Poems 1960-2000
Page 22
Amelia
It went like this: I married at 22,
in 1870. My daughter was born
the following year – Laura, we called her.
(No reason for the name – we just liked it.)
In ’72 my brother hanged himself.
Laura died exactly a year later,
when I was pregnant with her brother Thomas
(named for my dead father). In ’74
three things happened: my baby Thomas died,
then my sister; then I gave birth to John,
my first child to survive. He was a hunchback.
(I don’t suppose you care for that expression;
well, call it what you like.) He lived to 20,
making the best of things, my poor brave lad.
After him, I got the knack of producing
healthy children. Or perhaps it was the gin.
Yes, I took to the bottle. Wouldn’t you?
By the time it killed me I’d five living –
a little Band of Hope, a bright household
of teetotallers, my husband at their head.
I died of a stroke, officially; ‘of drink’
wasn’t spoken aloud for forty years.
These youngsters have my portrait proudly framed –
an old thing in a shawl, with a huge nose.
They also have a photograph – a maiden
with frightened eyes and a nose as trim as theirs.
Both are labelled ‘Amelia’. Which one
was I? I couldn’t have been both, they’re sure.
Barber
They set the boy to hairdressing –
you didn’t need to be strong, or have
a straight back like other people.
It was the scissors he liked – their glitter
and snicker-snack; the arts, too,
of elegant shaping. Oh, and the razors.
He served his time, and qualified young;
it’s on his death certificate:
‘Hairdresser (Master). Age 20.’
In the next column, ‘Spinal disease,
15 months. Abscess, 12 months.’
That sounds like cancer. It felt like blades
burning, slicing – a whole year
to play the Little Mermaid, walking
on knife-edges, with hand-glass and comb.
Flames
Which redhead did I get my temper from?
I’ve made a short ancestral list
by hair-colour and moods. But, more to the point,
what are the odds on Alzheimer’s?
Which ones went funny in their seventies?
Mary Ellen, perhaps, found in the coal-shed
hunting for her Ship Canal shares
after her fiery hair turned grey.
My hair’s not red. I like flames, though.
When I get old and mad I’ll play with them –
run the flimsy veils through my fingers
like orange plastic film, like parachute-silk.
My hands will scorch and wither, if I do.
I shall be safe and dead. It won’t matter.
It’s something to look forward to,
playing with fire. That, or deep water.
Water
I met an ancestor in the lane.
She couldn’t stop: she was carrying water.
It slopped and bounced from the stoup against her;
the side of her skirt was dark with the stain,
oozing chillingly down to her shoe.
I stepped aside as she trudged past me,
frowning with effort, shivering slightly
(an icy drop splashed my foot too).
The dress that brushed against me was rough.
She didn’t smell the way I smell:
I tasted the grease and smoke in her hair.
Water that’s carried is never enough.
She’d a long haul back from the well.
No, I didn’t see her. But she was there.
A Haunting
‘Hoy!’ A hand hooks me into a doorway:
‘Here!’ (No, that’s not it: too many aitches;
they’d have been short of those, if I recall…)
‘Oy, there!’ (Never mind the aitches, it’s his
breath now, gin and vinegar – I’m choking –
and fire on my neck; the hand grinding my shoulder.
I’m a head taller, nearly, but he’s strong.)
‘Look at me! I’m your ancestor.’
Eyes in a smudged face. Dark clothes. A hat…
‘Look at me!’ A stunted stump of a man.
Boots. No coat, although it’s cold. A jacket
crumpled at the elbows. (I’m shivering.)
What kind of hair? If I can get
my hands to move, I’ll push his hat off. There:
black, above a gleam of white skin (oh you poor
factory rat, you bastard you, my forebear!).
‘Which one are you? Which ancestor?’ Won’t say.
Won’t talk now. Stands there, shaking me now and then,
staring. Dark-haired – but then so were they all
in the photographs: brown hair, red hair, grey,
all dark for the cameras; and unsmiling.
This one’s before photography,
still on the verge of things: a pre-Victorian,
pre-Temperance, pre-gentility; and angry.
He shows a snaggle of teeth (pre-dentistry);
means another thing now: ‘Give us a kiss!’
No. No, I can’t. ‘Why not? You’re family.’
That’s not a family expression on his face.
‘You’re a woman, aren’t you? One of ours?
