As Night Was Falling
A memoir extract by James Sutherland Smith
I was born at 8.40 p.m. on 17th June 1948. The address on my birth certificate is 34 Great Western Road (now the A93). This was where my grandparents lived, but the site of the house is now occupied by the Ashvale Traditional Fish and Chip restaurant. Where the house must have been is a car park and a large copper beech. Across the road is a furniture store and a computer store both in the same converted building next to Nellfield cemetery, which must have been there when I was born. The memories I have of Aberdeen are of another address to which my grandparents moved so as to be near my grandfather’s brothers, George and Alexander (Alec).
My horoscope is in Gemini with Sagittarius as my rising sign and its ruler, Jupiter is also rising although retrograde which limits its expansiveness. Like many Geminis born between 1942 and 1949 I have my natal Sun conjunct with my natal Uranus, a configuration I share with Donald Trump and his creature, Rudi Giuliani. The Sun is still just above the horizon and so in my more pessimistic moods I tell myself that I was born just as night was falling. The configuration with Uranus is supposed to indicate originality, eccentricity and outrageous behaviour, but always calls to my mind a joke by Jonathan Miller in a television sketch where he played a producer hoping to make a documentary called “Is there life on Uranus?” A number of poets have been born with the sun in Gemini, among them, Rene Char, Allen Curnow, whose birthday is also 17th June, Stefan George, Allen Ginsberg, Seamus Heaney, Geoffrey Hill, Maxine Kumin, who once awarded me first prize and third prize in a poetry competition, Ivan Lalić, Henri Michaux, Paul Muldoon, Gérard de Nerval, Saint-John Perse, Marina Tsvetaeva and WB Yeats, the last of which, like me, entertained an interest in occult subjects. I can be as silly as Yeats, but I’m most proud of sharing a birthday with Igor Stravinsky and my friend, the poet, Kit Wright.
I became interested in astrology at secondary school and the public library next door to the school had a section devoted to the occult arts. Arithmetic has never posed any problems for me and so I found it easy to cast horoscopes. For good measure I picked up along the way the tricks of numerology, palm-reading, the Tarot and geomancy. These were always hits in class when I was a language teacher during structured conversation lessons. The problem with these arts is that they aren’t sciences despite statistical attempts to tie character, profession and events in a life to the position and relationships of elements in an astrological chart. The label pseudo-science is a canard as most practitioners of astrology or palmistry will claim that they pursue an art. Just as alchemy is in the genealogical tree of physical science, so astrology is in the tree that leads not only to astronomy, but also to psychology and psychiatric therapy. Freud, too was a Gemini. I received a startling lesson on the suggestibility of people when as seventeen-year-old I dressed up as a fortune teller and told fortunes for a small sum at our church’s garden fête. I was a hit and raised a substantial sum for the church despite a leery eye from the vicar when satisfied parishioners bent his ear on the accuracy of my predictions. Fortune telling was quite simple. I had a pack of cards and assigned topics to the suits, business for spades, matters of the heart for hearts, relationships for clubs and money for diamonds. Kings were men, Queens were women and Jacks were young people or children. Aces were inspiration, the nine of hearts great fortune and the nine of spades great misfortune. As for the other cards odd numbers were dynamic and even numbers were stable. Armed with these simple parameters I happily bullshitted a whole afternoon and sent a number of ladies of a certain age away content that good fortune was just around the corner or that their worst misgivings had a basis in reality. A reading would begin with the client choosing a card which I would then interpret. So if somebody drew the seven of hearts, I would tell them it concerned a mystery of the heart, and I would ask them to draw five more cards whose story I would tell while looking closely at their reactions. I read body language and facial expressions as no doubt the astrologers and fortune tellers of the classical world, the late Middle Ages and Renaissance did, and psychological therapists do now.
I put aside my interest in the occult despite my mother’s connection with Dennis Wheatley and Joan Grant and it wasn’t until my late twenties when I took up with B———, who professed to be a practising witch, that my interest revived. B——— was entranced by the knowledge that I was the son of somebody who worked for somebody who’d taken Aleister Crowley to lunch. She swore by Crowley’s writings although it became clear as our love affair deepened and worsened that she had never read any book of his completely except perhaps The Book of Thoth which she used as companion to the Tarot readings she gave to friends using the Crowley wicked pack of cards. B——— had a profound contempt for academic learning and universities. I suspected she had been over-praised for intelligence as a child and had later fallen foul of the examination system which required some application to pass A levels. She’d hung around the glittery and tacky scene of the London of the 1970s and claimed to have been one of the bottoms in a film made by Yoko Ono and John Lennon. Her parents had converted the third floor of their house in Fulham into a flat for her with its own bathroom and kitchen. Her favourite lines of argument were that there was neither good nor evil, that everything was an illusion and that only one’s will mattered. When I advanced the usual refutations of these less than startling notions she would fly into a rage. Yeats was an object of scorn, largely because of Crowley’s rivalry with him as a poet and magician. She suggested that Crowley’s book of erotic poems, White Stains, was superior to anything that Yeats had written.
James Sutherland Smith was born in Scotland in 1948, but has lived in Slovakia since 1989. He spent his working life as a teacher of English as a foreign language and as a lecturer in Cultural Studies. From 2002 to 2009 he was based in Belgrade on the Peacekeeping English Project as an English language Adviser to the Armed Services of Serbia and also to the Armed Services of Montenegro. He has published eight collections of his own poetry, the latest being Small-Scale Observations from Shearsman. Simultaneously in 2022, a bilingual chapbook, The Bead of Blood, was published in Slovakia.
He has translated a number of Slovak and Serbian poets. The Slovak poets include Ján Buzássy, Mária Ferenčuhová, Ján Gavura, Mila Haugová, Ivan Laučík and Milan Rúfus with book selections published in Britain, Canada and the USA. Serbian poets include Ivana Milankov, Dinner with Fish and Mirrors, from Arc Publications (UK) in 2013 and Miodrag Pavlović, Selected Poems, from Salt Publications (UK) in 2014. His translation of poems by Eva Luka, The Minotaur’s Daughter, was published by Seagull Books in 2025.
His website is http://www.jamessutherland-smith.co.uk and he also posts ‘photopoems’ on Instagram with images by the exiled Russian scholar and photographer, Shamil Khairov.
