Harry James Barker

Harry James Barker : A Tribute
By William Barker

June 10 1907 – August 17 2006

In recent months, with my father, I began assembling a book of about 30 to 35 of his best poetry, spanning a period of about 80 years from when he left England, to very recent poems. They describe seminal episodes of his life: his loves, his anger, his adventures, and simple beauty. He wrote about 500 songs and poems, and those in the book, in my opinion, are the best. I have been ruthless as an editor. The book also includes pictures, scanned from his albums, and music, some of which he composed, and very short biographical notes where needed.

He was not really interested in who benefited, if anyone; I told him that far from making anything from the book, it had already cost me a lot. I have decided to donate any profits to an educational fund: The Andries Olivier Ysterkoppe Vonds, administered by Landman and Landman, attorneys in Victoria West. It is an extraordinary fund, and he would have approved. I told him about the fund, years ago. Further details will be at the back of the book. Anyone wishing to be on the mailing list, once the book is printed, should e-mail me on barkerw@absamail.co.za

On April 14, 1945, Mike Burton, a climbing companion of my father’s was killed. Burton was already a decorated soldier, and he was going to recover the body of a comrade who had been blown up by a mine, when he himself was blown up by another mine. This was weeks before peace was declared. My father wrote:

“Why mourn we the beloved? They have peace –
Peace in the merciful dark whence we are born.
Why mourn we? Tis ourselves we mourn
For loss of noble hearts, for friendship’s break,
For the long road to travel with one traveller the less.”

WHEN I was small, I used to sleep in the smallest bedroom of the house behind me, that bedroom up there, and every morning, from babyhood, I used to hear him singing. He would strop his razor on an old Rolls razor strop in a metal box. “Thwack, thwack, thwack” it would go, like a metronome beating time. He would then start his scales, “la-la-la-la la-ah la. La-la-la-la ah ah ah.” Then as he washed his face and put on his shaving cream, he would start singing. Usually his first song would be one that would take him slowly through the range of his voice: Like Gounod’s

“Even bravest heart may swell
In the moment of farewell
Loving smile of sister kind…”

And I would know that he would have had to start very low, because after that middle part
“Yet when danger to glory shall call me… ”

He would then start
“Yet the bravest heart may swell …”

and if he had not started low enough, he would have to switch into falsetto. As I lay on my bed, waking each morning, I would hear him, and try to guess what was coming next. Often, like on a record, I would almost sense what would come next. He loved that old song, words by Thomas Moore:

“Oft, in the stilly night ‘ere slumber’s chains hath bound me,
Fond mem’ry brings the light of other days around me…”

He was young, and a baritone, with a tremendous range.
He would then switch to some other song, perhaps something in German, perhaps French, perhaps some English folksong.

But the favourite songs that I used to hear him sing, the very bestest, were OUR songs. These were songs that I knew HE had “made up” himself.

I heard him sing what has become known as “The song of the Magaliesberg”

“When the moon, above the krantzes
Silvers all the veld below
And the lovely mountain breezes
Softly come and softly go…”

And the words became etched in my mind.

I also loved

The song of the Drakensberg, also known as “Epitaph”

“Champagne shall be my castle gay
Cathkin shall be my bed
The Sentinel shall be my watch
And the Monk’s Cowl clothe my head
The great Cathedral be my church
The Organ Pipes will swell
And the stormy Saddle shall carry me home
When the Monk shall toll the Bell.”

This was often a sort of triumphant finale as he went downstairs.

One morning he was singing Edmund Waller’s

“Itisnot that I loved you less
Than when before your feet I lay
Buuut to prevent the sad increase
Of hapless love, I keep away
Of hapless love I keep away.”

And I interrupted him and told him he had forgotten the tune. It went

“It IS not that I love you less, than when before…” etc

But he had rewritten the tune, to fit the meaning of the words. It was like a chanted psalm, where the switch of the tune fits the meaning of the words. He could not stand the fact that the original tune just went its way without any regard for the way the words would have been stressed if they were being said by a doleful lover:

“Itisnot-that I love you less, than when before-your feet I lay…”

His own songs were also very special at campfires in the Magaliesberg and Krantzberg and Waterberg. I don’t think I ever went on a Natal Club meet with Dad, in the Drakensberg.

