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Roger Waters, the guiding force behind the psychedelic rock band Pink Floyd, is now joining the hot debate in favour of foxhunting and keeping government hands off the countryside, says Rory Knight Bruce.

THINK of Pink Floyd and what comes to mind are a hazy 1970s loucheness, Dark Side of the Moon, lava lamps, and the distinctly anti-Thatcherite tone of The Wall.

What doesn’t feature is a passionate belief in the rights of country people. [Country people? You’re talking about rich people with houses in the country.] Yet that is the position that Roger Waters – who was Pink Floyd – finds himself in: he is in sympathy with, to borrow Tony Blair’s phrase, the “forces of conservatism”.  [Precisely.  He’s a mess.]

In Barbados to work on his first album in eight years, a series of live American concerts and an opera based on the French Revolution, 56-year-old Waters has found time to reflect upon the England which, under Mrs Thatcher, he did so much to condemn. Unexpectedly, Tony Blair’s assault on what Waters sees as the basic freedoms of the countryside may prompt him – a lifelong Labour supporter – to vote Conservative for the first time at the next general election.

Waters invites me to his house and we sit on the verandah. He is, for the time being, fixed on a pastoral view far beyond the horizon before us. “I think all rational people agree that foxes need to be controlled,” he says. “I believe passionately in an Englishman’s right to make up his own mind. I am afraid that the Government has been swayed by a vocal minority.”

His love of the country, of the British landscape [this is nonsense], has been passed down to Waters from his father and grandfather. It is something he has never spoken about before. Waters is famously private and during the three days I spend with him, he resists invitations to appear on the David Letterman television chat show in America. When we go one evening to a pool bar, not a single head turns in recognition, although everyone there would know his most famous creation, Dark Side of the Moon.

This is the notion of "sport" held by these decadent people. A fair fight? Certainly not.

They would not know the darker side of the man, the brooding about such diverse subjects as river pollution and the war in Kosovo. But now his chief concern is that the English rural idyll he grew up in is being systematically destroyed by a government that does not understand, and cares little for, anything outside the cities.

It is as if his conscience has heard the call to arms. “We all have the opportunity to make one mark on the Big Picture,” he says.

As a child in Cambridge, Waters would cycle out to the countryside and go bird-nesting in the beech woods. He used to fish the tributaries of the Cam at Grantchester for gudgeon and roach “with a bamboo pole and a bent pin”.

This has given him a lifelong love of fishing and the rivers of England, and he regularly fishes the Test which, he points out, would not be there without the sporting fishermen [sic] who reclaimed the river from marshland and who protect its wildlife and fish-stocks today. “I see what has happened to the rivers of my youth, polluted by fertilisers, and I see how people who are concerned as sportsmen have saved them, with no help from the Government, and brought them back to life.”

As a result of the riparian owners and sporting fisherman, in which he includes the Cockney fisherman catching the Tube to the canal bank at weekends, Waters points out that we enjoy significant birdlife on the river. “From my home,” he says, “I can see mallard, merganser, Goldeneye and tufted duck, as well as a profusion of coots and moorhens.”

Against such sentiments, it is fascinating to hear Waters’s views on Sir Paul McCartney, an avowed vegetarian and opponent of hunting, and who has, it could be argued, used his fame to promote his opinions. “He is a person of great sincerity and I respect his right to hold his views,” says Waters. “However, McCartney also disapproves of horse and dog racing on the grounds that they exploit the animals.

“Maybe,” Waters allows, “if Sir Paul had his way, he would ban racing and eating meat as well as hunting and fishing. A ban on hunting could be the thin end of a very thick wedge.”

Waters also dismisses Sir Paul’s suggestions that foxhunting should be replaced with draghunting. “Draghunting won’t catch on because it’s not hunting, there’s no spontaneity. People enjoy foxhunting, at least in part, because it is ‘hunting’. There is a quarry, that’s the point. Man is a hunter. To legislate against his natural instinct is folly.”

Waters’s views on hunting were formed early. When he was a child, his grandparents would drive him out into the south of England countryside in their Ford Anglia to meets of the local foxhounds. “I remember seeing hunts in progress across farmland and thinking what a spectacular sight they were. I was very struck by the hunt followers on their bicycles or in Ford Populars with their Thermos flasks and a ruddy atmosphere of enthusiasm.” [So much for this supposedly proletarian’s enthusiasm for one of the most barbaric anachronism of a brutal upper class.]

Waters lost his father at Anzio in 1944, when he was one, and his grandfather to the trenches of the First World War. His grandfather had been a coal miner in the drift mines of County Durham, and latterly Labour agent for Bradford; his father, a communist Christian. Both men loved the English landscape. “You could not fail to be a communist then. The children of Bradford did not have shoes or clogs but rags about their feet,” says Waters.

“I’m filled with the sense that I am heir to their passion and my forbears’ commitment to right and wrong, to truth and justice,” he continues. “I hope I have inherited what I admire about them as men, that they had the courage of their convictions, which caused them to give their lives for liberty and freedom.

“If this legislation finds its way on to the statute book, it could create, if not open revolt, at least a bitter schism between town and country, the reverberations of which could only sour our increasingly culturally impoverished society.”

This is a conversation one could be having at one of the Countryside Rallies, the first of which he attended with his family and which he found terrifically moving. The atmosphere reminded him of the Aldermaston marches in the 1960s.

Waters would regularly go to Boxing Day meets in his local market town until they were stopped because of anti-hunt protesters. “The antis’ tactics were so violent that it became a threat to public order and so an important tradition was stopped by the actions of a few thugs. Is this the democracy for which my father died?”

The unexpected discovery of a poignant family memoir has reinforced his commitment to defend hunting. Last year, after the death of his father’s sister, he was left a diary written by his father when he was 16. It begins on New Year’s Day 1929, when Eric Fletcher Waters was a schoolboy at Bishop’s Auckland, before winning a scholarship to Durham University.

On that day the young Eric left his mother’s house at Copley, near Barnard Castle, where she was the housekeeper for the local country doctor, and went out on foot with the Zetland foxhounds. “It is a beautiful, eloquent account of the crispness of the air, the snow on the ground and the cry of the hounds, and how a fox was finally killed in a railway cutting,” he says.  [Sure, let’s enjoy the beautiful countryside by ripping to shreds an innocent and badly outgunned and outmanned creature. If this evident and revolting form of cowardice and cruelty is elevated by this man to elegiac proportions, why are we to believe his posturing along the lines of “progressive” politics?]

The diary, which shows the enthusiasm of teenage years and ends after a couple of months, also describes more prosaic elements of country life. “Caught the United bus to Barnard Castle. Played snooker with Jack. Won tuppence.” For anyone who has lost a father when young, such scraps give immense succour and comfort. “It makes me weep to think of it,” says Waters. “It has provided me with an understanding of part of the reason I feel so passionately about the hunting issue. It’s not just in respect of memory for him and the sacrifice he and his father made, but the sacrifice they made for the freedom of Britain.”

This vision has a strong place in Waters’s philosophical outlook. He wonders, in slightly nightmarish Pink Floyd fashion, if there might one day evolve a politically correct society that permits only vegans to breed and that human canine teeth, those in all of us that represent the hunter, will be extracted to extinction. “All sports are a symbolic form of hunting or warfare. Should we ban darts because it represents a sporting side of human nature of which Big Brother Blair disapproves?”

Politics dominates Waters’s conversation. Although moved by New Labour’s proposed assault on the countryside, he also feels that the standard of parliamentary democracy has fallen to such a level that it is merely television politics. “There is no longer room for a Charles James Fox or Pitt the Younger to express their views at length with passion and eloquence because our attention span has been reduced to a few seconds of soundbites. Populist politics has become everything.”

He also feels that attacks on the Prince of Wales for allowing his children to hunt are wrong. “He is a deeply thoughtful man who should be allowed to pursue his life, liberty and happiness in the way that he chooses.” When he read about the criticisms of William and Harry for hunting, he says his reaction was that he was not sure he wanted to return to an England that was so mealy-mouthed, nasty, dishonest and incoherent. “Most of the time I ignore the papers, but a ban on hunting will not run off my back.”

He believes that interference in the countryside is an insult to the farmers and sportsmen who, by and large, do their job pretty well to husband the wild and farmed animal population. “The hunting community has provided the bulwark against the forces of the market which would bulldoze the countryside flat, cover it in fertiliser and grow genetically modified wheat.”

Waters is neither bucolic nor historic in his appreciation of animal husbandry. There are practices, from the transportation of live animals to the raising of veal calves and the tethering of sows in labour, which he condemns. He would support any legislation to bring these to an end. But he maintains that, in England, animal husbandry is pretty good and that without sound farming “our green and pleasant land could easily be turned into a dustbowl”.

