Exile in his Own Country was published by Bluechrome in 2006, hot on the heels of my 3 slim volumes in one year 2004. Exile was definitely a not-so-slim-as-it-used-to-be volume, a bumper and 'variegated' (as the review had it) harvest in too many sections (8) of all the other published volumes to date, starting 1991, and the last I published while I still had a day job. It and the tour of the same name I did to promote it effectively finished my teaching career and quite possibly the publishing house as well.

'Exile' includes pretty much every facet of my life and verse writing, from 'The Beautiful Game' football sonnets through 'Marked For Life' poems about schooldays/ teaching and paeans to Frank Sinatra and the Beatles and from its beginnings inWest Country/Welsh verse-bildungsromans to belter skelters through Norfolk to India, in lots of different verse forms including a fair bit of free verse and even some prose. Worth a dip.

Exile In His Own Country

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Published by bluechrome publishing 2006

2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

CopyrightÓGareth Calway 2006

Gareth Calway has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

First published in Great Britain in 2006 by

bluechrome publishing

PO Box 109,

Portishead, Bristol. BS20 7ZJ

www.bluechrome.co.uk

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 1-904781-94-2

Exile

In His Own Country

Gareth Calway

Also by Gareth Calway:

Previous Books

“City Zen” (1982)

“Coming Home” (1991)

“Britain’s Dreaming” (1998)

“The Merchant of Bristol” (2004)

“The House on the River” (2004)

“Sheer Paltry” (2004)

CDs

“Boudicca: The Anarchy Tour” (1999)

“Marked for Life” (2000)

“Bristol City Ruined My Life But Made My Day” (2001)

Contents

Foreword

Early Doors 1956-1981

Toucan Resistance

Enclosure

The Canteens Of Moria

Dear God, ’elp us to feel ashamed of our bodies.

Cooking Up A Revolution

1966 (England 4 Germany W. 2)

Welsh Rugby

Cleavage

1970 (England 2 Germany W. 3)

Frank

from Valley Nocturnes

Gap Year: Weymouth

Student House

Masculine and Feminine Rhymes

1977: A Haunting

Coming Down

DIY

Marked For Life

Star Teacher

Anniversarie for John Donne on St Lucy’s Day

Marked For Life

Profiles

The Driftwood Comprehensive, Dis on Sea poems

Homecomings

In The Bleak Midwinter

Homecoming: Cardiff

Homecoming: Pontypool

From The Welsh

Return to Egezeter - via Logres

Single to Frome

Gran (1909-2001)

A Country Life

A Good Friday

On His Birthday

Look, I have come through

After The Show

Recollections Of Recent Family Holidays As My Daughter Steps From Childhood.

Going Up

Sedgeford October

Fall

from Memorial

England Win The World Cup (1966/2003)

The Wash

from Norfolk Carol, 1996.

The Music

Life is a bitch, but the songs are great.

The Voice.

from Beatle: a prose poem

Tribes

The Tribe That Never Was

A Jolly Good Friday

from Sheer Paltry

City Win Three Second-Flight Games In A Row

from The Beautiful Game

Glad to be a guy

from The Ballad of Ashton Gate

Coming Home

from Coming Home

from “Coming Home”: Evolution

Worm

Fish

Birth of a Human Being

from “Coming Home”: Ghosts

from Gwenefore 539 AD.

Lady Guinevere (circa 13^thcentury)

from “Coming Home”: Involution

Coming Home

from “Britain’s Dreaming”

from The Road to Walsingham

from “Britain’s Dreaming: Mountain Ashes

Yellowing Lines

The Conductor

Coalminer

from “Britain’s Dreaming”: Sonnets from Hell

from The House on the River

Petering Out

from The Merchant of Bristol *

Meher Baba * in Poona 1967

Acknowledgements

DIY was first published inDIY Today, Valley Nocturnes (asNewport Nocturnes) in New Welsh Review (- it continues asThe Heavy Metal Sonnets inBritain’s Dreaming, 1998); Star Teacher was first publishedin School Poetry Review, Single to Frome and Memorial in the New Forest Poetry Society Anthology 2003; Sedgeford October in The Rialto; The Wash in the 1993 King's Lynn Festival Souvenir; Frank, Cleavage, After The Show and Fall in HQ Poetry Quarterly.

