Book Read Free

Poems 1960-2000

Page 23

by Fleur Adcock


  We’ve begun at the wrong end.

  Room for one more? Yes.

  There, just in front of the altar,

  a chaste plaque and a chaste coat of arms.

  It says what the book says:

  ‘Here lieth the body of Griffith Hampden…

  and of Ann…’ No need to write it down.

  Now we begin again, the vicar and I,

  rolling the carpet back,

  our heads bent to the ritual;

  tweaking and tidying the heavy edges

  we move our arms in reciprocal gestures

  like women folding sheets in a launderette.

  A button flips off someone’s jacket.

  Yours? I offer it to the vicar.

  No, yours. He hands it back with a bow.

  At Baddesley Clinton

  A splodge of blood on the oak floor

  in the upstairs parlour, near the hearth.

  Nicholas Brome splashed it here

  five centuries ago, the villain.

  Not his blood; he kept his,

  apart from what he handed down

  (drops of it circulating still

  in my own more law-abiding veins).

  It was a priest’s blood he squirted:

  out with his sword and stuck it into

  the local parson, whom he caught

  ‘chockinge his wife under ye chinne’.

  Not the same class of murder

  as when he ambushed his father’s killer.

  That was cold blood at the crossroads;

  hot blood in the parlour’s different.

  But he got the King’s and the Pope’s pardons,

  and built the church a new west tower.

  There it stands among the bluebells:

  ‘NICHOLAS BROME ESQVIRE LORD OF

  BADDESLEY DID NEW BVILD THIS STEEPLE

  IN THE RAIGNE OF KING HENRY THE SEAVENTH.’

  His other memorial was more furtive;

  it trickled down under the rushes

  and stayed there. Easy to cover it up,

  but more fun now for the tourists

  to see it crying out his crime.

  It is blood: they’ve analysed it.

  On some surfaces, in some textures,

  blood’s indelible, they say.

  Traitors

  ‘… For that preposterous sinne wherein he did offend, In his posteriour parts had his preposterous end.’

  MICHAEL DRAYTON: Poly-Olbion

  (on Edward II, murdered by Roger de Mortimer, 1327)

  Naughty ancestors, I tell them,

  baby-talking my cosy family –

  the history ones, the long-ago

  cut-out figures I’ve found in books.

  Cut up, too, a few of them: quartered –

  you, for instance, regicide

  who cuddled a king’s wife, and then

  had her husband done away with.

  You never touched him yourself, of course;

  but wasn’t it your own vision,

  to roger him to death like that,

  a red-hot poker up his rear?

  Well, he had it coming to him,

  you might have sneered (I see you sneering:

  a straight man, in that you preferred

  women to Eddy-Teddy-bears).

  It’s never only about sex.

  Power, as usual, was the hormone;

  and two of those who had the power

  were my other naughties, the Despensers.

  It wasn’t Hugh the king’s playmate

  but Hugh his father who begat us,

  through a less blatant son. Both Hughs

  lost their balls before the scaffold.

  That was how the sequence went,

  for treason: chop, then hang, then quarter.

  So fell all three. Only the king

  died without a mark on his body –

  or so they say. It’s all hearsay.

  Perhaps the king and Hugh the younger

  were just good friends; perhaps the murder

  wasn’t a murder; perhaps the blood

  of traitors isn’t in my veins,

  but just the blood of ambitious crooks

  with winning Anglo-Norman accents

  and risky tastes in sex. Perhaps.

  Blood must be in it somewhere, though;

  I see them bundled into a box,

  dismembered toys, still faintly squeaking,

  one with royal blood on his paws.

  Swings and Roundabouts

  My ancestors are creeping down from the north –

  from Lancashire and the West Riding,

  from sites all over Leicestershire,

  down through the Midlands; from their solid outpost

  in Lincolnshire, and their halts in Rutland,

  down through Northants and Beds and Bucks.

  They’re doing it backwards, through the centuries:

  from the Industrial Revolution

  they’re heading south, past the Enclosures

  and the Civil War, through Elizabethan times

  to the dissolution of the monasteries,

  the Wars of the Roses, and beyond.

  From back-to-backs in Manchester they glide

  in reverse to stocking-frames in Syston,

  from there back to their little farms,

  then further back to grander premises,

  acquiring coats of arms and schooling

  in their regression to higher things.

  They’re using the motorways; they’re driving south

  in their armour or their ruffs and doublets

  along the M1 and the A1.

  They’ve got as far as the South Mimms roundabout.

  A little group in merchants’ robes

  is filtering through London, aiming

  for a manor-house and lands in Chislehurst

  across the road from a school I went to;

  and somewhere round about Footscray

  they’ll meet me riding my bike with Lizzie Wood

  when I was twelve; they’ll rush right through me

  and blow the lot of us back to Domesday.

  Peter Wentworth in Heaven

  The trees have all gone from the grounds of my manor –

  the plums, quinces, close-leaved pears –

  where I walked in the orchard, planning my great speech;

  and the house gone too. No matter.

  My Pithie Exhortation still exists –

  go and read it in your British Library.

  I have discussed it here with your father;

  he was always a supporter of free speech.

  The trouble it brought me it is not in my nature

  to regret. Only for my wife I grieved:

  she followed me faithfully into the Tower;

  her bones lie there, in St Peter ad Vincula.

  I would not have gone home to Lillingstone Lovell,

  if my friends had gained my release, without her,

  ‘my chiefest comfort in this life, even

  the best wife that ever poor gentleman enjoyed’.

  She was a Walsingham; her subtle brother

  was the Queen’s man; he guarded his own back.

  Any fellow-feeling he may once have cherished

  for our cause he strangled in his bosom.

  I was too fiery a Puritan for him.

  His wife remembered mine in her will:

  ‘to my sister Wentworthe a payre of sables’.

  Not so Francis: he was no brother to us.

  Well, we are translated to a different life,

  my loyal Elizabeth and I.

  We walk together in the orchards of Heaven –

  a place I think you might find surprising.

  But then you found me surprising too

  when you got some notion of me, out of books.

  Read my Exhortation, and my Discourse;

  so you may understand me when we come to meet.

  Notes
/>   238-39: Mary Derry married William Eggington in 1800 and was the great-great-grandmother of Samuel Adcock’s wife Eva Eggington.

  240: Moses Lambert: the facts: Moses Lambert, 1821-1868, was the father of Mary Ellen Lambert (not the premarital baby in this poem but a later child), who married William Henry Eggington and was the mother of Eva.

  240-41: Samuel Joynson was Amelia Joynson’s brother.

  241: Amelia: Amelia Joynson, 1847-1899, married John Adcock, 1842-1911, and was Samuel Adcock’s mother.

  242: Barber: John Adcock, 1874-1895, was the son of John and Amelia, and brother of Sam Adcock.

  246-47: Anne Welby married Henry King, 1680-1756. Their granddaughter Elizabeth King married William Adcock, 1737-1814, Samuel Adcock’s great-great-grandfather.

  247, 248-50: Beanfield and Frances: Frances St John married Nicholas Browne, rector of Polebrook, Northants, in 1597, and was Anne Welby’s great-great-grandmother.

  250-51: At Great Hampden: Griffith Hampden, 1543-1591, and his wife Anne Cave were the parents of Mary Hampden who married Walter Wentworth, son of Peter. Their daughter Mary Wentworth married John Browne; these were the great-grandparents of Anne Welby.

  251-52, 252-53: At Baddesley Clinton and Traitors: These assorted villains figure in the family tree of Elizabeth Ferrers, mother of Griffith Hampden. Baddesley Clinton is in Warwickshire; the house belongs to the National Trust.

  255: Peter Wentworth in Heaven: Peter Wentworth, MP, 1524-1597, was imprisoned in the Tower of London several times by Elizabeth I for demanding that Parliament should be free to discuss the succession and other matters without interference. His wife Elizabeth Walsingham died in 1596 in the Tower. Her sister-in-law who mentioned Elizabeth in her will was Sir Francis Walsingham’s first wife, Anne.

  II

  Tongue Sandwiches

  Tongue sandwiches on market-day

  in the King’s Head Hottle (I could read;

  my sister couldn’t.) Always the same

  for lunch on market-day in Melton.

  No sign of a bottle in the hottle –

  or not upstairs in the dining-room;

  the bottles were in the room below,

  with the jolly farmers around the door.

  I didn’t know we were in a pub,

  or quite what pubs were: Uncle managed

  to be a not unjolly farmer

  with only tea to loosen his tongue.

  And what did I think ‘tongue’ was?

  These rose-pink slices wrapped in bread?

  Or the slithery-flappy tube behind

  my milk-teeth, lapping at novelties

  (yes, of course I’d heard of ‘ho-tells’)

  and syphoning up Midlands vowels

  to smother my colonial whine?

  (Something new for Mummy and Daddy,

  coming to visit us at Christmas,

  these local ‘oohs’ and ‘ahs’, as in

  ‘Moommy, there’s blood in the lavatory!

  Soombody moost have killed a rabbit.’)

  On the way back to Uncle’s cart

  (how neat that his name was George Carter!)

  we passed the beasts in the cattle-stalls –

  their drooling lips, their slathering tongues.

  The horse was a safer kind of monster,

  elephant-calm between the shafts

  as Auntie and Uncle loaded up

  and we all piled on. Then bumpety-bump

  along the lanes. I was impatient

  for Jerry of St Winifred’s –

  my Sunday School prize, my first real book

  that wasn’t babyish with pictures –

  to curl up with it in the armchair

  beside the range, for my evening ration:

  ‘Only a chapter a day,’ said Auntie.

  ‘Too much reading’s bad for your eyes.’

  I stuck my tongue out (not at her –

  in a trance of concentration), tasting

  the thrilling syllables: ‘veterinary

  surgeon’, ‘papyrus’, ‘manuscript’.

  Jerry was going to be a vet;

  so when she found the injured puppy

  and bandaged its paw with her handkerchief,

  and the Squire thanked her – well, you could see!

  As for me, when I sat for hours

  writing a story for Mummy and Daddy,

  and folded the pages down the middle

  to make a book, I had no ambition.

  The Pilgrim Fathers

  I got a Gold Star for the Pilgrim Fathers,

  my first public poem, when I was nine.

  I think I had to read it out to the class;

  but no one grilled me about it, line by line;

  no one asked me to expatiate on

  my reasons for employing a refrain;

  no one probed into my influences,

  or said ‘Miss Adcock, perhaps you could explain

  your position as regards colonialism.

  Here you are, a New Zealander in Surrey,

  describing the exportation of new values

  to America. Does this cause you any worry?

  And what about the title, ‘Pilgrim Fathers’ –

  a patriarchal expression, you’ll agree –

  how does it relate to the crucial sentence

  in stanza one: ‘Nine children sailed with we’?

  Were you identifying with your age-group?

  Some of us have wondered if we detect

  a growing tendency to childism

  in your recent poems. Might this be correct?’

  No one even commented on the grammar –

  it didn’t seem important at the time.

  I liked the sound of it, is all I’d have said

  if they’d questioned me. I did it for the rhyme.

  Paremata

  Light the Tilley lamp:

  I want to write a message,

  while the tide laps the slipway

  and someone else cooks sausages.

  Make the Primus hiss:

  twizzley music. Dusk time.

  Bring back the greeds of childhood;

  forget young love and all that slime.

  Camping

  When you’re fifteen, no one understands you.

  And why had I been invited, anyway? –

  On a camping holiday with my Latin teacher

  and her young friends, two men in their twenties.

  I didn’t understand them, either.

  The one I fancied was the tall one

  with soft brown eyes. He was a hairdresser.

  One day the Primus toppled over

  and a pan of water scalded his foot.

  The skin turned into soggy pink crêpe paper –

  grisly; but it gave him a romantic limp

  and a lot of sympathy.

  Once he condescended to lean on my shoulder

  for a few steps along a wooded path.

  Next time I offered, he just laughed.

  Funnily enough, two days later

  I scalded my own foot: not badly,

  but as badly as I dared.

  It didn’t work.

  Everyone understood me perfectly.

  Bed and Breakfast

  They thought he looked like Gregory Peck, of course;

  and they thought I looked like Anne somebody –

  a name I vaguely recognised: no one special,

  not Greer Garson or Vivien Leigh.

  What they really must have thought I looked like

  was young. But they were being kind;

  and anyway, we’d asked for separate rooms.

  When it was late enough, Gregory Peck

  came into mine – or did I go into his?

  Which of us tiptoed along the passage

  in our pyjamas? And to do what?

  Not sex,

  but what you did when you weren’t quite doing sex.

  It made you a bit sticky and sweaty,

  but it didn’t m
ake you pregnant,

  and you didn’t actually have to know anything.

  You didn’t even take off your pyjamas.

  Unfortunately since it never got anywhere

  it went on most of the night. No sleep.

  At breakfast, though, I can’t have looked too haggard:

  Gregory Peck was not put off.

  For that I could thank the resilience of youth –

  one of the very few advantages,

  as far as I could see, of that hateful condition.

  Anne Whatsit might have looked worse;

  but then I suppose she’d have had makeup.

  Rats

  That was the year the rats got in:

  always somebody at the back door

  clutching a half-dozen of beer,

  asking if we felt like a game of darts.

  Then eyes flickering away from the dartboard

  to needle it out. What were we up to?

  Were we really all living together –

  three of us? Four of us? Who was whose?

  And what about the children? What indeed.

  We found a real rat once, dead

  on the wash-house floor. Not poison:

  old age, perhaps, or our old cat.

  We buried the corpse. Our own victims

 

‹ Prev