I was writing my doll’s name on the back of her neck when Mummy caught fire — a noisy distraction. She was wearing a loose blue flowered smock (an old maternity smock, I now deduce, from her pregnancy with my sister four years earlier, being used as an overall, not to waste it); the hem
When we found them under the tree there were twenty-two men all dressed in white, packed in two boxes of rosewood, between ancient and brittle layers of yellow paper. We set them out in classic style, carrying their rigid bodies up and down, up and down, until the light began to fail; one motionless fielder
These mornings when he’s not rota’d on picket, he spends the shift he would’ve spent in darkness in the spare room, sawing, painting, making a doll’s house. His wife, in secret moments, sews bits and bobs of fabric into dolls’ dresses: twists of foil are jewellery, pages of old colouring books wallpaper. It’s for their
after Harry South’s closing theme to ‘The Sweeney’ It blows through a scrapyard,through unstable towersof Capris, Granadas, Transit vans … through yellow teeth and fingers,a clouded bar’s persiflagethen out onto the street to lift comb-overs, flares,wide lapels, facial hair –a balm for sore ribs, black eyes. In search of a decade’s soulit winds through a
We struggle to remember what we came up for – spaghetti or air – who our neighbour said was coming to fix what, the conifer we’ve just planted. We watch too much Netflix, play word games online when we should be asleep. We cast off covers, cast them on again, force ourselves to rest upright
You did London early, at nineteen: the basement room, the geriatric nursing, cinema queues, modish fall-apart dresses, and marriage at Stoke Newington Registry Office, Spring 1955, on the rebound. Marrying was what we did in those days. And soon enough you were back in Wellington with your eye-shadow and your Edith Piaf records buying kitchen
Dull day. The Black Mountains in mist. The houses crawl up the lower slopes like rising damp. I wander the town devoid of purpose. November’s fallen leaves siliconed to the wet Monmouth Road. At five the streets eerily vacated as if there’s a curfew. Everything already now so last year. Weatherspoon’s beerhall empty but for
Spring cartwheels down these country lanes, knocks fern and dock for six as frost exhumes with petrol fumes tar potholes leaves can’t fix, while bluebells smoke as downpours choke torrentially inside each rainswept flume of beech or broom chiffchaff and finch survive. Here pimpernel bedraggle a grass verge where, windblown, dog violets snitch through hedge
What luck that Sweatenham’shad been flattened, its concrete baseremaining: the perfect spotto sit the works caravan on blocksand our paint shop beside it. Ern and Jud deftly navigatedthe Land Rover around dead tyres,mangled iron, sprouting steel rods,backing it into positionin full view of the Newcastle Street shops and the windows above them,all day traffic to
Thinking about those nights Kindles a strange felicity: Drinking by candlelight In a pub off the Earls Court Road In the time of the Three Day Week, Because there was no electricity. Certainly we were political. Nothing, though, seemed as serious— Intimate and critical – As the play our
Last night my wife and I went to Asda, And – among other things – spent eight pence on a Bag for Life. The bag is guaranteed to last us a lifetime. Every day we will look fondly at the bag, And recall that evening, All those years ago, When we held hands and strolled
For Rebecca and Hamish Along the dale to the wedding church the fields are fluffy with meadowsweet – ditches and verges foaming with it. Perhaps a tanker has overturned, and shed its load of banana milkshake? No, that’s not it; something more honeyed, more artificially confected; a familiar ingredient from your pantry at
I arrived in Lhasa by train in freezing weather. From what I’d heard, my father would be there. Outside the gaping entrance all was dark,snow falling quietly like owls’ feathers. In the bustling concourse, doubling as a market, just as I’d feared, my errant father was nowhere to be seen. I knew he was dead
Plate scrapers, scrap tippers, throw down your cloths. Raise your ruined hands to the sky. Rise up from the saunas of sunken kitchens. Squeeze soap in the face of progress. Pick up your brushes and take to the streets. Leave the dishes piled high. Point your thumb at the Chef de Cuisine Leave the suds
The beach magician’s vanished, gone home. Now it’s my sleeping cousins’ turn to disappear. Out of the creaking depths of old deckchairs their teenage spirits rise, drift down to the shore. The mackerel are in. Helen’s in blue, Cat in her yellow dress. The harbour’s a pond, the moored boats nailed to their
by Anna Akhmatova Somehow we pulled off becoming apart, Snuffed out our awful hot light. Perennial enemy, it’s time you were taught how someone can love someone right. I’m willing. To me it’s all fun, I’m game: At night, the easeful Muse careers Down to me here, and in the morning Fame Trudges in, rattles
here come the billygoats down the track so heavily hung with dongs that dangle down in the dust and balls that swing from side to side to clonkerty bells that roll and toll on their necks the melody ripples into the stone pine fragrance cypress shadows the nannies plunging onward struggling big with milk so
I probed its crown with the tip of my tongue and it creaked like a bough a boy swings on. Then with the pincer of finger and thumb I plucked it from its loose bed like a bud and set it on this oak table now a desk. It was taller than I thought and
It might be a long, long time since I was christened Christopher And nicknamed Kit… but not so long ago As 1570, when was born my namesake, Who did his best to stage the Fireworks Show That nearly happened. Yet they blew their chance And came to grief, as which of us wouldn’t have
No Englishman would be seen dead under one, preferring to run for cover, soaked to the skin, peruke bedraggled, than carry this effeminate device, the ‘Frenchies’ unfurled without a blush. Only Mr Jonas Hanway, by no means wet, having seen off Persian pirates on his travels and an outspoken critic of tea drinking and employment