But he would usually sing his new songs at Mountain Club meets in the Magaliesberg. He would be as nervous as a new actor in a performance before the campfire started. As the fire was stoked, often by Paul Houmuller who loved a big campfire, and who would heave great logs onto it, sending sparks flying into the air, and then hoik a coal out to light a delicious-smelling cheroot, mugs of sweet muscadel would be passed around from bottle to drinkers. Olly and I would help pass these mugs, and I can remember sneaking a sip of the delicious liquid on their way.

Then they would start singing: usually some song that everyone knew, with lots of choruses.

Then someone would prompt dad. “Dad’s got a new song about Labyrinth” I might say in a piping voice. Weeks before, Dad, Olly and I, with June Davies and the professor of mathematics from Pretoria University, Nico van Warmelo, had climbed Labyrinth in Cedarberg Kloof. It was a long climb, about e-grade in the old grading, with some very exposed pitches, long drops and it ended with a chimney which tunnelled through the rock, which was why it was called Labyrinth. But a feature of the climb was also an uncomfortable traverse, several hundred feet up. In this there was a bulge in the rock around your middle, so you were edging along with your feet and hands, and you lost sight of your feet completely. Professor Van Warmelo had an enormous paunch, and he belayed my father as he led the climb. My father did the traverse, and then tied himself on to belay Nico. As Nico got to the traverse, we heard his cursing. Then we heard my father roaring with laughter. What had happened was that Nico’s trousers came adrift on the traverse. They slipped down below his paunch, and ended up round his ankles.
He had to complete the traverse, because if he had stopped he would have fallen, and like so many mountaineers, he wore no underpants.

So my father’s song described the scene

“And right in the middle of that Cedarberg crag
Nico van Warmelo strikes his flag --
Displaying the biggest professorial bum
That ever you’ll see, till kingdom come

With a hey ho ho, high ho ho
Haai los broeke, Van Warmelo…”

I am not sure if it was at that campfire that someone walked over to my father, round the fire and poured a large glass of beer over him in retribution: many of his songs teased and poked fun at his fellow mountaineers. Some took about 10 minutes to sing, and were a medley of 20 or more songs, like one that described a disastrous trip to the Drakensberg, in which the pack donkeys and the mountaineers became separated, and it took days to find the donkeys. While they were hunting the donkeys, all they had to eat was the mieliepap of the young Basutho man who had the donkeys and was lost with them. It was all in the song. He was always in demand at campfires, and even we never knew when he would come up with something new, or dredge up a song that everyone else had forgotten.

As a result of this experience, when I was seven years old, I joined the church choir. I was immediately in demand as a soloist, as was Olly who joined a little later. We could sing already, we did not have to be taught. I later sang in musicals at Wits, and was always landed a part. Later, in Cape Town, I joined the Symphony Choir and the Philharmonia, and later the Cape Town Male Voice choir, singing everything from church music to great choral works and folk songs, as a tenor and bass. I acquired a vast repertoire. Olly’s musical career went off in different directions, I would not speak for him, but it was equally diverse and distinguished.

One year I drove from Cape Town to Johannesburg, to come up here to visit Dad. On the way, I had no music in the car, because with my old sound system I could hear nothing at speed. I sang to myself, all the way, probably over a period of about 10 hours.

I did not repeat myself once.

I have my father to thank for that.

Dad had his faults, and he admitted to them. He was very careful with money, coming from a childhood of poverty. He used to switch off lights incessantly: I would leave my room to go to the bathroom, and come back and find the light off. Recently I stayed with my brother, and a nephew said archly to me: “Uncle William, is it true that in Cape Town people switch off their geysers to save money?” I roared with laughter, because that is what we do – what we have been asked to do because Koeberg cannot keep pace with demand in Cape Town. I told Jess about it, and she also laughed. It has come full circle. But the funny thing is that Harry anticipated a time when power would have to be saved, when if you did not flush your lavatory with your bathwater, you might have to forego flushing. In water-short Cape Town, we also do that! Harry did not need to do it, but he thought it was the RIGHT thing to do. He lived his beliefs.

I told him this, in a recent letter, and also face to face, because he seemed to be getting so sad about his old age, and at times his life seemed meaningless to him. He wrote:

Morning joy at 93
The sun’s reveille starts my daily round.
Farting, I shuffle slippered feet along
My clock’s run down, ambition’s gone to ground,
And all I’ve ever striven for seems wrong.

My tongue has lost its power to rejoice –
Forgets the lines once chanted without care
The urge to sing has vanished from my voice
And both my sewers are beyond repair.