A great-great-great-granddaughter?’ He looks
younger than me, thirtyish. How do you talk
to a young man who’s been dead a hundred years?
‘Not unless you tell me who you are.’
‘A part of you,’ he cackles. ‘Never mind
which part.’ (Is it compulsory, I wonder,
to like one’s ancestors? I couldn’t stand
that laugh of his for long.) ‘You were so set
on digging us up. You thought it was romantic,
like all that poetry they talk about
(not me – I can’t read). Well, I’m what you dug.
So: what’ll you give me for the favour, lass?
You wouldn’t be on this earth if it weren’t for me.’
That scorching gin-breath. ‘Let me find my purse.’
We stagger together, a step or two, and I’m free.
His hat’s on the cobbles. I rattle it full of money.
Not sovereigns, no: pound coins, worth less than a kiss –
base metal to him, proleptic wealth, no use
for more than a century to come. I’m sorry.
The Wars
When they were having the Gulf War
I went to the 18th century.
I could see no glory in this life.
Awake half the night with the World Service,
then off on an early train for news –
secrets, discoveries, public knowledge
lurking on microfilm or parchment:
‘I bequeath to my said daughter Mary Adcock
my Bedd and Bedding my oak Clothes Chest and Drawers
my Dressing Table and Looking Glass my Arm chair
my Clock standing in my said Dwelling house,
And one half part or share of all my Pewter.’
When it was over and not over,
and they offered us the Recession instead,
I went back further, pursuing the St Johns,
the Hampdens, the Wentworths to their deathbeds:
‘Item I give to my wives sonne…’
(Ah, so she had been married before!)
‘…Mr Edward Russell fiftie pounds,
and to John his brother ten pounds by the yeare
to be paid hi
m soe long as he followes the warrs…’
Sub Sepibus
‘Many of this parish in the years ensuing were marryed clandestinely, i.e. sub sepibus, and were excommunicated for their labour.’
Note after entries for 1667 in Parish Register for Syston, Leicestershire
Under a hedge was good enough for us,
my Tommy Toon and me –
under the blackthorn, under the may,
under the stars at the end of the day,
under his cloak I lay,
under the shining changes of the moon;
under Tom Toon.
No banns or prayer-book for the likes of us,
my Tommy Toon and me.
Tom worked hard at his frame all day
but summer nights he’d come out to play,
in the hedge or the hay,
and ply his shuttle to a different tune –
my merry Tom Toon.
The vicar excommunicated us,
my Tommy Toon and me.
We weren’t the only ones to stray –
there are plenty who lay down where we lay
and have babes on the way.
I’ll see my tickling bellyful quite soon:
another Tom Toon.
Anne Welby
(died 9 May 1770, Beeby, Leicestershire)
For her gravestone to have been moved is OK.
I know she isn’t here, under the nettles;
but what did I want to do, after all –
burrow into the earth and stroke her skull?
Would that help me to see her? Would she rise
from the weeds (‘Dormuit non mortua est’)
and stand clutching at elder branches to prop
her dizzy bones after centuries of sleep?
The nettles, in fact, have also been removed:
a kind man with a spade has just slain them
so that I could kneel on the earth and scan
the truths, half-truths and guesses on her stone.
‘Here lie the earthy remains’ (I like ‘earthy’)
‘of Ann the wife of Henry King’; then (huge
letters) ‘Gentleman’. Not quite, I think:
it was his children who cried out their rank.
Henry was a grazier in his will;
but Anne, his lady, brought him eighty acres
and a fading touch of class; then lived so long
they buried a legend here – her age is wrong.
Homage (or weariness) called her 95,
adding perhaps five years. Her birth’s gone under
the rubble of time, just as her grave was lost
when the church expanded a few yards to the east.
But I know who she was. I’ve traced her lineage
through wills and marriage bonds until I know it
better than she herself may have done, poor dear,
having outlived her age. And yes, she’s here:
I’ve brought her with me. As I stroke the stone
with hands related to hers, I can feel
the charge transmitted through eight steps
of generations. She’s at my fingertips.
Beanfield
Somehow you’ve driven fifty miles to stand
in a beanfield, on the bumpy ridges
at the edge of it, not among the blossom
but under the larks – you can hear but not see them;
and it’s not even where the house was –
the house, you think, was under the airfield
(beanfield, airfield, ploughed field) –
they ploughed the house but left the twitter of larks,
a pins-and-needles aerial tingling;
yet somehow this, you’re sure, is Frances St John.
