Poems 1960-2000 (18 page)

Nuns, now: ladies in black hoods

for teachers – surely that was surprising? 

It seems not. It was just England:

like houses made of brick, with stairs, 

and dark skies, and Christmas coming

in winter, and there being a war on. 

I was five, and unsurprisable –

except by nasty dogs, or the time 

when I ran to catch the bus from school

and my knickers fell down in the snow.

The French boy was sick on the floor at prayers.

For years his name made me feel sick too:

Maurice. The teachers said it the English way,

but he was French, or French-speaking –

Belgian, perhaps; at any rate from some

country where things were wrong in 1940.

Until I grew up, ‘Maurice’ meant

his narrow pale face, pointed chin,

bony legs, and the wet pink sick. 

But we were foreign too, of course,

my sister and I, in spite of our

unthinkingly acquired Leicestershire accents.

An older girl was struck one day

by our, to us, quite ordinary noses;

made an anthropological deduction:

‘Have all the other people in New Zealand

got silly little noses too?’

I couldn’t remember. Firmly I said ‘Yes.’

Forget about the school – there was one,

which I’ve near enough forgotten. 

But look at this – and you still can,

on the corner of Honeycrock Lane – 

this tiny tin-roofed shed of brick,

once the smallest possible Public 

Library. I used to lie

flat on the floor, and work my way 

along the shelves, trying to choose

between Rose Fyleman’s fairy verse 

and
Tales of Sir Benjamin Bulbous, Bart.

The book that really stuck in my heart 

I can’t identify: a saga

about a talking horse, the Pooka, 

and Kathleen, and the quest they both

made through tunnels under the earth 

for – something. Herbs and flowers came

into it, spangled through a dream 

of eyebright, speedwell, Kathleen’s bare

legs blotched blue with cold. Well; there 

were other stories. When I’d read

all mine I’d see what Mummy had. 

Of Mice and
Men
: that sounded nice.

I’d just got far enough to notice 

it wasn’t much like
Peter Rabbit

when she took it away and hid it. 

No loss, I’d say. But where shall I find

the Pooka’s travels underground?

Milkmaids, buttercups, ox-eye daisies,

white and yellow in the tall grass:

I fought my way to school through flowers –

bird’s-foot trefoil, clover, vetch –

my sandals all smudged with pollen,

seedy grass-heads caught in my socks. 

At school I used to read, mostly,

and hide in the shed at dinnertime,

writing poems in my notebook.

‘Little fairies dancing,’ I wrote,

and ‘Peter and I, we watch the birds fly,

high in the sky, in the evening.’ 

Then home across the warm common

to tease my little sister again:

‘I suppose you thought I’d been to school:

I’ve been to work in a bicycle shop.’

Mummy went to a real job

every day, on a real bicycle; 

Doris used to look after us.

She took us for a walk with a soldier,

through the damp ferns in the wood

into a clearing like a garden,

rosy-pink with beds of campion,

herb-robert, lady’s smock. 

The blackberry briars were pale with blossom.

I snagged my tussore dress on a thorn;

Doris didn’t even notice.

She and the soldier lay on the grass;

he leaned over her pink blouse

and their voices went soft and round, like petals.

The little girls in the velvet collars

(twins, we thought) had lost their mother:

the ambulance men had had to scrape her

off the road, said the sickening whispers. 

Horror’s catching. The safe procedure

to ward it off, or so we gathered,

was a homeopathic dose of torture.

So we pulled their hair, like all the others.

Air-raid shelters at school were damp tunnels

where you sang ‘Ten Green Bottles’ yet again

and might as well have been doing decimals. 

At home, though, it was cosier and more fun:

cocoa and toast inside the Table Shelter,

our iron-panelled bunker, our new den. 

By day we ate off it; at night you’d find us

under it, the floor plump with mattresses

and the wire grilles neatly latched around us. 

You had to be careful not to bump your head;

we padded the hard metal bits with pillows,

then giggled in our glorious social bed. 

What could be safer? What could be more romantic

than playing cards by torchlight in a raid?

Odd that it made our mother so neurotic 

to hear the sirens; we were quite content –

but slightly cramped once there were four of us,

after we’d taken in old Mrs Brent 

from down by the Nag’s Head, who’d been bombed out.

She had her arm in plaster, but she managed

to dress herself, and smiled, and seemed all right. 

Perhaps I just imagined hearing her

moaning a little in the night, and shaking

splinters of glass out of her long grey hair. 

The next week we were sent to Leicestershire.

Being in Mr Wood’s class this time,

and understanding, when he explained it clearly,

about the outside of a bicycle wheel

travelling around faster than the centre;

and not minding his warts; and liking Scripture

because of the Psalms: I basked in all this

no less than in the Infants the time before,

with tambourines and Milly-Molly-Mandy.

Although I’d enjoyed Milly-Molly-Mandy:

it had something to do with apricots, I thought,

or marigolds; or some warm orange glow.

Just visiting: another village school

with a desk for me to fill, while Chippenham

decided whether it wanted me – too young

for there, too over-qualified for here. 

I knew it all – except, of course, geography.

Here was a map; I vaguely scratched in towns.

Ah, but here was a job: the infant teacher

was called away for half an hour. Would I…? 

Marooned there in a tide of little bodies

alive with Wiltshire voices, I was dumb.

They skipped about my feet, a flock of lambs

bleating around a daft young heifer. 

