The Colour of Black and White E-Book

Liz Lochhead

• Herausgeber: Birlinn
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Seitenzahl: 78

Beschreibung

These poems are often poems of love or death and iconic figures, Jungian archetypes, animus figures with strong outlines, harsh comfort and, often, voices of their own dominate the first, the 'title' section of the book. Here you can find poems autobiographical and entirely fictional set in her native rural/industrial Lanarkshire. Poems dedicated to other poets. There is a section of the rude and the rhyming, the out-loud. Now she's in her middle years she's decided to own up to this stuff properly, her interest in 'unrespectable' poetry, in black prison 'toasts', in recitations, folk-poems and music hall monologues. The colour of both the black and the white. The collaboration with the printmaker Willie Rodger was also an essential part of the making of this book. Lochhead, long an admirer of Rodger's work, felt strongly that he was a kindred spirit and his poetically pared down and essential lino cuts accentuate the positive and the negative, the black and the white.

Leseprobe

THE COLOUR OF BLACK & WHITE

Liz Lochhead

Lino & Woodcutsby Willie Rodger

POLYGON

POEMS

Title Page

Acknowledgements

I

The Unknown Citizen

The Man in the Comic Strip

In the Black and White Era

Ira and George

The Beekeeper

The New-married Miner

The Baker

II

Kidspoem/Bairnsang

Little Women

The Metal Raw

Lanarkshire Girls

Your Aunties

Clothes

Social History

After the War

Sorting Through

1953

III

View of Scotland/Love Poem

Neckties

A Night In

IV

Epithalamium

The Bride

The Redneck

The Bridegroom

V

Two poems on characters suggested by Bram Stoker’s Dracula

1. Lucy’s Diary

2. Renfield’s Nurse

VI

Five Berlin poems

5th April 1990

aquarium 1

aquarium 2

three visits

Almost-Christmas at the Writer’s House

VII

Good Wood

Papermaker

A Wee Multitude of Questions for George Wylie

Warpaint and Womanflesh

The Journeyman/Paul Cezanne on Mont Sainte Victoire

VIII

Year 2K email epistle to Carol Ann Duffy, Sister-poet & Friend of my Youth

Black and White Allsorts

Hell for Poets

Almost Miss Scotland

In the Beginning

The Ballad of Mary Shelley’s Creature

Lady of Shalott

Advice to Old Lovers

Sexual Etiquette

Song for a Dirty Diva

My Way

About the Author

By the Same Author

Copyright

LINO AND WOODCUTS

Wee Song

Wee Bite

Man Nearly Falling in Love

Man Nearly Falling in Love

Jonah

Pithead

The Oven

Tenements

Wee Waif

Wee Friends

Adjusting Earring

Wee Cosy

Dream Dresses

Partners

Wee Hooses

Wee Valentine

Wee Kiss

Once In a Blue Moon

Lovers’ Knot

Wee Caress

Bride & Groom

Wee Hug

Wee Fright

Listening To A Friend

Wall

Wee Pencils

Punch & Judy

Wee Fairy

Wee Dug

Wee Sweetie

Eve

Eve’s Gardening Glove

Interval

School Reunion

Gallus Dancers

Wee Romp

Sisyphus

Acknowledgements

Some of these poems, in slightly different forms, have previously appeared in Bagpipe Muzak (published by Penguin Books, now out of print) or in Poetry Review or Chapman Magazine or have been broadcast on Radio Four. The author is grateful for the Cholmondley Award for Poetry she received in 2002. And very grateful, too, to have been awarded a Residential Fellowship by the Civitella Ranieri Foundation in 2000 when she worked on some of these poems while a guest in their artists’ studio accommodation in Umbria.

To Tom Logan, and to Tom Leonard

I

The Unknown Citizen

How to exist

except

in a land of unreadable signs and ambiguous symbols

except

between the hache and the ampersand

except

between the ankh and the ziggurat

between the fylfot and the fleur de lys

between the cross and the crescent

between the twinned sigrunes and the swastika

or the sauvastika its mirror image, its opposite –

meaning darkness/light whichever –

with a blank page for a passport

except

under some flag

some bloody flag with a

crucially five

(or a six or a seven)

pointed star?

