No Love Affair With New Zealand - Taking A Steak Knife To Denis Glover Poem by Keith Shorrocks Johnson

I have a lot of respect for Margaret Foster
Who was born in 1902 in the grimy town of Dudley,
In the heart of the English Midlands ‘Black Country',
But who ran off as a teenager in hot-blood
To spend two years in the cabaret chorus line
As a Bluebell Girl, traveling the world kicking up the traces -
Later becoming a German contortionist's assistant
And then dancing at the New York Winter Garden
Where she met and married a Spaniard -
Settling first in Buenos Aires and then on the Costa Brava
Where she had a passionate affair with a German anarchist
With both of them then joining an anarchist centuria
Called the ‘Aquilochos' [or Eagles] of the Corts Tram Depot
Of Barcelona, fighting for the POUM in the Spanish Civil War,
With which she took part in the attack on Almudeva in 1936
Where she almost reached the Fascist trenches
But had to retreat when the Communists failed to provide support -
With she and Werner then organizing camps and relief
For refugee children until they were dismissed by
A communist delegate who did not approve of their politics -
After which they were eventually reunited in England
But interned for their anarchist and German links -
Though they eventually escaped to New Zealand in 1940,
Living in a derelict cottage near Paparoa in Northland
Until the authorities allowed them to move to Auckland
Where they met Frank Sargeson and his writers' clique,
With him encouraging her to write about her new country
Under a name she concocted from her mother's family forename
And her first husband's surname - ‘Greville Texidor'.

Not altogether surprisingly, she was bored and thought that NZ
Seemed a wasteland by comparison with the scenes of her adventures -
A desert of emptiness peopled with men and women
Who were so repressed they could hardly bear to go near one another
And whose existence was so numb, it made existentialism seem positive
With Sargeson commenting diplomatically, that she was:
"unable to establish with this country relations which in any way resembled a love-affair".
But what I like most about her is facing up to Denis Glover, the witty and brilliant
Editor and writer who in addition to also being a notorious misogynist and obnoxious drunk
Was a Communist sympathiser, later awarded the Soviet Union war veterans' medal.
So when, at a North Shore party, the pissed-newt loud-mouth rat-bag taunted GT about the Fascists triumphing under Franco:
‘She took a steak knife and held it to his throat until bystanders could overpower her'.