An appointment with the angels

Bernard Kops’ forthcoming radio play and latest poetry collection reflect what he has learned about ‘what it means to be alive’, writes Dan Carrier

The conversation took place 59 years ago in the corridors of a Catholic hospice called St Joseph’s. It was where playwright Bernard Kops’ father spent his final days, and the Jewish tailor was understandably confused by the appearance of Irish nuns at the foot of his bed, as Bernard explains. 

“It has been on my mind ever since. He was completely mystified because there were these nuns around,” says Bernard. “He said to me: ‘I keep on seeing these people hanging around the end of the bed but there is no one really there’.

“I told one of the nuns: ‘My dad keeps telling me there are people standing around at the end of his bed.’ She replied: ‘Oh lucky him! He is with the angels – they come visiting sometimes!’”

It prompted Bernard to write a new play, due to be broadcast later   this year by Radio 4 featuring the playwright and his friend the actor Warren Mitchell.

Called Harry and the Angels, it is about a man offered eternal life or death by a gang of stellar bodies. 

“He is an auctioneer, and when he thinks about eternity, he finds it almost as frightening as death,” says Bernard.

“He says to them: ‘I don’t think I can handle eternity’, but the angels say, ‘Well, its eternity or nothing’. Harry does what any good auctioneer would do and starts haggling. ‘I’ll not take 2,000 years, or 1,000 years’, he tells them. ‘I’ll settle for 200’. Still the angels say no, its all or nothing, so he says, ‘OK, make it 250 then’.”

The commission coincides with the publication of a new anthology by the author that covers seven decades of literary work. And, as with the new play, the book is full of ghostly memories. 

His life has provided the tools for poetry. He enjoyed instant success  when his play The Hamlet of Stepney Green was produced in 1957, endured disastrous criticism for works that followed, and fought a long-term battle against drug addiction. Yet  throughout all the personal problems, that included financial troubles, he kept writing and with his wife Erica – to whom the new anthology is dedicated – produced four children. 

The collection has plenty of his works from the East End days of his youth – starting with the famous “Whitechapel Library, Aldgate East”, lines which can be  found on the wall of the Whitechapel Gallery that now sits in the building which was known as the University of the Poor. It was here Kops sheltered from the wind and rain as a child, and consumed the titles on the shelves. 

As well as some of his most celebrated poems there is new material: reflections on love – his wife Erica features in many – as does death; memories of a Jewish East End and growing old. Allen Ginsberg and WH Auden are mentioned – and there is a poignant tribute to fellow poet Adrian Mitchell, who passed away in December 2008. 

Many poems feature his life in West Hampstead, where he has lived for 40 years. His flat backs onto a communal garden and he remembers warmly two women who were the life and soul of the place in his poem, “Two Tall Ladies”.

“They were called Jill Barnett and Maggie Cohen,” he recalls. “They were wonderful. They kept our community together – they were the fulcrum. They organised parties, they did the gardening. They passed away around 10 years ago and when they died two beautiful trees were planted in their memory. I wrote about them being about at night in the gardens, still doing the weeding and looking at the flowers.”

Bernard says the urge to write is burning as fiercely as ever: “Picasso said do not go seeking inspiration, it will find you. You have to live by that.” 

And he refers to the final line of the final poem to show that his journey told through his verses has ultimately been a fruitful and happy one – times can be challenging, his words suggest, but without such challenges how is the human spirit supposed  to have something to measure itself by? 

“The  last line ends with the words, ‘the joy of living’,” he says.

“What starts out as chaotic, neurotic, written by a disturbed young man, gradually goes through the whole gamut of life until now, where I come out with an appreciation of what it means to be alive.”

• This Room in the Sunlight: A Collection of Poems.
By Bernard Kops.
David Paul £9.99