Poems 1960-2000

by Fleur Adcock

  in early 19th century courtship scenes.

  I’d never seen a copy; often wondered.

  Well, here it was – a pretty compilation

  of tales and verses: stanzas by Lord Blank

  and Countess This and Mrs That; demure

  engravings, all white shoulders, corkscrew hair

  and swelling bosoms; stories full of pure

  sentiments, in which gentlemen of rank

  urged suits upon the nobly-minded fair.

  You passed the volume round, and poured more wine.

  Outside your cottage lightning flashed again:

  a Grasmere storm, theatrically right

  for stories of romance and terror. Then

  somehow, quite suddenly, the book was mine.

  The date in it’s five weeks ago tonight.

  ‘On loan perpetual.’ If that implied

  some dark finality, some hint of ‘nox

  perpetua’, something desolate and bleak,

  we didn’t see it then, among the jokes.

  Yesterday, walking on the fells, you died.

  I’m left with this, a trifling, quaint antique.

  You’ll not reclaim it now; it’s mine to keep:

  a keepsake, nothing more. You’ve changed the ‘loan

  perpetual’ to a bequest by dying.

  Augusta, Lady Blanche, Lord Ravenstone –

  I’ve read the lot, trying to get to sleep.

  The jokes have all gone flat. I can’t stop crying.

  England’s Glory

  Red-tipped, explosive, self-complete:

  one you can strike on the coal-face, or

  the sole of your boot. Not for the south, where

  soft men with soft hands rub effete

  brown-capped sticks on a toning strip

  chequered with coffee-grounds, the only

  match for the matches, and any lonely

  stray (if they let them stray) picked up

  from a table or found loose in a pocket

  can’t, without its container, flare

  fire at a stroke: is not a purely

  self-contained ignition unit.

  ‘Security’ proclaims the craven

  yellow box with its Noah’s ark,

  ‘Brymay’ Special Safety’s trade-mark

  for southern consumption. That’s all right, then:

  bankers can take them home to Surrey

  for their cigars, and scatter the odd

  match-head, whether or not it’s dead,

  on their parquet floors, without the worry

  of subsequent arson. Not like here

  where a match is a man’s match, an object

  to be handled with as much respect

  but as casually as a man’s beer.

  You can’t mistake the England’s Glory

  box: its crimson, blue and white

  front’s a miniature banner, fit

  for the Durham Miners’ Gala, gaudy

  enough to march ahead of a band.

  Forget that placid ark: the vessel

  this one’s adorned with has two funnels

  gushing fat blue smoke to the wind.

  The side’s of sandpaper. The back

  label’s functional, printed with either

  holiday vouchers, a special offer

  on World Cup tickets, or this month’s joke.

  Somewhere across England’s broad

  midriff, wanderingly drawn

  from west to east, there exists a line

  to the north of which the shops provide

  (catering for a sudden switch

  of taste) superior fried fish, runnier

  yogurt, blouses cut for the fuller

  northern figure; and the northern match.

  Here England’s Glory begins; through all

  the vigorous north it reigns unrivalled

  until its truce with Scottish Bluebell

  round about Berwick and Carlisle.

  The Genius of Surrey

  The landscape of my middle childhood

  lacked factories. There had been no

  industrial revolution in Surrey,

  was the message. Woods and shops and houses,

  churches, allotments, pubs and schools

  and loonie-bins were all we had.

  Except, of course, the sewerage works,

  on ‘Surridge Hill’, as we used to call it.

  How sweetly rural the name sounds!

  Wordsworth’s genius, said Walter Pater,

  would have found its true test

  had he become the poet of Surrey.

  Yorkshire had a talent for mills

  and placed them to set off its contours;

  Westmorland could also have worn

  a few more factories with an air.

  As for Surrey’s genius, that

  was found to be for the suburban.

  Loving Hitler

  There they were around the wireless

  waiting to listen to Lord Haw-Haw.

  ‘Quiet now, children!’ they said as usual:

  ‘Ssh, be quiet! We’re trying to listen.’

  ‘Germany calling!’ said Lord Haw-Haw.

  I came out with it: ‘I love Hitler.’

  They turned on me: ‘You can’t love Hitler!

  Dreadful, wicked – ’ (mutter, mutter,

  the shocked voices buzzing together) –

  ‘Don’t be silly. You don’t mean it.’

  I held out for perhaps five minutes,

  a mini-proto-neo-Nazi,

  six years old and wanting attention.

  Hitler always got their attention;

  now I had it, for five minutes.

  Everyone at school loved someone,

  and it had to be a boy or a man

  if you were a girl. So why not Hitler?

  Of course, you couldn’t love Lord Haw-Haw;

  but Hitler – well, he was so famous!

  It might be easier to love Albert,

  the boy who came to help with the milking,

  but Albert laughed at me. Hitler wouldn’t:

  one thing you could say for Hitler,

  you never heard him laugh at people.

  All the same, I settled for Albert.

  Schools

  Halfway Street, Sidcup

  ‘We did sums at school, Mummy –

  you do them like this: look.’ I showed her.

  It turned out she knew already.

  St Gertrude’s, Sidcup

  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.

  Scalford School

  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.’

  Salford
s, Surrey

  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?

  Outwood

  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.

  On the School Bus

  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.

  Earlswood

  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.

  Scalford Again

  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.

  Neston

  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.

  Chippenham

  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.’

&
nbsp; I felt my impetigo scabs

  blaze through my shoes. How did he know?

  Tunbridge Wells

  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.

  The High Tree

  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: