In the early stages of Tory-inflicted austerity, I noticed flea markets and antique emporiums — with quaint names and decor evocative of the depression-hit 1930s — popping up in great numbers in boarded-up shop premises. 

Complementing this change of mise-en-scene was the historic local art deco building the Dubarry Perfumery by Hove station near to where I lived. 

But this retro was not confined to retail — it also pervaded the social attitudes of Tory austerity. It was presaged by an attitudinal nudge towards 1940s blitz nostalgia — that notorious “We’re all in this together.” Bakelite rhetoric as if to stiffen our collective upper lip in the wake of massive public spending cuts. 

The now ubiquitous legend “Keep calm and carry on” adorns posters and T-shirts. I’ve even seen a sign on a newsagent counter reading “Keep calm and pay your bills.”

I’m only surprised the Tories haven’t taken up this trope to promote their gutting of our social fabric: “Keep calm and queue up at the foodbank.”

Near where I live now, in Brighton, there’s a café called The Emporium which is carved out of an old Baptist chapel. It has high ceilings, cavernous echoing space and shabby-chic decor with a Bloomsburyesque thrown-togetherness. 

Although a refreshing aesthetic alternative to bland coffee chains, it’s also bleakly symbolic of a time-shift in attitudes that coats our society like a mould. Not so much “Alarm clock Britain” as “Clocks back Britain.”

Amid all this retro-chic it’s ironic that Woolworths — totemic cheap store of the 1930s depression — was among the first casualties of the recession. And retro goods retailer Past Times disappeared just when its nostalgia range might have come into vogue. Or perhaps it was rendered obsolete by the authentic articles returning to the market?

All this is to furnish the backdrop to a long poem work I’ve been working on since early last year, Odour of Devon Violet, which juxtaposes the attitudes and politics of the 1930s with that of today’s austerity culture. 

The title is an allusion to the popular cheap perfume of the ’30s and ’40s, Devon Violet. 

The poem plays much on olfactory associations of time and place — smell being one of the most evocative of our senses. 

It also touches on smell as an invisible class-descriptor. Whether in the difference between cheap and luxury scents, or the body odours of honest toil and perfumed idleness of the leisurely classes. 

There is satirical play on advertising spiel throughout, which I pastiche for polemical purposes. The poem has an underlying schema on the captor-and-hostage relationship of commercialism and consumerism. It also investigates the strange interrelation between advertising and verse. 

As with my previous period long poem, Keir Hardie Street (Smokestack, 2010), written through the fictitious narrator Allan Jackdaw, Violet comes to us through another authorial alter ego, Ivor Mortise.  

I was fortunate to find a number of original copies of Left Book Club editions in some of those new antique emporiums. My project has been made easier by the 1930s returning to roost on our doorsteps. Graham Stevenson’s daily 80 Years Ago Today columns in the Morning Star have also proven an invaluable resource. 

The Tory-led coalition has done the most to bring the ’30s back to life by using Stanley Baldwin’s right-wing “national” government as a template for its own austerity regime. 

Benefit cuts and labour camps for the unemployed — brought in under Baldwin — are echoed today in welfare caps and mandatory workfare placements. The past has a habit of catching us up under Tory rule. 

Darker still is the recrudescence of fascism at times of capitalist crisis. The rise of Golden Dawn (Greece), Jobbik (Hungary), Front National (France) and Ukip and the EDL at home all pay testament to this historical trend. 

Such cultural viruses are nurtured by divide-and-rule rhetoric, such as we witness today through Tory and red-top stigmatisation of immigrants, Roma and the unemployed — modern Britain’s untermenschen (sub-human). 

Violet is a cautionary poetry polemic on the dual dangers of capitalism and fascism, flip-sides of the same coin — the rim of which is fiscal fascism, or austerity capitalism, most brutally witnessed today in troika-yoked Greece and Spain. 

Odour of Devon Violet can be read exclusively online as an ongoing work-in-progress at www.odourofdevonviolet.com funded by an Arts Council Grant for the Arts Award.

Well Versed is edited by Jody Porter – wveditor@gmail.com
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