Poems 1960-2000 (27 page)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 make 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.

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

were only our reputations, we thought –

bright-eyed with panic and bravado.

It can take thirty years to find out.

The first transvestite I ever went to bed with

was the last, as far as I know.

It was in the 60s, just before tights.

He asked if he could put my stockings on –

on me, I thought; on him, it turned out.

His legs weren’t much of a shape,

and my suspender-belt was never the same

after he’d strained it round his middle.

But apart from that, things could have been worse.

The whisky helped. 

I never went out with him again;

and I never, ever, told his secret –

who’d want to? (He must have counted on

the inhibiting power of embarrassment.)

But I still went to his parties.

At one of them I met Yoko Ono.