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THEODORE DALRYMPLE

When I was 12 years old, I had an English teacher whom I admired to the point of hero-worship, one of whose aphorisms was that poetry was man's natural form of expression. It was prose, in his view, that was unnatural. I came to think this an absurd and overwrought idea, but now I am not so sure. Age, of course, makes us more rigid in our beliefs; but experience makes us more flexible.

Yes, it is true that people, and not necessarily the best-educated among us, often speak in poetry. For example, I was in the prison last week when I heard a few lines of the purest verse. A female officer had refused to give an inmate more tablets than the doctor had prescribed, to which he responded with the words, 'Listen, you bitch, I'm gonna cut your tits off and nonce your children.' What command of language, what rhythm, what verbal inventiveness! This was the first time I had heard the noun nonce (sex offender) used as a verb. Imagine it in verse form:

Listen, you bitch.

I'm gonna cut your tits off And nonce your children.

This is the very lyricism of the slums, the poetry of the welfare state.

Perhaps it was on account of the rhythmical quality of his outburst that he was not punished for it; in any case, it would be quite wrong to inhibit selfexpression, and possibly damaging to the psyche also.

Drugs, of course, are a well-known aid to self-expression, but they are used for other purposes as well. For example, in the hospital that same week I had a patient who was admitted with what was described in the notes as an overdose of cocaine (what is the correct dose?). He had been taking cocaine for years, and I asked him why he started.

'I was just trying to shut down, trying to take everything away. Now I take it and take it until something happens, until my mind stops working overtime.'

I guessed from his tattoos — ACAB (All Coppers Are Bastards) — on his knuckles, and a policeman hanging from a lamppost on his left ankle, as well as a cannabis leaf on his upper arm, that he had sometimes been in conflict with the law, and I asked him about his latest imprisonment. 'It wasn't for violence, it was for a verbal.' Now, however, he had a health problem. 'Doctor,' he said, 'I've got severe anger loss.'

He meant, of course, that he was always going into one and losing it.

The patient in the next bed had taken an overdose because his girlfriend had left him and he was on bail for having assaulted her.

'I know I've given her a good slap now and again,' he protested, tut a slap's just a slap.'

They'd fallen out over the care of their child.

'I told her it's my baby's inside you, I don't want you to f—g get rid of it. But I still have feelings for her, even though she's a crackhead and a smackhead.'

I asked him about his relations with his parents.

'My father don't speak to me no more,' he said.

'Why not?' I asked.

'He says I tried to run him over.'

'And did you?'

'No, of course I f—g didn't. I've been brought up old-fashioned, to respect my olders. If I'd run him over, I'd've put my hands up to it, wouldn't I?'