The maths master was eight feet tall.

He jabbed his clothes-prop arm at me

halfway across the classroom, stretched

his knobbly finger, shouted ‘You! 

You’re only here one day in three,

and when you are you might as well

not be, for all the work you do!

What do you think you’re playing at?’ 

What did I think? I shrank into

my grubby blouse. Who did I think

I was, among these blazered boys,

these tidy girls in olive serge? 

My green skirt wasn’t uniform:

clothes were on coupons, after all.

I’d get a gymslip – blue, not green –

for Redhill Grammar, some time soon 

when we went home. But, just for now,

what did I think? I thought I was

betrayed. I thought of how I’d stood

an hour waiting for the bus 

that morning, by a flooded field,

watching the grass-blades drift and sway

beneath the water like wet hair;

hoping for Mrs Johnson’s call: 

‘Jean, are you there? The clock was wrong.

You’ve missed the bus.’ And back I’d run

to change my clothes, be Jean again,

play with the baby, carry pails 

of water from the village tap,

go to the shop, eat toast and jam,

and then, if she could shake enough

pennies and farthings from her bag, 

we might get to the pictures. But

the clock was fast, it seemed, not slow;

the bus arrived; and as I slid

anonymously into it 

an elegant male prefect said

‘Let Fleur sit down, she’s got bad feet.’

I felt my impetigo scabs

blaze through my shoes. How did he know? 

My turn for Audrey Pomegranate,

all-purpose friend for newcomers;

the rest had had enough of her –

her too-much hair, her too-much flesh,

her moles, her sideways-gliding mouth,

her smirking knowledge about rabbits. 

Better a gluey friend than none,

and who was I to pick and choose?

She nearly stuck; but just in time

I met a girl called Mary Button,

a neat Dutch doll as clean as soap,

and Audrey P. was back on offer. 

There was a tree higher than clouds or lightning,

higher than any plane could fly. 

England huddled under its roots; leaves from it

fluttered on Europe out of the sky. 

The weather missed it: it was higher than weather,

up in the sunshine, always dry. 

It was a refuge. When you sat in its branches

threatening strangers passed you by. 

Nothing could find you. Even friendly people,

if you invited them to try, 

couldn’t climb very far. It made them dizzy:

they’d shiver and shut their eyes and cry, 

and you’d have to guide them down again, backwards,

wishing they hadn’t climbed so high. 

So it wasn’t a social tree. It was perfect

for someone solitary and shy 

who liked gazing out over miles of history,

watching it happen, like a spy, 

and was casual about heights, but didn’t fancy

coming down again to defy 

the powers below. Odd that they didn’t notice

all this climbing on the sly, 

and odder still, if they knew, that they didn’t ban it.

Knowing them now, you’d wonder why. 

Death by drowning drowns the soul:

bubbles cannot carry it;

frail pops of air, farts

loosed in water are no vessels

for the immortal part of us.

And in a pit of mud, what bubbles?

There she lies, her last breath with her,

her soul rotting in her breast. 

                               *

Is the sea better, then?

Will the salty brine preserve

pickled souls for the Day of Judgement?

Are we herrings to be trawled

in long nets by Saint Peter?

Ocean is a heavy load:

My soul flies up to thee, O God
–

but not through mud, not through water. 

And so, Bishop Synesius,

how can you wonder that we stand

with drawn swords on this bucking deck,

choosing to fall on friendly steel

and squirt our souls into the heavens

rather than choke them fathoms deep?

One more lash of the storm and it’s done:

self-murder, but not soul-murder. 

Then let the fishes feast on us

and slurp our blood after we’re finished:

they’ll find no souls to suck from us.

Yours, perhaps, has a safe-conduct:

you’re a bishop, and subtle, and Greek.

Well, sir, pray and ponder. But our

language has no word for dilemma.

Drowning’s the strongest word for death. 

It's the old story of the personal;

or of the Person – ‘Al', we could call him –

with his oneness, his centrality,

fingers tapping to the band music,

and his eyes glowing like that

as if he had invented the guitar;

or coming around the corner on his tractor

calling out some comment you just missed. 

The radios begin at 6 a.m.

It is really a very crowded city.

You're lucky to find two rooms, one for sleeping,

and a patch of allotment for potatoes. 

Here we are on the hills, and it's no better.

Of course the birds are singing, but they would.

All you get is contempt, didn't they say so?

All right, contemn us.

We asked for nothing but a few gestures –

that kiss inside his open collar,

between the neck and shoulder, shockingly

personal to watch. 

It's Al again, laughing in his teeth,

telling us about his Jamaican childhood

and the time his friend had crabs

from making love to the teacher's maid.

‘It gave me a funny feeling,' he says

‘to see them crawling there, little animals.

I hadn't even grown hair on mine.

In a way I was jealous –

imagine!' We imagine. 

All these people running about in tracksuits

for nothing. And one standing at the gate

with a paper bag of bananas. ‘Hi,' he says,

‘How are you?' Nobody answers. 

So at the May Day rally there they are.

Surely that's his jacket she's wearing?

And the face under the hair is his,

the way she wrinkles her nose.

How people give themselves away!

Yet all we have is hearsay. 

Too late to take a boat out;

and anyway, the lake's crowded,

kids and oars together, and all their voices.

But really no one in particular,

unless you say so. Unless we say so.