Section 2 - along with Welsh Rugby- is substantially the text of the touring schooldays show and CD Marked for Lifeand includes poems published in The Teacher and by Frontier Publishing. Section 6 includes poems previously published by Bristol City Football Club. Section 7 is taken entirely from previous collections published by King of Hearts Publications and Frontier Publishing and includes poems first published in Schools Poetry Review, Encounter, New Delhi London Quarterlyand New Welsh Review. The Ballad of Ashton Gatewas commissioned by Bristol City in September 2004 to celebrate 100 years of the team playing at Ashton Gate and is published for the first time here. Section 8 includes a poem first published in The Merchant of Bristol(The Day Dream Press, 2004).

for Melanie

Foreword

My first memory is being attacked by a toucan at Bristol Zoo in 1959. I learned to walk and talk in 1950s Bedminster, to read and write in 1960s Somerset and to cross the teenage wasteland in 1970s South Wales (with only the Methodist Association Youth Club to guide me). Thus my childhood and adolescence are, like Hartley’s past, different countries. I revised my O and A levels by candlelight during the miners' strikes of 1972 and 1974, discussing British history in The Forgehammer with the men who were making it. Roy Jenkins, son of the local MP, had lived two doors up. Now he was a Home Secretary inventing the “permissive society”.At the age of eighteen I set out to conquer the world and got as far as Guernsey – eight jobs in seven weeks - before beating a Napoleonic gap-year retreat to Weymouth. I then spent five years in the East – at UEA, Norwich. (India came later).

All these places remain branded, like the cows I saw as a boy at Frome market, or coal-like under the skin of the Eastern valley, into my writing. Apart from a UEA poetry magazine, my first poems were published in the mid-80s in School Poetry Association publications and DIY Today. The plan was to teach for three years like Auden and then become the world’s first Beatle poet. A quarter of a century later, I am teaching English and some remnants of culture (effectively as a foreign language) in a Norfolk comprehensive: am Court Poet at the King of

Hearts Centre for People and the Arts in Norwich; Lounge Bard in Residence at the Wolf Brewery and Official Poet Laureate of an underachieving West country football team whose ground is five hours away. I run poetry workshops, judge poetry competitions, review children’s fiction for the OUP, write for Secondary English MagazineandNATE News and, in the tongue of permanent exile (poetry), compose suicide notes from one of the loveliest rural backwaters of Middle England (‘Middle’ as in Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita). I tried to give up but it didn’t work.

“This coat is torn and frayed.

It’s seen much better days

But as long as the guitar plays,

Steal your heart away.

Steal your heart away.”

(The Stones, Exile on Main St)

Early Doors 1956-1981

Toucan Resistance

I am two.

I am at the zoo.

A toucan’s eye

Explodes into ‘I’.

His neck’s

Giant peck’s

A hissing snake

Rippling with hate.

What he don’t ave in clout

He makes up in mouf.

Teaches I in my pram

The song of the toucan.

(Bristol Zoo, 1959. Note a toucan’s disproportionate beak convinces other birds that it is a very much larger opponent than it actually is. )

Enclosure

When I was a child (of the 60s),

My father (a child of the 40s) gave me

A palm full of flowerseeds that miraculously grew

Into the picture of blue heaven on the packet.

He toiled meanwhile among his gooseberries

And redcurrants. He was bedding

Down a home, away from the factory

While Mum pressure-cooked, laundered Frome

Town's kit (ten red interlock shirts, one green,

Transforming our line into an apprehension

Of The Enclosure at Bristol City),

Earned shillings from Frome Valley Cleaners

And in between raised me and my sisters.

They had their hand-in-hand pre-school world;

I had thebox room painted lavender,

A six feet yard and a shed backed

With stuff I ignited with "safety" matches,

Or watered with my "weeter." I had pet hutches,

A temporary Alps sculpted by the six week

Beatlemania snow of ’62-’63 (from which

My toy army never returned.) I had

The rockery it melted back into. I had fruit nets,

Summer country peas, carrots and sticks

And, in the hedge at the top of the garden,

A natural oak stile: Edenin smelling distance

Of my blue heaven. Here, outgrowing Little Weed

And Watch With Mother, I played alone

For centuries and ages of mankind's heroes,

Cutting weapons, painting centipedes

(Then trying to save them), battling nettles,

Perpetrating benevolent genocide on ant civilisations,

Came in grizzling when bested by the pus-striped

Bombers my mum called (to rhyme with asps) “wasps”,

Smashed the backdoor glass once over the chasing head

Of a mock enemy, a real boy, and one day

Chopped through that fat horizontal crinkly-barked

Oak bough around which all these events were built,

The border and picture frame of my world.

That sturdy barrier (between childhood and bricked in fields)

Was wiped out in an instant. My act was an obscenity

On the lines of patient green-fingered cultivation

That was Dad's enclosure. I tried to hide it, undo

Its disfigurement. I never went near it again.