The Man in the Comic Strip

For the man in the comic strip

things are not funny. No wonder he’s

running in whichever direction his pisspoor

piston legs are facing

getting nowhere fast.

If only he had the sense he was born with

he’d know there is a world of difference

between the thinks bubble and the speech balloon

and when to keep it zipped, so, with a visible fastener.

But his mouth is always getting him into trouble.

Fistfights blossom round him,

there are flowers explode when the punches connect.

A good idea is a lightbulb, but too seldom.

When he curses, spirals

and asterisks and exclamation marks

whizz around his head like his always palpable distress.

Fear comes off him like petals from a daisy.

Anger brings lightning down on his head and

has him hopping.

Hunger fills the space around him

with floating ideograms of roasted chickens

and iced buns like maidens’ breasts the way

the scent of money fills his eyes with dollar signs.

For him the heart is always a beating heart,

True Love –

always comically unrequited.

The unmistakeable silhouette of his one-and-only

will always be kissing another

behind the shades at her window

and, down-at-the-mouth, he’ll

always have to watch it from the graphic

lamplit street.

He never knows what is around the corner

although we can see it coming.

When he is shocked his hair stands perfectly on end.

But his scream is a total zero and he knows it.

Knows to beware of the zigzags of danger,

knows how very different from

the beeline of zees that is a hostile horizontal buzzing

of singleminded insects swarming after him

are the gorgeous big haphazard zeds of sleep.

In the Black and White Era

for Ian McMillan

‘Hitchcock,

there was a Hitchcock on.’ he said. ‘Lifeboat.

I’d harped on about it that much that Dad and I

had stayed up late to watch it.

Cocoa, and there we were, father and son in

nineteen-fifties checky dressing gowns and striped pyjamas.

Mum was up late too, footering with the packing

because next day we were going on our holidays.

The big black and white TV

was a boiling box of cruel grey sea,’

he said, ‘when the door went.

We were normally such a family of early bedders too,

and my Mum was all for not answering –

the time of night and us going our holidays tomorrow –

which wasn’t a bit like her, not normally,

and obviously – door went again, and then again –

wasn’t going to be on, now was it? So

when she changed her tune from

“Don’t go, Jack,” to “You better go, Jack,”

Dad tied his cord again tighter and went to answer it.

What I remember, and I do remember

whatever my Mum says, and though my Dad denies it,

is the man sitting there on our settee,

sitting there the way no visitor ever sat,

not normally, without so much as a cup of tea

and a biscuit, which was unheard of, with that big dog of his

wetly wolfing down the water my mother –

and this wasn’t like her – had so very grudgingly

brought it in that flowered bowl I’d never seen before.

“I’ve never seen you before in my life,”

said my Dad to the man. And, honestly

it wasn’t like him to be blunt like that.

This was after the man looked long at him and said,

“I know you, you’re Jack Jones, I was

on the same ship as you, Ark Royal, remember?”

My Mum was wringing her hands and saying,

“A fine time of night this is to come to folk’s door –

and here they’re away on their holidays tomorrow too!

You with your shaggydog stories of walking to Hamilton

and needing a bowl of water for your dog.

The doorstep wasn’t good enough for you, was it?”

The TV was still on. Lifeboat. Which, with

a visitor in, it wouldn’t have been, not normally.

A Hitchcock I never saw the end of,

not that night,

and as far as I know has never been repeated.’

Ira and George

for Michael Marra

‘First the phonecall’

as the man said – and he sure said a mouthful –

to that ‘which comes first, words or music?’ question.

Who knows? Except: for every good one

there are ten in the trash, songs you slaved over

that just won’t sing, in which no lover ever

will hear some wisecrack twist itself to tell

his unique heartbreak (so sore, so personal)

so well

he can’t stop humming it. The simplest three chord

melody might have legs

once it’s got the lyric, not tunesmith’s

ham-and-eggs.

Each catchphrase, colloquialism, each cliché

each snatch of overheard-on-the-subway or

street can say

so much, so much when rhymed right, when

phrased just-so to fit

its own tune that was born for it.

A Manhattan night in twenty-nine or thirty.

It’s late, you’re reading Herrick. Just back

from a party,

your brother calls out ‘Hey let’s work!’ You

watch him shuck

his jacket, loose his black-tie and grab your book.

