Lights turned on but the curtains not yet drawn in the dusk that lingers over hedges and scrubland bordering Langhams Rec. Here’s the overgrown shortcut to the Bourne Stream, the high wall that protects the vicarage. Here’s another mother getting supper in Neil’s kitchen. Here’s another father parking his car in Adrian’s driveway. They
– Nella Last, diary entry for Mass Observation When the Prime Minister spoke so solemnly and said ‘WAR’, I thought the shock would kill me. Eighteen months ago I was in Southsea and saw the Fleet come in. Hundreds of young ratings walked on the Prom and I gradually became conscious
Next he told us how he’d creep to the edge of the tip with a broken chunk of cistern or sink raised above his head and before letting it go, them black rats, super quick, big as rabbits, tails fat as rope, gone. Other places where they usually get and that tea time was a
shuffling across the carpark from the pool in my dry robe like a damp, disconsolate Cistercian, I heard them, two peacocks: their proclamations launched wide into the whites of the Cumbrian sky, their maladroit plainsongcutting up the backdrop of chaffinch after chaffinch and as iffrom nowhere, two peacocks: (stately home dropouts? heritage park rejects?) with
A loaded presence in a biscuit tin, The rounds of sandwiches they found Were cut and dried as hard as tesserae; Forgotten in the airless wardrobe, play Was innocent. Would they rebel Against the bounds of home? But looking in One day back
As the Taliban surged back into Kabul and the international correspondents looked more exhausted with every broadcast but not as exhausted as the refugees I thought of my young second cousin Matthew, one of the four hundred and fifty-seven flown back from Afghanistan in sealed coffins to Wootten Bassett and then, in Matthew’s case,
Each morning it is there. A cocoon of memory visible and invisible waiting for me to stumble into it. I feel its viscid grip. Its symmetry of silken threads spun into a tensile trapeze that bends in the breeze. Day and night a cobweb of neurons always firing whether awake or asleep trapped
Across the great divide… They kept them hidden till I stepped inside One for a birthday card, Puzzled at first by what was there And what was not. And what was there to hide? Huge glossy frozen packs of pig’s feet, tripe, Hog maws
Years of working weekends, cashing in his holidays, dossing in loveless digs beside arterial roads or in vans to pocket his expenses. He’d earned it, kept on how soon he’d be in Lido di Jesolo, a linen suit for evenings; us lot wouldn’t exist. Back three days later, rubbing down skirting boards before
The door is broken! The door is broken. A Polar wind squalls and flings it open. The bloke behind the fish fryer with a rag thrown over his shoulder tells me to leave it; wipe-clean menus skid across the floor. I’m always somewhere like this in winter. Trawlers queued at the Wyre light for
We trudged the grounds of a country house under a featureless sky as stark trees bled out with morning rain and what light there was started to die, and every time you grabbed for my hand I felt a little thrill, unmentioned, ineffable.
There are no headless horsemen, White Ladiesor rattling chains in this ghost story;he died in the chair from black lung, coughing;the coal dust that did for him, and the fags. In life, he’d been a nasty piece of work; like those blokes at the pictures my grandmawarned me about in their fetid raincoats,Brylcreemed hair. We
A canny cousin taught me the handshake trick. I was ten or eleven. Small for my age, but quick As a flash, after a smiling approach, I could duck Beneath my arm and get the affable chap Locked in a Half-Nelson. Thing about tricks is You shouldn’t use them too often. This I learnt
‘I Remember Arras’, a sequence in four parts corresponding numerically to the four stanzas of ‘Adlestrop’, imagines Edward Thomas as having survived the war and looking back on his experience in France. The sequence plays fast and loose with some bits and pieces drawn from Thomas’s writings, including his 1917 diary. I ARRAS I remember
After breakfast, our bonuses in the bag, time sheets collected, the weekend begins. Down by the battered garages near the burnt-out Escort, our apprentices go for it: first to find one gets chips for his dinner. Stanway says to take it behind that steel-shuttered house, top of the estate, and for all of us to
Summer in the suburbs, Its wealth confined to a bedroom Where a tepid waft disturbs And strokes with silver gloom The long beast with demon eyes Who, stealthy as all cats, will come To tipple from the vase of the anemones.
My soul, my shadow, the dreams I stare into the night are wounded. I kiss my mirror-self. The lips with which I bite are wounded. I am a year filled with venom, every season is autumn: leaf-filled evenings, the snaking twilight are wounded. The signs of the stars – my Scorpio, my Libra,
Hearing ‘Caravan’ by Duke Ellington and I’m at the Blue Parrot in Casablanca: the house bird perched outside unfazed by whirring ceiling fans, and the belly dancer’s creeping shadow. The band playing jazz to a fluent clientele leave the exotic bird unperturbed. A street market unfolds under her gaze. How simple the menu at Ferrari’s
In the beginning a slap gets it going and a child once told me breath’s here ‘to blow bubbles’. In heaven I was once informed breathing is no longer needed. I should have guessed. Breath’s always been a downmarket option, wholly belonging to earthly struggles, to life and death and other mundane matters.
Cleat hooks glinted on the window wall. We checked again the spotless parquet for paint flecks, even the galvanised conduits and trunking, the suspended lights. A song of an American summer played low. He slipped in ahead of schedule, mild, beige, miles from his reputation. From a chrome tin a telescopic aerial deftly linked to