Selected Poems (11 page)

nor politely ask them first to wipe their boots,

nor coax her trampled soil patch back to green

after they’ve trodden down the pale spring shoots.

I’d hope my mother’s spirit wouldn’t chase

her scattered household, even if it could.

How could she bear it when she saw no face

stare back at her from that long polished wood?

II

The landlord’s glad to sell. The neighbourhood,

he fears, being mostly black, ’s now on the skids.

The gate my father made from bread-tray wood

groans at the high jinks of Jamaican kids.

Bless this house’s new black owners, and don’t curse

that reggae booms through rooms where you made hush

for me to study in (though I wrote verse!)

and wouldn’t let my sister use the flush!

The hearse called at the front, the formal side.

Strangers used it, doctors, and the post.

It had a show of flowers till you died.

You
’ll have to use the front if you’re a ghost,

though it’s as flat and bare as the back yard,

a beaten hard square patch of sour soil.

Hush!

         Haunt me, and not the house!

                            I’ve got to lard

my ghosts’ loud bootsoles with fresh midnight oil.

I

The two machines on Blackpool’s Central Pier,

The Long Drop
and
The Haunted House
gave me

my thrills the holiday that post-war year

but my father watched me spend impatiently:

Another tanner’s worth, but then no more!

But I sneaked back the moment that you napped.

50 weeks of ovens, and 6 years of war

made you want sleep and ozone, and you snapped:

Bugger the machines! Breathe God’s fresh air!

I sulked all week, and wouldn’t hold your hand.

I’d never heard you mention God, or swear,

and it took me until now to understand.

I see now all the piled old pence turned green,

enough to hang the murderer all year

and stare at millions of ghosts in the machine –

The penny dropped in time! Wish you were here!

II

We built and bombed Boche stalags on the sands,

or hunted for beached starfish on the rocks

and some days ended up all holding hands

gripping the pier machine that gave you shocks.

The current would connect. We’d feel the buzz

ravel our loosening ties to one tense grip,

the family circle, one continuous US!

That was the first year on my scholarship

and I’d be the one who’d make that circuit short.

I lectured them on neutrons and Ohm’s Law

and other half-baked Physics I’d been taught.

I’m sure my father felt I was a bore!

Two dead, but current still flows through us three

though the circle takes for ever to complete –

eternity, annihilation, me,

that small bright charge of life where they both meet.

III

The family didn’t always feel together.

Those silent teas with all of us apart

when no one spoke except about the weather

and not about his football or my art.

And in those silences the grating sound

of father’s celery, the clock’s loud tick,

the mine subsidence from deep underground,

mi mam’s loose bottom teeth’s relentless click.

And when, I’m told, St James’s came to fetch her,

My teeth!
were the final words my mother said.

Being without them, even on a stretcher,

was more undignified than being dead.

Ay!
I might have said,
and put her in her box

dressed in that long gown she bought to wear,

not to be outclassed by those posh frocks,

at her son’s next New York première!

I thought it made me look more ‘working class’

(as if a bit of chequered cloth could bridge that gap!)

I did a turn in it before the glass.

My mother said:
It suits you, your dad’s cap.

(She preferred me to wear suits and part my hair:

You’re every bit as good as that lot are!
)

All the pension queue came out to stare.

Dad was sprawled beside the postbox (still VR),

his cap turned inside up beside his head,

smudged H A H in purple Indian ink

and Brylcreem slicks displayed so folk might think

he wanted charity for dropping dead.

He never begged. For nowt! Death’s reticence

crowns his life’s, and
me
, I’m opening my trap

to busk the class that broke him for the pence

that splash like brackish tears into our cap.

No! Revolution never crossed your mind!

For the kids who never made it through the schools

the Northern working class escaped the grind

as boxers or comedians, or won the pools.

Not lucky, no physique, too shy to joke,

you scraped together almost 3 weeks’ pay

to buy a cast-off uke that left you broke.

You mastered only two chords, G and A!

That’s why when I’ve heard George Formby that I’ve wept.

I’d always wondered what that thing was for,

I now know was a plectrum, that you’d kept,

but kept hidden, in your secret condom drawer.

The day of your cremation which I missed

I saw an old man strum a uke he’ll never play,

cap spattered with tossed dimes. I made a fist

round my small change, your son, and looked away.

I

An Eccles cake’s my
petite madeleine
!

On Sundays dad stoked up for next week’s bake

and once took me along to be ‘wi’ t’men’.

One Eccles needs the currants you could take

in a hand imagined cupped round a girl’s breast.

Between barrels of dried fruit and tubs of lard

I hunched and watched, and thought of girls undressed

and wondered what it meant when cocks got hard.

As my daydream dropped her silky underclothes,

from behind I smelt my father next to me.

Sweat dropped into the currants from his nose:

Go on! ’ave an ’andful. It’s all free.

Not this barrel though. Your sweat’s gone into it.

I’ll go and get my handful from another.

I saw him poise above the currants and then spit:

Next Sunday you can stay ’ome wi’ yer mother!

II

At dawn I hear him hawk up phlegm and cough

before me or my mother are awake.

He pokes the grate, makes tea, and then he’s off

to stoke the ovens for my Eccles cake.

I smell my father, wallowing in bed,

dripping salt no one will taste into his dough,

and clouds of currants spiral in my head

and like drowsy autumn insects come and go

darkening the lightening skylight and the walls.