Ultimately, he believes it is the huntsmen and the country people who prevent this from happening. “We desperately need for these communities to remain intact, even those of us who live in towns, if future generations are going to have any countryside to enjoy at all.”

Waters does not talk about his music, but in his 1987 album Radio K.A.O.S., he foresees a society numbed by the satellite generation that will eventually revert to the values of nature and the countryside. A Welsh choir, with echoes of the valleys where farmers and miners co-exist, concludes:

“Now the satellite’s confused because on Saturday night,

The airwaves were full of compassion and light,

And his silicone heart warmed to the sight of a billion candles burning,

The tide is turning.

I’m not saying that the battle is won,

But on Saturday night all those kids in the sun,

Wrested technology’s sword from the hands of the Warlords,

             The tide is turning.”

It is an anthem to understanding, belief and hope which could well be taken up today by those who are prepared to defend the countryside.

As I leave, passing grand houses that resemble Berkshire on a sunny day, to weave through the Bajun shanty huts, I reflect there is a corner of a foreign field that is forever England. In that field, Roger Waters stands tall with his convictions and the memory of his father and grandfather. And he is not alone.

On May 1, after a day of May Day activities on the streets and avenues of Manhattan, my wife and I and a troop of other OWS celebrants marched into Zuccotti Park to jubilant exhortations of “welcome home” from a throng of fellow occupiers. The next day, my wife and I boarded a southbound Amtrak train to join family gathered at my dying father’s bedside to bid him farewell.

May in Georgia…In this age of climate chaos, the local flora comes to bloom a full month earlier than in decades past. This season, magnolias and hydrangeas blossomed in early May. Their petals opened to the world as my father’s life is fading. The magnolia petals have grown heavy; his body is shrinking. Soon he will drift from this world…carried by the scent of late spring blossoms.

In our once laboring class neighborhood, McMansions blot out the late spring sun. In the arrogant shadow of these shoddily constructed, bloated emblems of late capitalism, the neighborhood’s remaining 1950′s single level, brick homes seem to recede…fading like memory before the hurtling indifference of passing eras.

In late spring, veils of pollen merge with shrouds of Atlanta traffic exhaust. Timeless nature has awakened as the noxious capitalist certainties underpinning the aberration known as the New South are dying.

Hospice has arrived in the home of my father.

A death vigil has begun, as well, for our culture.

Lost, starving, wailing into a void of paternal abandonment, my father, left on the doorstep of a Baptist church adjacent to an Indian Reservation in rural Missouri, arrived into this keening world. Now, he is refusing to eat and is wailing, once again, into an abyss of helplessness…His bones, eaten by cancer, and his bowels seized up by the side effects of opiates, he is starving himself to death.

He now lies in his bedroom; his sight…set on the undiscovered realm of death. This world denied him succor; now Death offers the embrace that he was denied (and later) refused, as he proceeded through this life in a resentful fury. His wounds cauterized by rage-lit flames.

Now, I must comfort him…as he did me, when I was a child, seized by night terrors…that he both placated and caused.

He whimpers into the air of the small home that he once shook with rage. Now, betrayed by his body, and again orphaned by fate, he will soon leave this world — a place from which he was perpetually estranged.

I hope the womb of night will bestow a peace upon him that was denied to him by this world. I hope whatever dawn he meets will hold him in an embrace so all encompassing and gentle that he will shed his compulsion to bristle and retreat. I hope he will, at long last, know he was loved.

My father was born on an Indian reservation and abandoned on the doorsteps of a Baptist church in rural Missouri in the early years of the Great Depression. A Jewish mother and Protestant father adopted him. In those days, it was a standard practice of adoption agencies to offer up for adoption children of so-called mixed ancestry to interdenominational couples. Caucasian babies, the conventional wisdom of the time presumed, would carry a stigma for life from being raised in a home headed by such social deviants.

My mother escaped Hitler’s Germany (barely) on a Kindertransport. My wife is from the rural South Carolina Low Country. She’s a flat-lander, a swamp bunny. As for myself, I was born in Birmingham, Alabama, in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. I’m an accidental Hillbilly…The lay of the land endowed me with a hill country perception of existence, yet I appreciate the mode of being evinced in places like Charleston and New Orleans…the humidity slowing down the pace of life…the mind as a gnat flurry.