‘Gather ye rosebuds’ he says, and slams it

shut. He’s right.

Hard against the deadline and at night –

shoes off, moon up (just daring you),

piano open –

that’s when you two can make it happen.

The tune that smells like an onion? Play

it very

slow, then the one that sounds like the

Staten Island Ferry

till you hear the words – brother, they’re

already there

under the siren and the train and the cab

horn blare

of his jazz of endless possibilities that will

only fit

its own fine-tuned lyric that is born for it.

The Beekeeper

for Carol Ann Duffy

Happy as haystacks are my quiet hives

from this distance and

through the bevel of this window’s glass.

This is the place I robe myself

in net and hat and gloves.

This is my vestibule,

crocked like a dairy, full

of the sexual smell of bees.

Bees that fizzle out singly

like smoke rising from one cigarette

then straighten-up and fly right

hauled

by olfactory magnets

while, loaded, laden,

their fellow workers make a beeline home.

This is the business

and I mind the time the old man,

showing me my first stuffed queen, the

tawny intricate purpose moving on the quiet comb,

made me initiate of this gold, this goodness.

He taught me the riddle of Samson –

Out of the strong came forth sweetness –

the honeycomb in the lion’s carcase.

Out of the eater comes something to eat

Out of the strong comes something sweet.

I flip my net back

and go bare-armed on and out to them

wishing only to trust my own good husbandry

and do nothing

nothing but feel them

crawl and trawl the follicles, stamens

and pistils of my unpollened arms.

The New-married Miner

My shift is over that was night time all day long.

My love, it’s lowsan time. Alone among

these dog-tired colliers my drouth’s for home.

Bank up the fire with small coal till I come

and before tomorrow I’ll not think again

how sore and small the space I have to hunker in

or how huge and hard but true it pulls all day

as at the pithead, black against the sky,

the big wheel turns. Now my bike’s

coggling front wheel clicks and squeaks,

my cold bones ache as hard for home I pedal

still blacked up like a darky minstrel.

My long path home is starved of light

so I must do without.

No moon tonight, so round and white –

its Davy Lamp’s gone out.

Frost edges every blackened leaf,

black snot-flowers on my handkerchief.

Heat my bath scalding

and, bonny lass, I’ll make

the white lace of the lather black.

Squeeze the hot soapy flannel

at the nape of my neck

and scribble long white chalkmarks down my back.

Put the dark fire to the poker

till the hot flames burst in flower.

Stretch out the towel and I’ll stand up.

Hold and fold me

rub and scrub me as hard as you can

till in your white warm arms I’ll end up

a pink and naked man, my love

your pink and naked man.

The Baker

I am as lucky for a funeral

As a sweep is at a wedding

When with his red eyes, furred brush and burnt smell

He blesses bridal lace with his soil and smirching.

Thus do my work-night whites,

The cracks on my dusted boots,

My overall trousers of flour-stiffened linen

Handsel your black ties and pressed mourning suits

Although I am not by your side, nor

Does any one photograph my – or that rawest – absence.

Dawn delivery to this hotel had me

Shoulder those boards of my generous dozens

As all week neighbours came with bakestuffs

Up the saddest path to your door

Wanting to bring something sweet and light

To where nothing can be so any more.

And now I sleep on sacks washed soft

While you – your time at the cold grave over,

Or after that stare at the core of the terrible oven –

Take tea and funeral cakes together.

Let sober girls in black and white replenish plates

And freshen up the cooling cups with warm

As if tomorrow like live yeast could rise and prove.

I say: such crumbs do no harm.

In nights while I will work and you will grieve

Weak tea, sudden hunger for the heel of a new loaf,

White dawn and the surprise of appetite

Will have you tear a lump of goodness off.

Sooner, later a new season’s wind will lift –

Though it may be many daily loaves from this dark hour –

As you let go, fling, and feel the ashes sift

Around your footsteps like spilt flour.

