The caniculae are almost over. Cool intermittent winds chase each other round lush trees. Dead leaves are lying on the ground and a light lace mantle descends on a pool at the fag-end of the second millennium.
The wheels of the old world groan as they turn over the bones of the dead who won't learn their lessons and are destined to remain dumb.
The doors are open. The train empties then fills, moves off. It is a great effort moving towards the fire. The cog wheel railway rises towards the woods' outer ring of darkness without any visible means of support, and time turns backwards into yesterday.
My father was a scout light years ago. In a world of health and efficiency, he rowed and hiked while the world was waiting to explode under his feet, when those who could would blow with it.
He would leave the dark city down the river, winding through valleys, up and down the screepaths of mountains in lung piercing clarity, that could sustain a boy almost for ever.
Friends sang and played Baden-Powell games in colonies of urban dust, wore ties with toggles, khaki shorts and walking boots, kept rank and discipline to funny names adapted from wood-craft, moved through woods like spies in a body cult of uniforms and suits.
They sing now, as they sang when there were many, when the dead were young and wore vests and grins and went diving and tramping: Mowglis, Sir Galahads, Chingachcooks, Wolves, all of a mythical company bound by codes and by magic, where manhood begins with oaths and secrecy, discipline and parades.
And so they marched off, being Jews, to places the century saved for them. Marched to the tunes of the day that were sung in the cabaret and the beer hall, their bodies still young but with premature faces, my father, Akela, the wolf pack, to make their fortunes among the lost behind a fence or a high wall,
fifty-five years ago along with their leadership, their heroes and brothers as if on a day trip.
So history came and blew them apart. Their arms and legs and heads flew off, their bodies aged in camps. They froze in forests. Fires raged in ovens at the heart of unbearable farms.
The handsomest, cleverest, most athletic . . . the fire consumes whatever is thrown on it. Those once burned remained burnt, but some, as always, returned with only their whiskers singed while the flames leapt higher.
I have a photograph of six of them straddling a fallen tree trunk. Only two survived the time. Luck smuggled such through prison gates, in some cases only
But I can't help thinking of the lost scouts, their songs, their chants, their ever more distant shouts.
Here they are now. My father among a hundred lost boys, knights of the round table, the dark wood glooming behind them, their faces turned red by the central fire which signifies brotherhood.
Memory washes away the scent of ashes and rounds off the sharp edge of broken glass, but they keep the fire going with twigs and rushes like decent schoolboys in a promising class.
Old men from Canada, Spain, The States, Australia, with wives and children, gathered as if for the Grand Order of Water Buffaloes or the Rotary Club, wearing invisible regalia of firelight as the night-cold clutches stiff arthritic fingers and feels its arthritic toes.
They sing and tell stories. That is the role of the old who have travelled the roads and rails of atrocity. They sing old songs as they move through the city in business suits, fully insured and bankrolled, in laboratories, concert halls, cool studios, high office blocks, respectable addresses, their tears tucked under the pillowslips of brilliant successes or sizzling in embers under long melted snows.
This language is too fancy for them. Let them crack jokes. Let them remember old japes. Let them recall excursions on the Danube or any other river. Let them have a drink or two, let them over-eat and grow ulcers. Old blokes with baseball caps, their peculiar foibles and aversions. Old guys in their cups, in fine fettle, in the pink.
But as we leave the gardens of the hotel where the fire dies down and move to the edge of the forest a man begins screaming. It is now, the merest moment, trapped in the moment, as if in some dire prison. A single man in the wood, furious, cursing invisible enemies, while our bus waits like a dim lit room. There is something that hates the world, it seems. The man in the wood is its curious emanation.
One of the scouts had made a kind of a dummy he called the spirit of evil and threw it on the fire where it fell with a long hiss. It was a strange moment and I felt afraid thinking of other fires, of the work of the devil whatever that it. I prefer not to think of this . . .
What is better in early September than these reliable trees closing over our garden on the leafy side of the city? It is no great burden carrying the memory of them. They please me now, the next day, as they had the eyes of boys my father's age before they grew into their old age of returns. There's nothing new in nature, not that you'd know, but the surprise of complexity and light.
The poet Radnoti, who died in a ditch, wrote of his garden and his wife on a summer afternoon drinking with his friends.
Then came history, and the wolfpacks they cried appeared at the door and demanded their one life and they gave it, like that, and so the evening ends.
George Szirtes was born in Budapest in 1948 and arrived in England as a refugee in 1956. He currently teaches creative writing at the Norwich School of Art and Design. His collections of poetry include The Slant Door Bridge Passages Portrait of My Father in an English Landscape The Budapest File (published earlier this year by Bloodaxe Books), in which The Lost Scouts appears. He has translated the work of Hungarian writers, including Istvan Vas, Otto Orban and Dezso Kosztolanyi.
His work has been shortlisted for the Forward and Whitbread Poetry Prizes.