The chance to chant out Kipling's "The Mary Gloster" was the highlight of the Bermudan guide's day. The time was Easter 1990. The Berlin Wall was well down.
Saddam Hussein was well up. Margaret Thatcher, also on her way down though not yet knowing it, had just arrived for an Atlantic summit with George Bush the elder. "I've paid for your sickest fancies; I've humoured your crackedest whim", the local tour leader declaimed to a desultory band of hangers-on.
"Dick, it's your daddy, dying; you've got to listen to him!"
And so we journalists did listen. An impromptu performance of a poem, whatever the reason for it, was a break from impenetrable political briefs. There were helicopters in the unusually grey sky and flash-pasts by American and British fighter planes. Up on the Hamilton hill, the then President Bush had no choice but to endure his usual dose of "backbone stiffeners" from the Iron Lady. Down in Pitt's Bay Road, a foreign correspondent could forget for an hour the first follies of the New World Order -and be entertained.
The purpose of the guide's performance was to re-enact for visitors a local tourist scene, famous in "Happy Island" Bermuda, in which the elderly Mark Twain used to read aloud at his holiday home from the works of his favourite poet.
Rudyard Kipling's ballad, "The Mary Gloster", in which a self-made shipping tycoon on his deathbed ("'Not the least of our merchant princes'. Dickie, that's me, your dad") confronts his spendthrift art-loving "Harrer and Trinity College" son, was a special favourite of Twain's. Our Summit poetry reader proclaimed the lines outside Twain's house in sonorous black-preacher style, with rolling waves of admiration for Kipling's hero, the helpless financial pioneer with his devastated hopes of passing on his passions to his heir. The knowledge that only a mile or so away a weakening Mrs Thatcher was out to handbag "Gentleman George" added frisson to this portrayal of Sir Anthony Gloster, hardman, realist, chancer, a disappointed millionaire obsessed in his last hours only with being buried at sea on the same Macassar Straits coordinates as his wife.
"And they asked me how I did it; and I gave them the Scripture text, / 'You keep your light so shining a little in front o' the next!' / They copied all they could follow, but they couldn't copy my mind / And I left 'em sweating and stealing, a year and a half behind." We could all imagine the British Prime Minister enjoying that. According to the guidebook, Twain had regularly reclined, white-serge suited on his hotel bed, and read this poem aloud to old male friends and the young female admirers whom he called "Angelfish". By the end ("Never seen death yet, Dickie? . . .Well, now is your time to learn!") there were said to have been open tears from the women and stern blinking from the men. It was all in that "drawling, resonant voice": the sound that Twain uniquely brought to American literature was lent at these times to the poet of Empire.
Among our own tour band of Pitt's Bay Road there was generous appreciation but no flowing tears that day. This was not one of those poetry readings, all too common, which make one cry out for escape. But it was not quite a pleasure either. To imitate one great writer reading the words of another is not a role for an amateur. Both the place and the time were appropriate enough for Kipling -a colonial island when one way of the world was passing into another. But our journalists' eyes were on impending newspaper deadlines for the latest thoughts about Europe without Communism and the Middle East without the Cold War. Unlike Twain's early twentieth-century guests, we did not even get the whole poem, still less "the bare hotel room, its pine woodwork and pine furniture, the loose windows which rattled in the sea wind", all of which the guidebook described. While Twain's listeners had heard "once in a while a gust of asthmatic music from the spiritless orchestra downstairs" we had constant helicopters and staff cars. While Twain was said to have "hair which gleamed and glistened like frost in the light of gas jets", our jets were F 16s.
Yet a poetry reading still defeated the political "read-outs" for a place in this reporter's memory. Fourteen years later, I could still recall more of this poem on the troubles of success than the press conference on the same theme that eventually followed. Once again there was a small group of journalists, different ones but the same sort of folk, listening to the same story of the bitter "Baronite" whose son, instead of following him into ships and steel, had "muddled with books and pictures, an' china an' etchin's an' fans" and whose "rooms at college was beastly, more like a whore's than a man's". We were in the British Library; and as well as the newspaper folk there was a big crowd of poetry-fanciers, gathered to hear a selection of Kipling's works, this time read by a professional, the film actor and once so familiar James Bond, Sir Roger Moore.