II

Kidspoem/Bairnsang

it wis January

and a gey dreich day

the first day Ah went to the school

so ma Mum happed me up in ma

good navy-blue napp coat wi the rid tartan hood

birled a scarf aroon ma neck

pu’ed oan ma pixie an’ ma pawkies

it wis that bitter

said noo ye’ll no starve

gie’d me a wee kiss and a kid-oan skelp oan the bum

and sent me aff across the playground

tae the place Ah’d learn to say

it was January

and a really dismal day

the first day I went to school

so my mother wrapped me up in my

best navy-blue top coat with the red tartan hood,

twirled a scarf around my neck,

pulled on my bobble-hat and mittens

it was so bitterly cold

said now you won’t freeze to death

gave me a little kiss and a pretend slap on the bottom

and sent me off across the playground

to the place I’d learn to forget to say

it wis January

and a gey dreich day

the first day Ah went to the school

so ma Mum happed me up in ma

good navy-blue napp coat wi the rid tartan hood,

birled a scarf aroon ma neck,

pu’ed oan ma pixie an’ ma pawkies

it wis that bitter.

Oh saying it was one thing

but when it came to writing it

in black and white

the way it had to be said

was as if you were posh, grown-up, male, English and dead.

Little Women

for Carol Ann Duffy and Jackie Kay

When Oona Cody left me

for that new girl Helen Derry

initially

I had everybody’s fullest sympathy –

which entirely failed to comfort me.

That Helen Derry, yon one,

her with the wee fur cuffs on her bootees, the

knife edges on her accordion pleats which,

when she birled to swing them

in a quick scart along the peever beds

or bent to touch her toes, showed

a quick flash of her scut

in pants embroidered with the days of the week.

Rumour was she’d plain refused once to come to school

with Thursday on on a Monday and ever since –

oh, she was a hard case that Helen Derry –

her mother had learned her lesson, taken

a tumble to herself, got a grip and shaped up

good and proper.

My mother was predictable.

If that was the kind of friend Oona was, well,

she was no friend of mine, good riddance,

she was somebody anybody,

anybody with a bit of sense,

would be glad to see the back of.

Which was, wasn’t it, just what a mother would say?

And everybody in the class said the novelty would wear off.

‘Bide your time’ and ‘She’ll come running back’

these seemed to be the bromides of conventional wisdom.

And Helen Derry, as for her, she could

get back to where they called Levoy ‘Bendulum’

(Bendulum!)

and Dutch ropes ‘French’ and she could just

take her wee blue bottle of Evening-in-bloody-Paris

back with her, coming here breaking up the

true marriage of a best friendship

with her face like the back of a bus

and her bahookey like the side of a house

and the wings on the famous specs you couldn’t get on the

N.H.S.

and the ‘auntie an airhostess’

and the wee lucky birthstone pierced earrings, the monster.

But I knew everybody knew what I knew.

There was something wrong with what I’d had with Oona.

Although the sanctity of our togetherness had seemed

unbroken

and her content – I’d thought – to swap scraps

with no thought of anyone else or anything ‘missing’ –

us able to run the gauntlet of a three-legged race in perfect

step together

with hardly a knot in the hanky that yoked us together.

Now I was bad luck, bad luck altogether.

No wonder all the other couples avoided me,

frantically spooling themselves into each other tightly

with loving lassoos of the french-knitting that ravelled

endlessly

from the wee dolly-things that were all the craze

and they worried at like rosaries.

‘There but for the grace of God’ and

‘Please, please let it never happen to me, so help me’ –

seemed to be the size of it as they jumped double bumps

together,

arms down each other’s coatsleeves, and chewed each other’s

used bubble gum for luck and love.

What the magazines said was that this was a chance,

a chance to be truly honest with yourself

and see where you had gone wrong, or slipped up,

or let yourself go, or taken things for granted,

been lax about ‘communicating’ – for how many

of us could say we really took the time to talk or listen?

The magazines reminded that revenge

was a dish better eaten cold (and then you’d see it was only

good taste to leave it).

For Oona Cody’s birthday – the first anniversary

since she’d left me – I bought her a copy of

Louisa May Alcott’s two best-loved children’s classics,

Yes, ‘Little Women’,

‘Little Women’ and ‘Good Wives’ in a Compendium

Edition

with a green marbled cover and one frontispiece,

a great book

I knew Oona – my Oona – would definitely love.

