Where did they flee to? Who wrote off their debts when, scuttled back into a gas mantled past, they left just this pair of foxed silhouettes inlaid to the depths of the shadows they cast? Their off-cuts, spiralled and coiled to the floor, were the shirts off their backs they left behind for the brilliantined
Death dropped its guillotine on my sister. She wouldn’t have seen it coming – she’s blind. Was blind: I haven’t got used to the tense. I confuse those still living with those past. What gets me through the evenings is drink. Ironic, that, since drink is what killed her. I’m guessing it’s unlikely you
They need to start believing in themselves. Like the cartoon character who runs off a cliff before the animator has drawn solid earth below they expected more certainty than this. Already out of their depth they hesitate at the edge of the sea and wonder how it feels to dive into the waves. They gaze
At first it was simply a mild irritation At his slightly buck-toothed expression. He carried on, convincingly enough, But then there was his lisp, you hardly heard it At first, but gradually it became unmissable: THs as Fs. It was tedious. He tended to begin with a slightly out-of-kilter Remark that caused you to pause,
(Poet and painter born in Bristol 1890, died on the Western Front April 1918. London art studio photo-portrait / National Portrait Gallery / 1917) The lips are full, fish-like, a deep gulped breath in-held against the body’s bitter will; bottom lip swollen, mouthy as a carp, or a trumpeter’s lips bilged from over-practice.
I found a gift-tag tailed with silver string dropped by our bed, ironically heart-shaped, gold cardboard, unattached to anything, attracting bits of fluff and Sellotape and, placed between your hairbrush and your pills with ribbon from the final gift you wrapped, reflected in a mirror that revealed With all my loveblue-biro’d on the back.
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