The Canteens Of Moria

Past bomb-sites into the old hall we’d go

With our escort of teachers, and the smell

Of boiled cabbage as surely served in hell

Would gas the stairwells, pied with potato

Even pig swillers had sent back, and though

The heart - or tongue? - was almost edible

That dread of infant dinners casts a spell

Of vegetable phobia even now.

Watching Moria in “Lord of the Rings”

Decades later in the cinema dark,

I recognise that something in my horror

Of webbed, corrupted, gothic, grave-like things

Was fed to me in infancy; that part

Of what we’re forced to eat, we always are.

Dear God, ’elp us to feel ashamed of our bodies….

Dear God,

'elp us to feel ashamed of our bodies.

'elp us to feel ashamed of our minds.

'elp us to feel ashamed of our souls.

Dear God,

'elp us to distrust all political leaders and worldly movements

especially those that seemmotivated by high ideals

and to put our faith instead into prayer groups.

’elp Gareth to understand that playing cards during prayers

(and writing poems about it for people to laugh at decades later)

means that both he and anyone who laughs is going to hell.

Dear God,

'elp us to accept that we are a waste of time and space

especiallywhen our instincts tell us we're not.

'elp us to distrust all righteous indignation and passion

on behalf of our community or children or family or football team or work or dream

as a deceitful snare of the devil.

and to put our trust instead in emptiness.

'elp us to avoid everything that makes us happy.

Dear God,

'elp us to distrust our adult attraction to a grown woman,

'elp us to repress it religiously for so long that we feel brutal longings for that helpless apple-cheeked angel boy in the choir.

'elp us to feel ashamed of that too, even more devoutly,

but to blame it somehow on the woman.

Dear God,

'elp us to feel totally and completely useless,

that human love is a sham, that divine love is beyond us,

'elp us to deny every living moment of our actual experience.

'elp us to feel that we're better off dead.

Dear God, humiliate us.

Frome Sunday School, 1963.

Cooking Up A Revolution

Across the road was where I used to eat

The council shit they served us in the slum

That housed school meals in nineteen sixty one

But here the chef is French, the pommes are fritte

And golden waitresses serve smiles and meat

As velvet-dressed as they, pour wine to welcome

This middle aged/class/English gentleman

Whose dad toiled over there in Factory Street.

The Little Bean Book started it, when rice

Emancipated me from lumpen spud

And put the earth-friend, hippy peace in greens,

Empowered rebel taste with peppers, spice

And garlic-cheesy student girlfriend quiche

Then Delia’s higher course, the food of love.

Frome 04/04/04

1966 (England 4 Germany W. 2)

“We won the war- in 1966!”

My Welsh mum beamed in the red-hatted sun,

Commanding me to hoist The Flag upon

Our council pebbledash, porch and privets,

The Somerset exile in which she lived:

And we'd all died, she piped, when that German

Last ditch never-was-a-free-kick spun

Off Cohen's knee and fell to tricksy Fritz.

It was The Victor'snever ending tale

Of under-doggéd gung-ho Beat-all Brits -

Each Daily written off by Mother’s Mail -

Moore, Peters, Hurst, Banks, Stiles, Charlton, Wilson,

Cohen, Hunt, Ball, refashioned as Hendrix,

A mini-short beauty born to die young.

Frome

Welsh Rugby

(“they’ve taken our coal, our iron, our water, our timber…

and we’re playing them this afternoon, boys.”)

John scores a hero’s try

and breaks his collar bone.

It’s only a Games Lesson

but it feels like the Grand Slam.

I take his drive for the line

right on the boil on my upper lip.

“Nasty place to have a boil,”

muses Terry Cobner, the Games Master,

Pontypool, Wales, Armageddon,

the Great British Lion who taught me everything

like:

if I come 0.33 seconds late to his lesson,

he hits me so hard on the backside with a Redflash dap,

I can’t even cry with the pain.

Last week, Rhys broke his shin failing to make a mark.

I saw the white bone

hanging out of the skin, and the chunks of blood:

one look was enough.

Then up to Ma Kinnock’s for ’istory:

leather jacket, hard consonants, Llewellyn the Last and

“Well boys, did you see the match – Cardiff and Arsenal?”

(no ‘r’ in Cardiff; no coccyx in ‘Arsenal.’)

The game she saw me fracture Pike’s nose was the proudest day of my life -

but she is as beautiful as the Barley Mountain in spring

and I’m getting to the age when I want to keep my teeth…

I don’t want to be Gareth Edwards.

