μὴ τὸ κράτος αὔχει δύναμιν ἀνθρώποις ἔχειν

             (“Do not proclaim that empire holds sway over human lives”,

                                                                                                           Tiresias, in Bacchae of Euripides.)



            A boy runs down the steep, stepped street,

            varying his strides and his leaps

            to each step’s irregular space.

            His bodily memory keeps

            that rhythm of his native place.		                     
            The boy explores the layered clothes

            in Mama Herminia’s wardrobe.

            Nearly snarling, a stole of fox

            breathes out time’s stale odours. Hands probe,

            and rest on a wood-and-glass box.
            The boy plays with the broken-down

            clock. It strikes with resonant sound

            long-vanished hours, as he wheels

            the minute hand. The room shifts round

            in the wardrobe’s mirror. It reels …
            The city has, strident or mute,

            the company of plant and brute

            on the White Rock: the wildlife that,

            winging the void or firm of root,

            owns birthright to its habitat.
            Life, being local, self-enables.

            The cloud the uptorn Rock compels

            yields it the benefit of dew.

            High on the Jurassic cliff, wells

            Darwin’s orchid, with squill’s drenched blue.                                                                                                                       
            Surprising out of rocks, profuse,

            their slender stems light-gemmed with dew

            in the morning sun, the jonquils

            bestow a fragrance on this New

            Year’s Day, that almost overfills.
            Was the paper-white’s origin

            blank — the wan metamorphosis

            of one who, mirrored, love implored?

            It bears now, as the “fox’s piss”,

            imprint of our people’s word-hoard.
            The local trades trace out their course —

            ignored for monuments of war.

            Mudéjar bricks remain true still

            in Willis’s gunpowder store,

            making known yet the Moors’ old skill.
            The city’s great scene of affairs

            is the roadstead. Once, steering there

            by the Pole Star, pilots from Tyre

            had brought fine, red-slipped, burnished ware

            to emporium (not empire).
            For casks of wine — heading and staves:

            Canada exchanges with Spain

            across this anchorage. Charleston

            ships tobacco, Morocco grain,

            cottons the Lancashire merchant.
            With false, Jerusalem colours

            the liberals clear, fate’s rudder

            set for Golgotha on the beach.

            The blindfolded bodies judder

            as shot on shot tears into each.
            A young Gibraltarian teacher

            stands sixth in death’s rank. Remember

            Gazzo, whose last a Capuchin

            told. He, one night each December,

            roams soundless el jardín de Glynn.
            Britain and the rival powers

            begin to count down the hours

            to Europe’s holocaust. Wolseley’s

            incremental poll-tax scours

            civilians from the Rock, he deems.
            Governor Nicholson regards

            our people as foreigners, barred

            by origin, connexion, tongue,

            from self-rule. But from the Dockyard

            a counterforce will soon have sprung.
            Imperial measures contradict

            one another. Some would restrict

            the civil population’s size,

            or deny it rights. Yet a picked

            workforce the Dockyard’s growth implies.  
            Our people find their voice within

            el arsenal itself. No din

            of dominion, no soldier’s sway,

            can silence it. Dockyard men win

            us our first democratic say.
            I honour, with communal pride,

            the Gibraltarian organized

            working class, union men who knew

            that the history newly prised

            in Petrograd was theirs too.
            Think now of a city at war,

            with loved ones sent far from its shore;

            more true than the one Orwell drew,

            a city of workers, whose core

            of morale insists on their due.
            Risso heads the campaign: “They must

            bring our families back; entrust

            the people with self-government.”

            As in other colonies, just

            demands prevail through mass intent.
            But satraps choose who will succeed.

            “Fava is too gifted. He leads.

            Deport him to retain control.”

            Whenever Britain some rule cedes,

            it first exacts repression’s toll.
            All that endeavour brought to nought?

            Do not say so. What those men caught,

            of our selfhood in the making,

            defines the goal to be now sought;

            shows the prize, there for the taking.    
            The clock’s hands turn, turn and return.

