Iam a Cornishman, a Celt, born in the far southwest ofnEngland. Apart from the six years of the Second WorldnWar and my time as a student at a college of education, Inhave lived the whole of my life not only in the smallnmarket-town of Launceston, where I was born, but alsonwithin the same parish.nCornwall is a granite country, thrusting itself out into thenAtlantic, an almost-island separated from the rest of Englandnby the boundary line of the River Tamar. To this day,ntraveling across the river into Devonshire, there are thosenwho still speak of going to England.nWhen the Normans arrived in Launceston soon after thengreat invasion of 1066, they built a tall stone castle andnwalled the town. Sensibly, they ventured no further into thenturbulent west. As a young child, then, growing up in then1920’s, my little town of four to five thousand inhabitantsnwas a microcosm of the whole world. For me, a child ofnworking-class parents, nowhere else existed. London was annimpossibly distant city. It might have been on the moon.nBut what was sown in my mind and imagination was annalmost overpowering sense of the past. Cornwall is a countrynrich in myth and legend. To me, every other farm and field,nstream and well, every stretch of moorland with its mysteriousnpiles of sculpted stone — sculpted by whom? — had, andnhas, its own history or fiction or fable. The Cornish were,nCharles Causley is the author of over thirty books ofnprose and poetry including, most recently, SecretnDestinations: Selected Poems 1977-88 (David R.nGodine). He was the 1990 recipient of The IngersollnFoundation’s T.S. Eliot Award, for which this was hisnacceptance speech. He lives in Launceston, Cornwall.n10/CHRONICLESnPERSPECTIVEnWhat Gift?nby Charles Causleynnnand are, great storytellers, and I now see that I was lucky innmy teachers and in my tellers of hearthside tales.nI was an only child. My father, a young soldier-volunteernin France in the First World War, had returned a hopelessninvalid and died in 1924, when I was seven. I remembernlitde of him. But rereading my work across the years, I seenthat — without always being endrely conscious of what I wasndoing at the time — I have made various attempts tonrediscover him, to recreate him. He appears, if not in thentext, in the subtext of what I write. Lll give you an example.nTen years — “ten feasts of fire” — after the end of WorldnWar II, and after my own naval service had ended, I visitednfor the first time Normandy, in northern France. Here somenof the bitterest fighting had taken place after the D-Daynlandings. And here, too, were ancient fortified towns thenimage of my very own. At Bayeux, I came upon my firstnBritish War Cemetery. It was neatiy laid out, in that thennrather ragged Norman farming landscape, in the form of annEnglish garden. Here is what I wrote.nI walked where in their talking gravesnAnd shirts of earth five thousand lay.nWhen history with ten feasts of firenHad eaten the red air away.n”I am Christ’s boy,” I cried. “I bearnIn iron hands the bread, the fishes.nI hang with honey and with rosenThis tidy wreck of all your wishes.n”On your geometry of sleepnThe chestnut and the fir-tree fly.n