I hoist my breeks, forget to zip my flies,
And fish my dentures from the cleansing mug.
Donning my specs to focus failing eyes
I shove my hearing-aid into my lug.

Accoutred thus, myself I dare to show,
And forth, a whited sepulchre, I go.

This was terribly sad to me, so in several letters, and also face to face, I used to tell him what he had done for me, for us. He had taught me to read, to love reading and books, he had coached me through my own attempts at writing verse, he had predicted things that I never thought would come to pass. I told him that he had taught me to sing, to love words and to use them, and that he had taught so many people, so much.

Perhaps a fault was that he could not easily be teased. He took himself seriously. My cousin Roger once said to him: “Uncle Harry, do you still chew every mouthful 32 times?” Harry did not speak to him for six months. He had to chew his food, because his stomach gave him trouble. But he forgave Roger in the end, and loved him and wrote to him.

Dad had insight, insight because he used to speak to everyone, poor and rich, educated and simple. 44 years ago, I came home from school with the news that the ANC were all communists, that Mandela should be hanged with Oliver Tambo, etc: Propaganda taught by a Scotsman, David Patterson, a history teacher. Dad listened, and then said: “The only solution for this country would be to have a round-table conference, with everyone there: the ANC, Poqo, the PAC, the Liberals, the Nats.”
I thought my father was crazy: I was at a right-wing school, a militarist school. More than 30 years later, there came the miracle of Kempton Park, and everyone sat down, around a table.

I once knew a woman who was very close to top Nats. This woman used to boast about how she had dinner with Magnus Malan and Adrian Vlok. I boasted as well: My father listened, and then said “They are all murderous bastards …”
Kyk hoe lyk hy nou. Vlok is not even at the table. He is washing up.

Because he kept diaries all his life, one of the things Dad loved to do was to say was “I told you so” and he could pull out letters he had written to the press to show that things he said, things he was reviled for, had come to pass, and were accepted.

Dad had his faults, like all men … we ended up very close, and there was always a letter in the post. I used to write to him, because he became so deaf. I tried to phone, but as soon as the conversation strayed from “how are you?” and the weather, he did not know what was being said.

He told a story about deafness that he witnessed in the small town of Acrington Stanley, in the 1920s:

He was lodging in a small house, next door to a Mr Higginbottom, and a young man came collecting for the Acrington Stanley Patriotic and Benevolent Society. “Morning, Mr Higginbottom, would you like to donate to the AS PBS?”

“What’s that – I’m deaf”

“Would you like etc”

“Eh? The what?”

“The Acrington Stanley Patriotic and Benevolent Society!” bellowed the young man.

“Sorry, can’t hear a thing” said old Higginbottom.

The young man gave up, said good afternoon and retreated. But he struggled to close the gate.

“Mind the gate!” shouted old Higginbottom from the door.

The young man muttered. “Bogger yer gate.”

“And bogger yer Acrington Stanley Patriotic and Benevolent Society!” shouted Higginbottom.

Dad was a good man, a scholar, and a visionary. He did not believe in God, because he had had religion of the worst kind rammed down his throat, with beatings and cruelty, when he was a child. He also felt, as he told me quite recently, that he felt religion was a short cut to truth, a way of short-circuiting the huge mystery of life.

One of the last books he read was a book on cosmology, of several he read, a book by one of Stephen Hawkings’s colleagues, George Smoot, who dealt with profound discoveries of creation, and how it all began, billions of years ago. “Wrinkles in Time.” He recently read his sixth biography of Charles Dickens. Another was on the lost languages of small tribes in Europe. Biographies by the score. He never ceased to read, to think, to study and wonder, and he felt that to a large extent, belief can stunt rational thought. “If you believe, there is a danger you stop thinking”.

But this did no absolve him from morality, and a genuine desire to do good. His will, and the fact that he gave years of his life to doing free work for the Mountain Club, Lawyers for Human Rights, the Liberal Party and other democratic movements including the Race Relations Institute, the Cancer Association, is a tribute to this altruism.

My mother also used to work, several days a week, for SANTA in town and in Alexandra Township, and later in her life for the Wayfarers, a sort of black girl guides – some of a lot of charitable work she did. But this is not a tribute to my mother, who was also great, in other ways.

In 1974 he wrote Dedication: for the Wayfarers

I do not have to see
The love that follows me.
I do not have to know
How far the echo of my words will go.
I must not ask, when I have shown a light,
How far it reaches in surrounding night,
All – all that I must know and all that I must ask
Is where my duty lies and strength to do my task.