She was sitting under the pegs at playtime,

under the pegs with Helen Derry,

the both of them engrossed – or acting-it engrossed,

for God-knows-whose benefit though, so

(with hindsight) I’ll concede it likely they were in

a mutual bona-fide brown study – engrossed

in a wee free-pamphlet entitled ‘Growing Up’.

I clocked the cover (two doves and a butterfly

above the – open – gates of womanhood

with the pastel-coloured coloured-in country beyond).

And Oona Cody had the grace to blush

when I dropped the present – all wrapped up –

like a reproach in her lap.

I held my breath till lunchtime, when –

Helen Derry stood against the railings, watching –

Oona Cody marched up to me and said she didn’t want a birthday present,

not from me, and anyway Helen had already read it.

‘She says it’s pure morbid, the wee sister dies

and the boy-next-door marries the wrong one,

the eejit that talks French and sleeps with

a clothespeg on her neb to improve her profile into aquiline

and thinks of nobody but herself and flaming art.’

So I had to go home with it,

home to face my mother’s scorn,

to stick it up on the shelf beside the identical one I had already

knowing I’d never have the neck to take it back and swap it

for ‘What Katy Did’ & ‘What Katy Did Next’

but was stuck with it –

‘“Christmas won’t be Christmas without any presents,” grumbled Jo,

lying on the rug.’

The Metal Raw

was what we used to call

what must’ve really been the unmetalled road or row,

a no-cars scratch across two farmers’ tracts

between ours, with its brand new scheme,

and the next

ex-mining village.

At four, or five or six or so, I thought

it meant the colour, though. Metal raw

was crude red (rid) gravel that you’d

better not brake your bike on and that surfaced

just the first hundred yards or so

then patched the worst of the ruts

on the dirt and mud and clinker of the rest of it. Rust

on corrugated iron, that was metal and raw, both.

A real remnant of The Iron Curtain for all I knew,

torn and gouged with nail holes along edges

that you’d to watch they wouldnae rip the hand off you.

Sheets of this stuff crumbled to red dust along the Metal Raw

among the black cold fires and rags and bits of brick

around the place the tinkers still camped

a week or two each Spring

with their piebald ponies.

Always some story

among us weans around the scheme or at the swings

about somebody’s big cousin creeping close enough

to kick the boiling billycan over, about a shaken fist,

cursing and swearing and how far, on the light nights,

that big man with the stick had hunted him.

I was wee enough then,

on a Sunday walk along the Metal Raw

with Mum and Dad in my good coat,

for the tinks’ big black dog that wouldnae do me any harm

to knock me flying in the mulchy ditch among

flag iris and the reeds I called bullrushes

and that might have harboured Baby Moses

and not one bit surprised me.

See, I am talking of the time when I mixed up

Old Meg she was a gipsy

and that old woman up the Metal Raw

smoking a pipe outside a tilting lean-to of tarred and

patched tarpaulin stretched on hawthorn.

And this was the nineteen fifties.

We slept under a mushroom cloud,

feared Kruschev and Bulgarin, men in Cossack hats

in blizzards of interference on the tiny grey T.V. screens

of the Cold War.

This was the time when our mothers down the New Houses

stood on Red Cardinal doorsteps

far too scared not to buy the tinkers’ pegs and prophesies.

Lanarkshire Girls

Coming into Glasgow

in our red bus through those green fields. And

Summer annoyed us thrusting

leafy branches through the upstairs windows.

Like a boy with a stick through railings,

rattling us. We bent whole treetops

squeezing through and they rained down twigs, broken

bits of foliage, old blossom on the roof,

chucked hard wee balls of unripe fruit,

drumming us out of the country.

Then it was

shabby schemes, gospel halls, chapels, Orange halls,

doctors’ surgeries, the crematorium, the zoo,

gap sites where August already frittered the stuffing out of

unpurpling fireweed and splintering thistles

till the blank blue sky was dot-dot-dotted

with whiskery asterisks.

Soon the coherent cliffs of Tollcross,

the many mansions of those lovely red and

blackened tenements. Our country bus sped

past the city stops, the women in their

slippers at the doors of dairies,

the proud pubs on every corner, accelerated

along the glamorous Gallowgate, juddered by

Reeta’s gallus fashions and the

gorgeous dragons of Terry Tattoo Artist, till it

spilled us out, fourteen years old, dreaming ourselves up,

with holiday money burning a hole in our pockets

at the corner of Jamaica Street.