My veins grow out of me like tough old vines

and grapes; each bunch the weight of a man’s balls

picked by toiling Greeks and Levantines,

are laid out somewhere open air and warm

where there might be also women, sun, blue sky

overcast as blackened currants swarm

into my father’s hard ‘flies’ cemetery’.

Note
. An Eccles cake was called a ‘flies’ cemetery’ by children.

The mams pig-sick of oilstains in the wash

wished for their sons a better class of gear,

‘wear their own clothes into work’ but not go posh,

go up a rung or two but settle near.

This meant the drawing office to the dads,

same place of work, but not blue-collar, white.

A box like a medal case went round the lads

as, one by one, their mams pushed them as ‘bright’.

My dad bought it, from the last dad who still owed

the dad before, for a whole week’s wage and drink.

I was brought down out of bed to have bestowed

the polished box wrapped in the
Sporting Pink
.

Looking at it now still breaks my heart!

The gap his gift acknowledged then ’s as wide as

eternity, but I still can’t bear to part

with these never passed on, never used, dividers.

A directory that runs from B to V,

the Yellow Pages’ entries for HOTELS

and TAXIS torn out, the smell of dossers’ pee,

saliva in the mouthpiece, whisky smells –

I remember, now I have to phone,

squashing a
Daily Mail
half full of chips,

to tell the son I left at home alone

my train’s delayed, and get cut off by the pips,

how, phoning his mother, late, a little pissed,

changing at York, from some place where I’d read,

I used 2p to lie about the train I’d missed

and ten more to talk my way to some girl’s bed

and, in this same kiosk with the stale, sour breath

of queuing callers, drunk, cajoling, lying,

consoling his grampa for his granny’s death,

how I heard him, for the first time ever, crying.

When the chilled dough of his flesh went in an oven

not unlike those he fuelled all his life,

I thought of his cataracts ablaze with Heaven

and radiant with the sight of his dead wife,

light streaming from his mouth to shape her name,

‘not Florence and not Flo but always Florrie’.

I thought how his cold tongue burst into flame

but only literally, which makes me sorry,

sorry for his sake there’s no Heaven to reach.

I get it all from Earth my daily bread

but he hungered for release from mortal speech

that kept him down, the tongue that weighed like lead.

The baker’s man that no one will see rise

and England made to feel like some dull oaf

is smoke, enough to sting one person’s eyes

and ash (not unlike flour) for one small loaf.

This New York baker’s bread ’s described as ‘Swiss’

though it’s said there’s something Nazi in their past.

But the cheesecake that they make ’s the best there is.

It’s made fresh every day and sells out fast.

My kids are coming so I buy one too,

and ask for a WELCOME frosted on the top.

I watch the tube squeeze out the script in blue.

It has my father’s smell, this German’s shop,

as he concentrates on his ice craftsmanship

that cost him weeks of evenings to complete,

a cake with V signs, spitfires, landing strip,

that took too many pains to cut and eat

to welcome home a niece back from the WAAFs.

Already I feel the cake stick in my throat!

The icing tube flows freely and then coughs.

The frosting comes out Gothic and reads:
COD
!

I

The fire left to itself might smoulder weeks.

Phone cables melt. Paint peels from off back gates.

Kitchen windows crack; the whole street reeks

of horsehair blazing. Still it celebrates.

Though people weep, their tears dry from the heat.

Faces flush with flame, beer, sheer relief

and such a sense of celebration in our street

for me it still means joy though banked with grief.

And that, now clouded, sense of public joy

with war-worn adults wild in their loud fling

has never come again since as a boy

I saw Leeds people dance and heard them sing.

There’s still that dark, scorched circle on the road.

The morning after kids like me helped spray

hissing upholstery spring-wire that still glowed

and cobbles boiling with black gas-tar for VJ.

II

The Rising Sun was blackened on those flames.

The jabbering tongues of fire consumed its rays.

Hiroshima, Nagasaki, were mere names

for us small boys who gloried in our blaze.

The blood-red ball, first burnt to blackout shreds,

took hovering batwing on the bonfire’s heat

above the
Rule Britannias
and the bobbing heads

of the VJ hokey-cokey in our street.

The kitchen blackout cloth became a cloak

for me to play at fiend Count Dracula in.

I swirled it near the fire. It filled with smoke.

Heinz ketchup dribbled down my vampire’s chin.

That circle of scorched cobbles scarred with tar ’s

a night-sky globe nerve-wrackingly all black,

both hemispheres entire but with no stars,

an Archerless zilch, a Scaleless zodiac.

Last years of Empire and the fifth of War

and CAMP coffee extract on the kitchen table.

The Sikh that served the officer I saw

on the label in the label in the label

continuously cloned beyond my eyes,

beyond the range of any human staring,

down to amoeba, atom, neutron size

but the turbaned bearer never lost his bearing

and nothing shook the bottle off his tray.

Through all infinity and down to almost zero

he holds out and can’t die or fade away

loyal to the breakfasting Scots hero.

But since those two high summer days

the US dropped the World’s first A-bombs on,

from that child’s forever what returns my gaze

is a last chuprassy with all essence gone.

Hawsers. Dirigibles. Searchlight.
Messerschmitts.

Half let go. Half rake dark nowt to find …

Day old bereavement debris of a blitz

there’s been no shelter from, no
all clear
whined.

Our cellar ‘refuge room’ made anti-gas.