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Former Britain’s Got Talent Contestant Andrew Johnston Charged with Raping and Sexually Assaulting Two Women

The trial of former Britain’s Got Talent contestant Andrew Johnston has shocked the public with serious allegations of sexual assault and rape. Johnston, who appeared as a singer on the show in 2008, is facing charges of sexually assaulting and raping two women over a number of years following his appearance on the program. As the case unfolds at Southwark Crown Court, disturbing details from…

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A poem by Andrew Johnston

THE SUNFLOWER

for Stuart Johnston, 1931–2004

One young bloom in a vase or jar, breath- takingly yellow. And her hands, in the morning light, the way they arrange and rearrange. Death brings lilies, but someone has sent a sunflower: this is our penance, staring at the sun, its blind eye, its ragged halo. The day, in the end, took to its bed before the day was over, taking thee with it. Soon this flower, too, will be dead, its summer of wondering done about the sun, petal by petal: loved me;

didn’t know how; did, unsayably so. It leaves me as he left us, in the dark. From one breath to the next, he’d deflect a question: in his the- ology, I, me, mine were just not done. Because he saw eye to eye with death we can stare at the sunflower all day but his heavenly father’s garden was further than we were prepared to go—its bed of blood-red roses, its promises, its premises, the way everything had been arranged; ‘dead’ a manner of speaking, under the sun. We counted ourselves lucky, hour by hour,

and by the minutes of the sunflower (he doesn’t, he does, he doesn’t know me), each in his or her own way worshipping the sun and coming to other arrangements with death— that it is the end, in the abstract. And then one day someone calls, and you take a deep, deep breath. Sister nor’wester, southerly brother— into the mind of the man we guess our way, blind and deaf, senseless, because he is dead. From the end of the earth I will cry unto thee, as daughters and sons have always done, for words unsaid. The riverbed

was dry and I was thirsty. By your bed, near the end, we could count our blessings: each day, for one thing, and though it was winter, the sun. A sisterly sixth sense, when death began to bloom, flew me from the end of the earth. In a week you were dead but we shadowed one another through the brittle days before you went away. You talked and talked, as you’d always done, of all but you, till you were out of breath. I would have liked to hear—despite your fear of the-

atre (so foolish was I, and ignorant, before thee)— about your mother, for instance, who took to bed when tempers rose; and how the sun had burned a dead- ly thirst into your father’s breath; but the hard facts I craved, my mother knew, were the same stones, day after day, that you buried in death- ly silence, so that in this inscrutable way you could build—for you, for her, for six including me— a house, a plain, safe house, with a sunflower in the garden. ‘That which is done

is that which shall be done’ is all very well in the- ory, but what if the sun were black, and the book dead wrong, and the interval under death demanded a father as unlike his father as day and night? A breath of wind reaches me from the rose-bed; in its vase or jar the sunflower nods politely. Halfway

across the Channel, halfway between waking and sleeping, my mind undone, I had, as luck would have it, something of an inkling. The day had been long; as I lay in the boat’s narrow bed a wave of black joy lifted me and left in me knowledge so dark it shone. I held my breath. Fear fell away, of death, and other fears; the end, in the end, was the darkest jewel. I was dead tired, and fatigue’s mysterious flower spoke perhaps in tongues. But that black sun still shines—a talisman, obsidian, a bright antithe- sis. Its darkness made light of death

at most, however, for me; the death of someone else is something else. Your way led over the border; I am a stranger with thee, and a sojourner, but wherever I am, my place in the sun you prepared. His earthly power spent, your god, to us, is dead, but it was your belief that gave us breath, the life we take for granted every day. What sense of your sense will I take with me? How much of your world will we hand on? Just before the end, on the wall beside your bed, Peter pinned Leonardo’s St. Anne. Her

smile, wry, reminds me of you, and her hand-on-hip benevolence. Wherever death leads, we can meet here. The power of light in van Eyck and Vermeer. The breath of Wallace Stevens, overhearing his way to work. Every Henry James you read in bed, destiny and destiny like night and day. The valedictory music of ‘The Dead’. Thou hast set our iniquities before thee but when all—or almost all—is said and done sometimes it seemed you believed no less than me that when we die we go into the sun.

There is nothing new under the sun but much of it is mystery: this my mother knows. Her psychological eye revised your the- ological line. They’d converge, anyway, at the library—your rain-cloud, your seed-bed. You read and read and read. And saved your breath not to write yourself, but to make each day bloom and turn. The astonishing flower, head full of edible seeds, bows down dead: this is the credible sense of its death, that here, where its turning is done other journeys begin. It seems to me you believed what you believed, but it strikes me, too, that the seeds you sowed, in the mind’s sun, mattered most. (Sometimes they grew a bed of nails: you were often ‘sick to death’ of fads and feuds, the way they shut out the sun.) Flower of wonder, flower of might: if I see thee on the other side, when I am dead, I’ll know there is an other side. Till then, while we have breath, our burgeoning work is not done: what we have been given is a rich, difficult day

that could go on without us, nevertheless, all day, whistling a cryptic tune. It comes to me in the conservatory, where we catch a little sun: I didn’t know you well, and then you went away but in the day of my trouble I will call upon thee because you were a man to get things done. In its vase or jar, the young sunflower I imagine has served its purpose. Beneath its bed, all along, the river was flowing—deep, where death knows more than we. Sylvia dons her gardening gloves to gather the dead roses. Man cannot utter it, but under his breath:

‘Remember me, my loves, when I am dead.’ Rest on memory’s sea-bed: we will swim down to thee. And in our own blue day, we will gaze at death the way this one young bloom would gaze at the sun. In the garden of the living, my mother stops for breath. Thou thy worldly task hast done. And seeds rain from the sunflower.

Andrew Johnston

Andrew Johnston comments on his poem: “The Sunflower ” is woven from many strands. In 1991 I read John Ashbery’s book-length poem “Flow Chart” and was struck by the double sestina embedded in it (pp. 186-193), which borrows its end-words (among them, “sunflower”) from a poem by Swinburne. In January 1997, newly arrived in the depths of a London winter, I was bowled over by an exhibition of Anselm Kiefer’s sunflower paintings. When my father died in 2004, my brother Peter suggested two passages from the King James Bible for the funeral service; their language stayed with me. I spent November 2005 at a writer’s residence in the north of France. On a trip back to Paris one weekend, I had a revelation in the train: I could use the double-sestina structure, and even Ashbery’s (and Swinburne’s) end-words, plus bits of the King James psalms and Kiefer’s sunflower image, to write the poem I needed to write about my father (there are echoes of many other sources in there, too). I went back to the Villa Mont-Noir and wrote “The Sunflower”.

Image: The Orders of the Night (Die Orden der Nacht), 1996, Photograph: Seattle Art Museum /Anselm Kiefer

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