My Brother & I

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From here, Jonty Driver gained his first headship, that of the Island International School in Hong Kong, here too ensuring the school’s rise to educational distinction. The Friends of St Peter’s, Newenden try to introduce new and different fund raising events. They have invited CJ (Jonty) Driver to read extracts from his poetry and tell of his life at An Evening with Jonty Driver in St Peter’s on Friday, May 6 at 7:30pm. STILL FURTHER, New Poems, 2000-2020, was published by the Uhlanga Press in South Africa and the UK in 2021. It is available from bookshops in South Africa, fromthe Africa Books Collective in the Collections at the end of these recitals have been given to the Hantam Community Education Project in the Karoo. In 2017, Jonty contributed a foreword to the history by Anne Hill of the first 25

It was really through this sequence of poems that I came to know Jonty well. We had met through a shared love of haiku. He had been perhaps over-generous in writing about my own attempts at the genre. He never of course lost the teacher’s desire to encourage nor the ability to do so. But when I read Requiemfor the first time I saw the chance to do something creative with it. Jonty had explained that Brahms’ German Requiem,a much more “secular” requiem than the liturgical texts usually set, had been the inspiration for him. It seemed obvious to me to wrap music around the poetry. So I asked the cellist Guy Johnston, then a recent winner of BBC Young Musician of the Year, to weave a Bach cello suite “around” Jonty’s poetry. It was one of those happenstances in response to which you could hear a pin drop, as an entranced congregation of hundreds in Westminster Abbey oneSunday eveningpaid rapt attention to both music and text, and found in them a depth of spiritual encounter that was as moving for them as for the author and Ann, his wife of almost fifty years to whom he was so devoted. When, later, I suggested that Jonty himself be asked to read lines of Shakespeare at the conclusion of the Thanksgiving Service for the life of Nelson Mandela in the Abbey, he was both thrilled, honoured, and humbled. It is difficult to summarise a life such as Jonty’s, more so immediately after his death. The Jonty I knew was a man who spoke, wrote, and thought with uncommon sensitivity and moral clarity. To my mind, he is one of the finest poets South Africa has produced. What strikes me most about Jonty’s death – like those of other friends and acquaintances in recent years — is how lives lived in so many different times and so many different places can be compressed and imagined into a single instance of grief and celebration, shared among family, friends and colleagues, both locally and abroad.This cookie is set by Addthis. This is a geolocation cookie to understand where the users sharing the information are located. Terrorist, Crane River, 2015. Used to be Great Friends, an essay in autobiography, originally published in Granta in 2002, was issued in an expanded form as an e-book by In 1976, he was a Research Fellow at the University of York, and for 23 years he was a headmaster (Principal, Island School, Hong Kong, 1978–83; Headmaster, Berkhamsted School, 1983–9; Master, Wellington College, 1989–2000). [2] [6] Writing career [ edit ]

In 2000 Driver retired from Wellington and eventually settled with Ann in a delightful old cottage at Northiam, near Rye in East Sussex. The house displayed another of the paradoxes that were always present in his life: an unusually tall man fitting himself comfortably into a low-ceilinged cottage, as if he had clambered into a dolls’ house overflowing with books. For the One Only" was in the Spectator (March 10, 2018) and another, "An Old Man & His Wife", in the Spectator (November 2, 2018). "Manifesto" – a defence of the iambic pentameter - appeared Jonty Driver (pictured above, centre) was Headmaster of Berkhamsted School, arriving from Hong Kong in 1983, before leaving to take up headship at Wellington College, after only six years, in 1989.

What a mixmatch. The more so because the pictures in and around the hallway include examples of old stone engravings and stone age technology on Hanglip Farm by the earliest peoples on this land. The imagination boggles, if you so will. In July 2019, as part of the JAM (John Armitage Memorial) Festival in the Romney Marshes, and again in July 2022, Jonty read some of the poems to an audience in the church of St Mary the Virgin, In “The Man With the Suitcase”, Driver chronicled the life, execution, and rehabilitation of John Harris, an anti-apartheid activist who planted a bomb in July 1964 on a platform at Johannesburg’s Park Station, which exploded, killing one person and injuring 23 others. Harris was hanged by the Apartheid regime in 1965.

The translator and facilitator was a charismatic young teacher, Sizwe Dyasi, then a popular figure at the school and among the town’s young people in general. At the time, Jonty remarked: ‘That young man deserves a good future.” Whether or not this has come to pass is of course yet another story. On Friday 2nd November 2018 (All Souls' Day) Jonty read his sequence of poems, REQUIEM, in the parish church of Ewhurst Green. Martin Bradshaw, cellist, played excerpts from Bach's Cello The cookie is set by CasaleMedia. The cookie is used to collect information about the usage behavior for targeted advertising.Perhaps because of his father’s job, or his height (eventually 6ft 4in), young Jonty was badly bullied. But instead of becoming a bully himself, as can happen, he grew into one of the warmest and kindest of people to young and old alike. Some Schools. John Catt Educational. 30 November 2016. ISBN 9781909717978. (About the five schools at which Driver worked) He became a fellow at the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire, US, in the fall of 2009, and a fellow at the Hawthornden Castle Writers’ Retreat in March and April 2011. He also served as one of the trustees of the Beit Trust for many years. Driver married Ann Hoogweerf shortly after. Hugely intelligent, sensitive and supportive, she was the love of his life: he said that he knew they would marry the first moment he saw her at a party in Chelsea in the late 1960s. In addition to his career in education, Jonty has been a senior lecturer in literature and creative writing at the University of East Anglia since 2007. He has had numerous novels and volumes of poetry published including A Messiah of the Last Days (Faber) and Before (a collection of 22 poems, published by Crane River).

Driver is married with three children and eight grandchildren and stays is East Sussex with his wife. A bigger volume, STILL FURTHER, New Poems 2000-2019, is to be published by the Uhlanga Press, probably in 2021. So-called retirement from Wellington at sixty saw a veritable Indian summer in writing. A fifth and final novel, a memoir about the schools he had served and shaped memoirs of an historical kind, one for Granta prompted by a photograph of his friends in the 1960s or, most recently, by the obvious debt he felt to Robert Birley.

Driver was as of November 2019 [update] an honorary senior lecturer at the School of Literature and Creative Writing, University of East Anglia, [7] a post he held since 2007. [ citation needed] In the meantime, the obituaries proliferate, not always to good effect. The one I like best is that of fellow poet, translator and publisher Douglas Reid Skinner, mainly about Jonty as a word artist. It underscores that, in the final instance, it is Jonty’s poetry and other writings that stand for his life, as it (or any other artistic endeavour) should for us all – for everyone to discover, read, listen to, translate and share. I once tried to explore this idea with Jonty when feeling him out on prospects for an independent association of rural writers, based in Colesberg (which has since begun to come to pass). I could sense that he was hesitant, wondering whether this vision could work. There was a practical edge to his love for poetry and other forms of writing, as well as his career, as is evident in the tributes from the educational institutions he served in various capacities in many parts of the world. (If you google his name, something like 480 000 internet entries will pop up in 0.37 seconds – and that’s disregarding AI, which I suspect he must have abhorred). Some of these obits are inaccurate and some seem opinionated, manipulative and arrogant … but be that as it may … Five pamphlets, made in co-operation with Artwrite Ltd of Rye, were published in 2019/20: the first is IMAGE & IMAGE, Some Old Photographs & Twelve Unrhymed Sonnets. Six of the photographs