Einstein's Bicycle: A cycle ride through Eliot's Waste Land

By Terry Dammery

This remarkable, original and imaginative poem, ‘Einstein’s Bicycle’, is the outcome of the poet’s childhood experiences in London orphanages during and after WW2.
Terry says of the poem, ‘Einstein’s Bicycle’, is a slow-burn rant about life’s drama as seen by those who fill the paupers’ pit. Its heroes are the descendants of the bowmen and those who manned the gun-decks. They are the children of the levellers, those who worked the looms and spun the thread – clichés of their class, yet resilient and spirited, always conscious of their inheritance.’
He adds, ‘What begins as the sad tale of a maid in the shadow of the Cenotaph, unfolds as the celebration of a culture old as Chaucer, proud of its pedigree and its vitality to tilt at pomposity and privilege, sustained by the principle of Einstein’s bicycle - if you don’t keep pedalling you’ll simply fall off.’

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Conrad Press
• Release date: Jun 18, 2020
• ISBN: 9781839780677

Book preview

Einstein’s Bicycle

A cycle ride through Eliot’s Waste Land

Terry Dammery

Einstein’s Bicycle

Published by The Conrad Press in the United Kingdom 2020

Tel: [phone] www.theconradpress.com 
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ISBN 978-1-839780-67-7

Copyright © Terry Dammery, 2020

The moral right of Terry Dammery to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved.

Typesetting and Cover Design by: Charlotte Mouncey, www.bookstyle.co.uk

The Conrad Press logo was designed by Maria Priestley.

Life is like riding a bicycle.

To keep your balance,

you must keep moving.

Albert Einstein.

Letter to his son, Eduard, February 1930

The Preface

My mother died and I thought of how awful things had been. So, I sat down and wrote the first draft of Einstein’s Bicycle. It was difficult at first because, even though I had spent a lifetime thinking of her, I hadn’t seen or heard of her in over sixty years, going as she did to Australia when I was still a schoolboy.

It was only by chance that I learned of her death and how she had been buried in a Melbourne cemetery – the young, teenaged mother I knew as my sister had grown old and died half a world away.

She was an Islington girl, born in 1922, the year that Einstein’s theory of relativity was proven and the year that Eliot’s The Waste Land was published. This latter coincidence cast my mother and my grandmother as two of Eliot’s vulgar London women, morally decadent like others of their class.

In this role they experienced the remembrance of a wasteland along the Western Front, the General Strike, the breadlines and soup kitchens of the thirties and the declaration of another war. It was into this particular wasteland that I was born.

There was nothing unique about our position. We were part of a long historical line that stretched back as far as Chaucer – noble antecedents but far from nobility. We exemplified Eliot’s low-brow, invidiously contrasted with his own high-brow – he and his Bloomsbury set exemplifying the establishment.

Ostensibly, Einstein’s Bicycle is about the travails of a mother and her child through difficult times, but it was only during proof reading that I realised what it was really about.

In the past, I had written a doctoral thesis on a philosopher who argued that the establishment achieves compliance through ideological and cultural means – hence subjugation is just an accepted fact of life.

I’d felt that those thoughts were long buried but, like Eliot’s corpse, they’d resurfaced in the text of Einstein’s Bicycle which seems to grudgingly document the successful working of what is now known as ‘cultural hegemony’.

Eliot was well placed to play a significant part in that process. With his hierarchical view of culture, his position in publishing and his affinity with the Bloomsbury set he was able to shape contemporary taste and culture for decades.

Thus, Einstein’s Bicycle can be seen as an implicit cultural critique of Eliot with The Waste Land viewed as the product and exemplification of establishment perspectives and cultural values.