Listen With Others

Last time, Hedge-sparrow had us trying to remember the collective nouns of various creatures, and before that we had to draw a fairly accurate map of the Thames from Oxford to Kingston, courtesy Three Men in a Boat. This week we seemed have a nautical theme.

Lots of things were missing from the clues: from all the acrosses, just one letter, but from six down clues, a whole jumble of thematic items. The across letters would spell out an author and a poem. Twelve items in the grid were provided by the Thematic clues, but they were in random order and clued in pairs. Finally, a Thematic word had to be written below the grid. A lot was going on here… no wonder it was a 14×14 grid.

Hedge-sparrow seemed to be very generous with his across clues. 6 JUDAS, 13 IRID, 14 ELBA, 20 ARNA and 21 RAFT were quickly slotted in. Frequently, I would blithely carry on with the across clues, but I couldn’t help but glance at the dropped letters from the five I’d already solved — J•HNM•S. Well, JOHN was obviously there, and I had a sneaky suspicion that MASEFIELD was the likely author.

Two poems from my school days immediately came to mind: The Listeners and Cargoes. The former was unlikely for two reasons: firstly, it was too long to fit with the number of across clues, and secondly, it was by Walter de la Mare! So Cargoes it was, and I wrote the remaining letters of Masefield and Cargoes alongside the corresponding across clues.

If I still smoked, I would’ve sat back in my chair, lit up and felt smug. As it was, I just felt smug.

As I took another puff on my imaginary cigarette, I tried to remember all the items in the poem. I stubbed it out impatiently after a couple of minutes as only five came to mind. (Well, it was over 50 years ago, and no, I won’t tell you which ones.)

After that, it was a fairly straightforward solve. Even the GALLEON and COASTER were easy to spot. However, I thoroughly enjoyed disentangling the six thematic items from the down clues:

 
QUINQUIREME was soon written under the grid, and I just needed to understand which thematic clues went with which of the other boats’ cargoes:

 
All done and dusted in under 90 minutes. All that was left was to reread the preamble. Shock horror! I nearly missed it: “The thematic word (11 letters) associated with these items must be written below the grid, in the Chambers spelling” (my bold). I looked the word up in Chambers and found that it was spelt QUINQUEREME. Luckily I could change my second I to an E without too much trouble.

Thanks to Hedge-sparrow for an entertaining, if easy, puzzle. Not for the first time, I had the suspicion that the subject of a Listener puzzle knew that his or her poem was going to be used as a theme — just look at the symmetry that H-s managed to organise in the grid! However, I look forward to a setter’s blog to explain the title.