            From our deep memories we learn

            who we are; from that, what to do.

            Still the hands of the world’s clock turn:

            history’s hour it tells true.
            The autumn crocuses raise up

            their slim, pink cups, and the rains come.

            The boy sits in his window seat.

            From step to step the water’s tum-

            bles form cascades down Castle Street.
            In the Bay of the Remedies

            the sun’s dipping rays dye a keen

            crimson hue. The sea expresses

            in its swell’s grave obscuring sheen

            Lord Poseidon’s lustrous tresses.



 The Pyramidal Orchid. ↩
 In popular speech the Gibraltarians call the paper-white narcissus “meao (meado) de

zorra”, Spanish for “fox’s piss”. Before their current reintroduction there were no foxes on the

Rock. Two hundred years ago the Governor’s chaplain and another British resident set

about killing the foxes on the Upper Rock with imported English hounds (Sir William G. F.

Jackson, The Rock of the Gibraltarians, 222). But the foxes survived the British blood sport,

at least by being preserved in this autochthonous expression. ↩
 A twenty-four-year-old Gibraltarian, José Guillermo Gazzo, joined Torrijos’s liberal expedition and

was executed with the others on the beach at Malaga on 11 December 1831.The property of Charles

Glynn was one of the places in Gibraltar where Torrijos and the other Spaniards, who were being

hunted by the British authorities, had been given refuge. In the free-trade period Gibraltar’s civil

society, with resident merchants from Britain among its leaders, was sharply separate from the

military garrison, maintaining a political culture of liberalism supportive of constitutionalist

movements in Spain. ↩
 In 1887, when Gibraltar had a civil population of 16,641, General Lord Wolseley (who had helped to

suppress the Indian Rising, served in the despoiling of Beijing, and commanded the burning of

Kumasi in today’s Ghana) proposed: “A heavy poll-tax to be at once imposed upon every civilian on

the Rock … You might begin with say 10 shillings for all adults, of both sexes, and half that amount

for each child, it being publicly notified that the tax would be doubled next year. I would go on

increasing the poll-tax until I had reduced the population to the 3,000 souls it used to consist of.” ↩
 The Gibraltarians employed in the Dockyard organized themselves in their own trade union and

sustained it actively in the face of repressive regulations during World War I. By 1918, a time of

social upheaval worldwide, the Dockyard workers had accumulated a range of grievances concerning

the conditions of work and life of Gibraltarians; but the colonial government, which exercised all

legislative and executive powers in Gibraltar, systematically excluded the working class from its

consultative bodies. As soon as the war ended, the Dockyard union sent two of its leaders, Manuel

Sanchez and James Federico, together with Oscar McIntosh of the Ex-Apprentices and Apprentices

Society, to London to press the Colonial Office, the Admiralty and the War Department for reforms,

including the setting up of a popularly elected municipal government. At the meeting with the

Colonial Office minister, L S Amery, on 15 May 1919 Sanchez was asked what might be described as

“the Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu question”: had he ever cast a vote in Gibraltar? Two

months later, Amery said that consultations were under way regarding the representations made by

the Dockyard union. In 1921 the City Council was established and Gibraltar had its first election. ↩
 When we think of the World War II evacuation, it is natural to focus attention on the women,

children and old men wrenched from their homes. But we should not overlook the quite exceptional

social circumstance created inside Gibraltar by the evacuation of all non-essential personnel. At the

beginning of Homage to Catalonia George Orwell writes of his impressions of Barcelona

six months into the Spanish Civil War: “And it was the aspect of the crowds that was the queerest

thing of all. In outward appearance it was a town in which the wealthy classes had practically ceased

to exist.” However, that appearance deceived: “I did not realise that great numbers of well-to-do

bourgeois were simply lying low and disguising themselves as proletarians for the time being.” In

war-time Gibraltar there was no deception. Almost to a man, the civilian population (which included

my father and all three of my uncles) was composed of the skilled working class. ↩