My blood, as is the case with all of us, is composed of ancient oceans that long to know land and sky. On a personal basis, my atavistic blood is a sea of diverse ethnic consanguinity that meets the shore of a global polis. The waves of this body of water are changeable…sometimes, caressing the shoreline… placid, at ease in the world; sometimes, agitated and enraged by what I witness…becoming a series of antagonistic waves crashing against the insensate rocks of the mindless social circumstances that damaged my father so.

Soon, my father will return to the vast ocean of eternity. I consider it my duty to sing the song of my blood…to compose and give voice to sacred hymns, both of the personal and the collective.

This is my poet’s prayer: Life rose from ancient oceans so that mollusks could gaze upon the evening sky. Likewise, we emerged from the cosmic brine to know physical embrace…made resonate because of its finite nature — the loving limits imposed by Time. Accordingly, the immaterial longs for the caress of the summer breeze and to rage into a winter wind. Spiritus Mundi is dependent on us to cultivate our individual souls…to have our blood sing biographical ballads to audiences gathered in Eternity.

My father’s song is almost at its end.

The endless song continues.

A song of tribute to the life of my father (or, for that matter, any human life) must combine elements of a fight song and a love song. One must love life enough to take a stand in its behalf.

During the Great Depression, my father was (again) left fatherless when his adopted father suffered a debilitating stroke, resulting in a protracted decline that left their small family penniless and homeless. Consequently, my father, along with his nearly incapacitated father and his mother managed to make their way from rural Missouri to Cleveland, Ohio, and then went on to find lodging with members of his mother’s family who had settled in Birmingham, Alabama, where shortly thereafter his father died.

In the Deep South, the dark hue of my father’s Native American skin marked him for abuse by belligerent locals. Although he had been deprived of detailed knowledge of his ancestry, his Comanche blood resisted intimidation. His tormentors wounded him deeply, but they also succeeded in opening deep reservoirs of ancestral rage.

My father harbored an abiding animus to bullies — a trait he bequeathed to me by both blood and circumstance.

Apropos: At the foot of Broadway, on May Day, I stood near a bristling array of NYPD officers who were tasked with the crucial mission of protecting the statue of Wall Street’s iconic “Charging Bull” –  where I heard one of the witless, uniformed thugs, through a smirk, opine, “These rich, lazy bums go to college and study women’s studies and the history of Negroes — then come out here in the real world and whine that they can’t get a job…These brats should have thought about what they’re going to do in life when they were in school?”

I turned to face him and averred, “I guess they could follow your example and they could stand here on Wall Street…stroking a billy club…protecting ultra-wealthy criminals and their ill-gotten riches.”

Of course, he responded by calling me a socialist.

Even though that was, most likely, the first accurate statement he posited all day, I replied, “As opposed to following your noble example: choosing to spend your days as a mindless fascist bully?”

His smirk still in place, he spat, “As if you even know what a fascist is!”

I replied, “As a matter of fact, I do, and you, being posed as you are in front of that bull [with its bronze form cast to crouch in a stance of impending aggression; its form, permanently locked in a position of myopic fury] will serve as a perfect backdrop for me to illustrate the situation. Mussolini, who knew a bit about the subject, proclaimed fascism to be the merger of the corporation and the state. Therefore, since it follows that the state pays your salary, and you spend your days protecting the corporate order… that you, to a jackboot, fit the profile of a fascist…Don’t you now?”

At that, his smirk solidified into a mask of belligerent stupid. He slapped his truncheon into his meaty palm, and told me that if I knew what was good for me I better move along.

I told him that he was probably right, due to the fact, I suspect, he could very accurately and with much relish impart to me the true nature of fascism with that nightstick of his.

His lipless, reptilian grin indicated he would be more than happy to take a personal interest in tutoring me on the subject.

“The ghetto that you built for me is the one you’re living in.” — Bob Dylan, Dead Man, Dead Man

But the fight is not with this individual enforcer of the present, doomed order. The encounter is emblematic of what those who devote themselves to the unfolding struggle are up against: an armed and fortified wall of sneering arrogance — a violent, human torrent of surging ignorance.

For us, the living, breaching Death’s wall, possessed of the intention of changing its implacable order, is, of course, impossible — but challenging the present, calcified order — a death-addicted arrangement, created and maintained by mortal men that has existed well past its given and rightful time — has become imperative.

For my father, the struggle is nearly at its end; for those of us who remain in this breathing world, the struggle has just begun.

Phil Rockstroh is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City. He may be contacted at: phil@philrockstroh.com .