How do you know? It just is.
She’s here; she’s not here; she was once.
The larks are other larks’ descendants.
Four hundred years. It feels like a kind of love.
Ancestor to Devotee
What are you loving me with? I’m dead.
What gland of tenderness throbs in you,
yearning back through the silt of ages
to a face and a voice you never knew?
When you find my name in a document
or my signature on a will,
what is it that makes you hold your breath –
what reverent, half-perverted thrill?
‘Flesh of my flesh,’ we could call each other;
but not uniquely: I’ve hundreds more
in my posterity, and for you
unreckoned thousands have gone before.
What’s left of me, if you gathered it up,
is a faggot of bones, some ink-scrawled paper,
flown-away cells of skin and hair…
you could set the lot on fire with a taper.
You breathe your scorching filial love
on a web of related facts and a name.
But I’m combustible now. Watch out:
you’ll burn me up with that blow-torch flame.
Frances
Her very hand. Her signature –
upright, spiky, jagged with effort –
or his hand on hers, was it,
her son’s grasp locked on her knuckles?
‘F. Weale’. Third of her surnames.
I Frances Weale of Arlesey,
widowe, being weake in body
but of perfecte memory,
doe make this my last will
in the yeare 1638…
Item I give to my sonne Samuell Browne
my halfe dozen of silver spoones…
*
They’ve had quite a history, those spoons.
My first husband bequeathed them to my second –
or at least to his mother, Goodwife Weale:
‘one haulfe dozen of silver spoones
which are alone and seldom occupied’ –
little guessing they’d come back to me.
I was supposed to go away quietly
and live at Ashby Mill in Lincolnshire,
there to ‘rest myself contented’ and not
(repeat not – he did go on about it)
sue for my thirds, my widow’s right in law.
Nicholas wasn’t one for women’s rights.
I was to have the bringing up of Samuel,
our older son; but John, our younger boy,
was to stay behind with the man Nicholas called
his ‘trustie frende’, Thomas Weale of Polebrook,
his joint executor. I was to be the other –
as long as I didn’t claim my thirds, of course.
I was to keep the buildings in repair;
I wasn’t to fell any of the trees…
he was going to rule us all from beyond the grave,
my iron rod of a husband, Nicholas Browne,
BA, BD, Rector of Polebrook, Prebendary
of Peterborough Cathedral; puritan.
Well, I wouldn’t be ruled. I was done with that.
I’d had eleven years of being meek.
So when he tried to shunt me off up north
to the dull retreat he’d set aside for me
(such a fiddly, scholar’s will), I didn’t go.
I stayed at home and married Thomas Weale.
Yes, I know I was taking another master,
but this time I was doing it by choice;
and believe me if I tell you he was different –
a yeoman, not a cleric; less cold;
and, above all, my little John’s guardian.
By marrying Thomas I kept both my children.
We made an execution of the will
to our joint satisfaction, I and Thomas
(I was still young, remember). We did our duties –
to Nicholas’s estate, and to the boys
(we had no other children), and to each other.
Thomas Weale was a ‘trustie frende’ to us all.
No naggin
g about thirds when his time came:
he left me both his houses, and some land
(for my life-time only – but even a man, I think,
needs little land when he’s dead), and his goods and plate.
Of which to my son John my silver bowl,
to his wife my silver cup; and the spoons to Samuel.
In witnes whereof I have set to
my hande the day & yeare above written…
*
F. Weale. Her final signature.
Her own fingers twitching across
this very page. Not John’s hand –
he wasn’t there. Not clever Samuel’s –
his legal glibness would have made
a brisker job of it. The wobbling
jabs of the quill are hers, an image
of weakness spelling out her strength.
At Great Hampden
That can’t be it –
not with cherubs.
After all, they were Puritans.
All the ones on the walls are too late –
too curlicued, ornate, rococo –
17th century at least.
Well, then, says the vicar,
it will be under the carpets:
a brass.
He strips off his surplice,
then his cassock,
hardly ruffling his white hair.
He rolls the strip of red carpet;
I roll the underfelt.
It sheds fluff.
A brass with figures appears. Not them.
Another. Not them.