Your Aunties

for Elizabeth Miller

your Auntie was

famous for being an air hostess or

famous for being a nurse

famous for being a bloody good sport

famous for being a Pain in the Erse

famous for being able to take a joke or

famous for Quite the Reverse.

famous for the office sweepstake and spectacular wins

your Auntie was

famous for her perra stoatin pins

famous for her big blue eyes

famous for her brass neck

famous for her mince pies

her harangues, her meringues, her am-I-right-or-am-I-wrangs?

famous for her talent contest

famous for Always Doing her Best

famous for For-Christssake-Wullie-will-you-give-it-a-rest?

famous for her bra

famous for her good bones

famous for her tattie scones

famous for her foxtrot

famous for her scarlet lipstick

famous for her scarlet fever

famous for Always Getting Up at Weddings and

Singing The Twelfth of Never.

famous for turning

famous for being a poppet

famous for being a Nippy Sweetie

famous for Always Being Immaculate

or

famous for being a bloody mess

famous for the specs you couldn’t get on the N.H.S.

famous for Signing the Pledge at the Bandy Hope

famous for her famous esperegus soup.

famous for being as daft as a brush

famous for fast thinking

famous for … What-do-you-think?

famous for her driving

famous for her drinking

famous for famously driving your Uncle Freddie to drink.

famous for the Famous Grouse

famous for her bought house

famous for her High Ideals

famous for her peerie heels

famous for her natural curls

famous for her Toni

famous for her fake tan

famous for her Wee Man

famous for her canary

famous for being the salt of the Earth

famous for being phoney

famous for being genuine

famous for being a poser

famous for being a Literary Creation like Aunt

Julia The Auntie of Mario Vargas Llosa

famous for her Giaconda Smile

famous for making scenes

like a Dickensian Aunt

or a Wodehouse Aunt, a Dylan Thomas

or a Graham Greene’s …

famous for being Norman MacCaig’s Gaelic Aunt

Julia in her black box bed

or Edwin Morgan’s Aunt Myra at a tea dance in the

twenties with a new tune in her head

famous for being one of Alan Bennett’s

Bradford Aunties who were

famous for I-take-as-I-find and

always-speaking-me-mind and

not-being-taken-in-by-t’-toffs

famous for being Charlie’s Aunt

or Roger McGough’s …

A very well known phrase or saying

meaning you are

welcome to whatever you want is:

Eat up – you’re at your Auntie’s!

Clothes

for Helen Simpson

There are dresses – good dresses,

dresses you always loved –

that are suddenly so clean gone

they never become a duster or

leave so much as a square of themselves

rubbing around decades later in the ragbag.

This was what I learned listening

to my mother and my aunts

when on one of the good days in the long Summer holidays

they sat out on backdoor steps

or – skirts spread out – on a tartan rug

on the back green under the white sheets

hung high. ‘What happened

to that wee dress?’ one of my aunts

would ask my mother or she’d ask them

coming out of one of the fridgeless kitchenettes

of the fifties with a jug of Boston cream

saying ‘Johnnie aye liked me in that costume …’

Maybe it was my grandmother saying

‘That was a good coat that’

with all the reverence and gravity

remembrance of such a garment

was rightly due. You knew how true it was

she liked good things. When someone said

‘That was something I always felt right in …’

what you heard was the real regret, the yearning.

If something could be explained away

as having been worn till it was well and truly done

this would dismiss it from discussion.

But the mystery of that wonderful swagger-coat –

a great coat – left on a train in the nineteen thirties

that disappeared before it was gone back for

only minutes later

was enough to make it mythical to me

as Joseph’s Coat of Many Colours,

as the one dream dress every one of them had danced in

and no one was sure who it actually belonged to or

whatever happened …

You learned that everything was in the detail,

that their mouths made rosebuds

to recall rows of toty-wee covered buttons.

Their knowledgeable eyes narrowed at darts

or edge-to-edge, bugle-beading, Peter Pan collar,

gleamed when they as much as said sateen.

