Since then, that is what Peirce has been doing all his life. Writing poetry. Never entirely sure of the merit of it (what poet, truly, ever is?) but always driven by the need to keep writing the drift words of dreams that form poems of the mind.

There have been detours aplenty.

Peirce (an unrepentant beach bum of the spirit) has been an amateur lifesaver and body—surfer, and then a professional actor, theatrical agent, cinema manager, announcer/producer on the English Service of the SABC, advertising space salesman, public relations manager, publisher, freelance journalist, artist and cartoonist. But always a poet.

In advertising he worked for about a dozen agencies from radio manager to copywriter to creative group director to creative director to company director.

But not for him the safe road. Clients? "Power does not presuppose intelligence or taste".

Those were the great, gone days of’ advertising," he recalls with enormous and wistful fondness. "Peopled with characters who were giants. A creative director who once bit a client on the ankle? Because he’ been called a dog for his emphysematic coughing? A managing director of the best agency in the country, who fired his entire creative department, and had the cream of artists and copywriters in the country queuing up as replacements the next morning?

"Who tolerated his creative team members being mildly pissed at work, as long as they produced great Ads. An emotional art director so infuriated by rejection of his work by a client that he stamped his foot in such high dudgeon that he broke his ankle? Ah, they were all such beautiful people, infinitely larger than life.

"Today? Oh, my. The grey brigade. Computerised. Who play everything by the book. Getting enormously rich maybe. But who’s going to remember them as people? Hell, that’s no way to live Not with pride."

A few other things along the way.

Radio programmes like Mark Saxon’s "No Place To Hide" for seven years. "Address Unknown". And creating "Squad Cars" and writing it for five years. "The Man Called Curtis" and "The Casey Kids" for Springbok Radio.

On the English Service, many series of serials such as "Call For Matthew Craig" and "Cat Moran" and "Fire Call", which were all enormously popular. Dozens of Radio Theatres. A little thing called "Kaleidoscope" which broadcast 48 short stories in a single year. You know. Pot-boilers, just to keep the cauldron bubbling.

Oh, and five scripts for feature films, all of which, incredibly, made money, even though the films themselves were very forgettable. Except "Pikkie", which was a good one, and repeated on television to this day.

Writing comedy sketches for the best people in the game. Several dozen short stories published and broadcast around the wor1d. Even writing terse caption ideas for some of the very best cartoonists who ever put pen to paper.

"And what a joy that was. To see your words come alive by some of’ the greatest cartoon artists in the world – immeasurable pleasure."

A novel called "A Well-lighted Wilderness" accepted by a publisher who paid an advance, but which somehow never found’ its way to print. Two "ghost-written" biographies, which always afforded a quiet, secret smile.

A stage play called "The Cassius Touch" which was mounted at the legendary Alexander Theatre, with a cast of the very best names in theatre, and which did very well indeed.

Peirce smiles in pained fondness. "There is nothing like seeing ones play brought to life on stage by professionals. Except for one extra bonus. When the audience calls Author and you take a curtain call with the cast on opening night. That experience is quite beyond description."

Through it all … all of this … the poetry somehow just kept stuttering out from Peirce’s pen.

He was commissioned by Colin Fish, Head of Drama for the English Service, to write a radio play for Marlene Dietrich. It was, he says, the biggest challenge of his life.

"I don’t know how I wrote it. My creative mind was jammed . Then I remembered some poems I’d written for two voices, marriage partners. That was the spur. I didn’t sleep much for three days, just wrote it out of me. Or maybe it just wrote itself. That happens."

When Dietrich read the script, she wept, but said she was not "a good enough actress in English" to play the par of Heidi.

"The Waiting Room" was then recorded with the late, magnificent actress Valerie Miller in the lead, and it enjoyed quite unbelievable success being selected for the SABC Transcription Series, broadcast all over the world, translated into several languages, rebroadcast again and again and again.

Letters from listeners poured in, asking for copies of the script. One critic called it "a triumphant prose-poem from the heart" and that, essentially, is what it is … an extended love poem, romantic and often sentimental, but juxtaposed with slashing and biting, blinding venom and fury.

Peirce makes no apologies for his romanticism.

"That’s what I am, always have been, and that love comes out unashamedly in most of my poetry. So many modern poets denigrate that. So do editors, many of them. They say what I write is ‘old-fashioned and does not appeal to the readers of today. I don’t believe that, cannot accept it."

Does his work appeal then only to the middle-aged, the elderly, the sentimentalists?

"Hell, no! There are only two universals in the world … music and love. Both of them transcend age. I’ve written gentle poems to pre-teens, who have not only adored them but immediately understood them.

"That is one of the prerequisites of my poetry, to me. That each poem must be able to be assimilated, grasped in its entirety at first reading or hearing. Nothing esoteric or abstruse. It’s me talking to you – or sometimes, of course, me talking to me. And if it doesn’t communicate at first gulp, I’ve done something wrong. Then I have to go back to make it right"