Norman Davey

"Far beneath where our airmen fly, Slowly the Garrison guns go by. Breaking through bramble and thorn and gorse Towed by engines or dragged by horse, The great guns, The late guns, That slowly rumble up To enable Messrs. to converse with Messrs. ."

"By Charing Cross in London Town There runs a road of high renown, Where antique books are ranged on shelves As dark and dusty as themselves. And many booklovers have spent Their substance there with great content, And vexed their wives and filled their homes With faded prints and massive tomes."

"By the canal in Flanders I watched a barge’s prow Creep slowly past the poplar-trees; and there I made a vow That when these wars are over and I am home at last However much I travel I shall not travel fast. Horses and cars and yachts and planes: I’ve no more use for such; For in three years of war’s alarms I’ve hurried far too much; And now I dream of something sure, silent and slow and large; So when the War is over — why, I mean to buy a barge."

"Monte Carlo itself is a fairy city given over to the worship of the hazard: a toy town, designed for the entertainment of the idle and the rich: a stage, particularly furnished with properties to deceive the vulgar, to intrigue folk of a small imagination. ... It is a shrine at which the artificial is natural: the useless, of use: the unreal, real: the false, true: a temple in which the painted cardboard is gold and silver: the wooden sword, Excalibur; and the paste, jewels. But Monaco, or rather the harbour of Monaco, is of a reverse order, for, here, the natural is artificial: not the useless of use, but the useful, useless: not the unreal, real, but the real, unreal. It is a place of essential and primitive things which are, here, accidental and secondary."

"He was concerned now more with livelihood than with life: Goddess, Planet or Mortal, he had no longer any thought of ."