Something had never been ‘blue’ but

saxe or duck-egg or ‘a shade somewhere

between peacock and a light royal

almost an electric blue – but no as gaudy’ …

Talk was of barathea, grosgrain, watered taffeta

organza, covered coating.

When it came to this stuff stuff

every one of them was her mother’s daughter.

I’d say every sister had three sisters

who were women after their own hearts

if I didn’t remember my youngest aunt, the looker –

the one who later divorced and remarried,

with the perfect eyebrows

and who never had a bad perm or a tint that

went metallic, harsh, who never had fireside tartan

or visible veins measling her legs in their glassy nylons –

smoothing down the glazed cotton over net

splashed with huge impossible blue roses,

admiring the this-year almond toes

of her gorgeous gunmetal shoes

and saying nothing

while her mother and her sisters argued enjoyably

over a past no one could quite agree the colour of

and that might or might not have been

sprigged with tiny flowers.

Social History

My mother never

had sex with anyone else

except my father. A week before

her three day leave to get married

my mother was examined by the Army Doctor

and pronounced virgo intacta

twenty four years old and virgo intacta

an unusual thing in the ATS

an unusual thing in wartime

if you believe even half of what you read

in the social history books.

And the joke was I wasn’t even sure

your Dad was going to make it. Rumour was

they were going to cancel all leave prior to D Day

so it was touch and go till the last minute …

The sex my mother could’ve had

but didn’t

sounded fantastic. Clever Jewish boys

from the East End of London

whirled her round the dance floors

niftily slow foxtrotting her into corners

telling her the khaki matched her eyes.

A soldier in a darkened carriage on a slow train

wept on her shoulder when he told her

that he’d lost his brother in North Africa.

Two naval ratings on Margate pier

slipped a string of cultured pearls in her pocket

said ‘Miss, we just found these on the beach

and you are so pretty we thought you ought to have them.’

She had a very close and very tender

friendship with a lovely, lovely gentle N.C.O.

from the North of England who told her she was

the image of his girlfriend. An Italian

prisoner of war sketched her portrait and

her sister who had her eye on him

was quite put out.

She didn’t care for Yanks but that didn’t

stop them trying. A Free Frenchman

fell in love with her. A Polish Airforceman

proposed. Any Scotsmen she met

down there had lovely educated accents

and tended to be Top Brass.

She mixed with folk from All Over.

Which was the beauty of the services

and the best of the party that was wartime,

while the buzzbombs overhead didn’t quite

cut out.

She was quite capable of downing her half of bitter

and rolling out the barrel with all the other girls

without ending up squiffy up against the wall

afterwards with her knickers down, unlike some.

When they all rolled back to barracks late,

swinging their lisle-stockinged legs

from the tailgate of a lorry singing Appleblossom Time,

Military Policemen turned a blind eye

in exchange for nothing more than a smile.

Officers messed around with her in the blackout,

but then my mother told them

she was engaged to be married to my father

and they acted like the officers and gentle-

men they were and backed off sharpish, so

my mother never

had sex with anyone else

except my father, which was a source

of pride to her, being of her generation

as it would have been a source

of shame to me, being of mine.

After the War

for Susanne Ehrhardt

After the war

was the dull country I was born in.

The night of Stafford Cripps’s budget

My dad inhaled the blue haze of one last Capstan

then packed it in.

‘You were just months old …’

The Berlin airlift.

ATS and REME badges

rattled in our button box.

Were they surprised that everything was different now?

Did it cheese them off that it was just the same

stuck in one room upstairs at my grandma’s

jammed against the bars of my cot

with one mended featherstitch jumper drying

among the nappies on the winterdykes,

the puffed and married maroon counterpane

reflected in the swinging mirror of the wardrobe.

Radio plays. Them loving one another

biting pillows

in the dark while I was sleeping.

All the unmarried uncles were restless,

champing at the bit

for New Zealand, The Black Country, Corby.

My aunties saved up for the New Look.

By International Refugee Year

we had a square green lawn and twelve-inch telly.

Sorting Through

The moment she died, my mother’s dance dresses

turned from the colours they really were

to the colours I imagine them to be.

I can feel the weight of bumptoed silver shoes

swinging from their anklestraps as she swaggers

up the path towards her dad, light-headed