Past Lives: Ignorance and a tale of two old Moores

Ill-prepared travel can pay some of the best dividends. Indeed, double-divvy in the 1967 case of our stumbling upon a near-perfect Roman amphitheatre at Pula, a workaday seaside town on the Istrian peninsula which Slovenia shares with Italy; the second payback from not reading the guidebook came that afternoon, when my "discovery" was extolled to a co-queuer at the post office.

"It is," replied the elderly Englishman with tactful gentleness, "quite famous." And the stranger in crumpled lightweight jacket and Panama hat, soon to be revealed as emeritus professor of ancient history at Oxford and conveniently equipped with a local angle - St John of God hospital at Scorton had lately snatched him from death's door - went on to provide enough insider information to haul my next travel feature for The Northern Echo out of the banal.

Then there was the entry of the innocents into Meteora. Every even half-awake package tourist to central Greece knows the valley contains a landscape to die for; we superior independent travellers counted the road merely as a useful shortcut ... but imagine our pleasure, nay euphoria, at rounding a bend and happening upon the spectacular clutch of mountain pillars, each hundreds of feet high and each with a medieval monastery perched on its heaven-most pinnacle.

Thomas Gray, elegiast in a country churchyard, was into serendipity. One of his lesser-known works is Ode on the Pleasure arising from Vicissitude. And not only did he give us the name of George Cole's 50s' radio show Ignorance is Bliss, but also coupled that with "Tis folly to be wise."

Although usually of the school that realises something is meant to be poetry only because it doesn't make sense, I was once moved by the stuff at the end of a bumpy bus journey into the back streets of Corunna, at the north-western tip of Spain.

Here, a little knowledge proved to be a delicious thing. We were on the trail of Gen Sir John Moore, killed at the battle of Corunna 192 years ago tomorrow, and we found his resting place in San Carlos gardens, a quiet square in the old-town.

After a 250-mile retreat through mountains and atrocious weather, his army - plus hundreds of women camp-followers - arrived at Corunna in lamentable condition but still able to win a desperate battle, holding off the French to enable an escape by sea. At the very moment of victory at this famous precursor of Dunkirk early in the 1808-14 Peninsular War, Sir John was mortally wounded by a round shot.

So much we knew. We were quite unprepared, however, for the impact of the lines we found set in bronze on the side of the tomb. Charles Wolfe's The Burial of Sir John Moore after Corunna does not otherwise mention the hero's name in its eight Kiplingesque verses, which begin:

Not a drum was heard, not a funeral note,

As his corse to the rampart we hurried;

Not a soldier discharged his farewell shot

O'er the grave where our hero we buried.

We buried him darkly at dead of night,

The sods with our bayonets turning,

By the struggling moonbeam's misty light

And the lantern dimly burning.

No useless coffin enclosed his breast,

Not in sheet or in shroud we wound him;

But he lay like a warrior taking his rest

With the martial cloak around him.

And towards the end:

But half of our heavy task was done

When the clock struck the hour for retiring;

And we heard the distant and random gun

That the foe was sullenly firing.

It is said that Wolfe, an Irishman, got his inspiration for the piece from an account Southey wrote for the Annual Register.

The poem was first published, anonymously, in a local newspaper in 1817 when Winchester-educated Wolfe (1793-1823) was a curate at Ballyclog (and we think Durham's Pity Me and Stand Alone are quaint names& in Co Tyrone.

TIME, though, to pull the threads together. There is less easily defended kind of ignorance and I was guilty of it in dealings long ago with another Moore, the Sky at Night man who, at 77, has just been made Sir Patrick.

It was 1959 and besides being already the people's astronomer - his xylophonic skills, though, were still but a private party piece - he was, together with prime minister Macmillan's family, a favoured customer at a posh provisions emporium in a Sussex market town (think Lewis & Cooper, Northallerton readers, and Darlington old-timers should conjure up Wildsmith's, late of Skinnergate) where my mum ruled the cheese counter.

Would Mr Moore mind giving her lad, who was mouldering away in a City marine insurance office, a few tips on how to get into the journalism he was hankering after? Send him along to tea was the immediate response.

That Saturday I cycled to Moore's rambling old home on the A23.

Advice, thoroughly practical, was duly given and gratefully received. Tea was served rather less fluently by the already confirmed bachelor but that too was much enjoyed by this callow youth. Conversation turned to cricket and then to our town's campaign for a bypass.

"Which reminds me,' said Patrick, "would you mind dropping a letter about that into the Observer office?"

No problem, except that to my eternal shame the edge went off my willingness when it became clear that my host had not yet written the letter. The big picture at the pictures started in 15 minutes.

As he fumbled for an antique portable typewriter, I prayed he had not realised that the sudden throat-clearing was in fact the stifling of an impatient sigh.

Ingratitude, ungraciousness ... ignorance.

What followed often comes back to me when I struggle to get a few words down on to an intimidatingly empty computer screen, which is most days. Moore rattled off a concise letter without, it seemed, pausing for thought.

His arguments were marshalled persuasively - 30 years later the new road was indeed to take the route of an old railway and he employed that epistolary masterstroke of expressing grievance while maintaining an engaging good humour.

Within five minutes the bike was back on the main road, within ten the letter was with the Observer, within 15 the wannabe reporter was sitting in the one-and-nines.

And within months, I was collecting my first £3 a week as an indentured full-timer on the rival broadsheet Courier.

Arise, Sir Patrick, congratulations and a thousand thanks from a repentant ignoramous whose first flash of pre-journalistic intuition told him that anyone who could write a letter like that as quickly as that must be bound for even greater things