I want to be The Beatles.

Last week, watching ‘Terry’ hang out of the window

in the middle of another of his recycled RE lessons

yelling at someone on the Rugby field to tackle evenharder,

I decided it was safer to study Prince Llewellyn

than to re-enact him on the pitch.

I know already that all peoples (even gentle ones)

who’ve had their sovereignty stolen by a superior force

produce males who all their lives have to prove

it’s no reflection on theirmanhoods.

It’s difficult for the English to understand this.

It’s why Rugby isn’t cricket in Wales

but War

Cleavage

"Therefore shall a man leave his father and mother and cleave to his wife."

You were in the doorway but

I knew you couldn't help me

Even then. In fact your silhouette

Unnerved me strangely, the ghost

Of the Daddy you'd been once,

So strong and secure - and wrong

(It now seemed) about everything.

At 13, I'd found out (for myself)

The hardest of the facts of life:

It ends. Why Death's fingers

Clutched my vitals then is a Mystery

Which discreetly remains

Eternal. I was in a sweat about Hell

When you broke in.

I told you out of dredged up childish

Habit, knowing it would do no good.

You said the right things - said I'd

Get to heaven, was a good boy, “usually”,

But I disbelieved your word,

Not your judgment, not your virtues,

Not even your love, could save me

Because I was me, alone

In the dark with a skeletal hand

Clamping my privates. You closed

The door, following Mum….

You'd gone. The radio scraped

Ephemeral music on the pillow

And I held my doom in my hands alone.

The R.I. Master droned, "See me

After school," set me Bible Questions

(Avoiding Genesis 2:24) but couldn't atone.

Only that girl at the bus stop, whose

New contours muddled the child's coat

I'd torn a togglefrom the last time

We'd skirmished, made me forget.

Oh not forget, but make it matter less.

Sooner or later, I'd die. But something

That answered in my heart then

Felt like it wouldn't. The darkness lifted

To a decent distance. And life went on

Soon after, though she, shadow-eyed,

Grew aloof and I more awkward.

What good was Grammar and Lit.?

My heart was a cry in the wilderness:

I'd have given all the poems we scanned

For one kiss, her real kiss, that stopped

The longing. You felt the change cleave

Your heart like a blade, but I was me,

Lost. And you couldn't find me, Dad.

Pontypool

1970 (England 2 Germany W. 3)

"At 2-0 up, my England never lose!"

Swore Dad, and twenty minutes later I

Had lost my father too, wondering why

He'd cheated me like foreign teams, or news

Of English captains nicked, or fools who'd choose

To take wor Bobby off: the Sixties died

In Pontypool exile then, in Groveside

Villas with its Nineteenth Century views.

Pan's People changed to Legs, the Oh No band

Yoked John, Starrs fell, Paul's flare stopped making sense,

'uddersfield 'arold became "Hampstead" Heath;

Brazil were back and in the sun they'd tanned

Our English hide, so '66 had meant

Nothing, meant all things pass - except defeats.

Valley Frank

your coaldust

got under my skin

your iron rust

cut deep in the heart of me,

so deep in my teenage heart

that you’re never apart from me

tra mor yn fur, I’r bur hoff bau,

o bydded i’r heniath barhau

fromValley Nocturnes

1. Seventeen: his own country

The river’s prophet tongue I now understand:

I am heir to my druid realm at last.

Girl’s curves hover, almost in my grasp,

The boys step back a bit; I have command.

Down Jerusalem Lane, mine’s the upper hand,

A Carpenter of Fate in the Christmas

Sun - then the mocking mud, led on by a judas

To his Hotpoint, house, wife, ‘friends’, looks that brand.

No escape, through a room that madly pulsates

To Pen y Maen bridge, tracing beneath it

Green microdot fields, hills’ pie in the sky,

Victorian railings, Dad’s Thought Police eye.

I need a real home, away from this place:

A girl, a room, a bed, tavern, music…

2. Made Up

That old religious music plays as I

Get dressed. Clapton now, Madonna later, blues;

I dust my eyelids and sharp glossy shoes

The shade of nightclub nooks and mountain sky

Between the stars, beyond the moon. Meshed thigh

As smooth as Silvikrin, I stand and muse

In drawing where I know I must refuse

A smoky stare, a blushing cheek, a sigh…

This market Magdalene just isn’t me,

The blackened-station lashes are not mine,

The heightened loveliness is love’s disguise;

The chirpy upbeat music isn’t happy,

The sweet and fizzy pourings are not Wine.

You want me? Look me in my naked eyes.

Gap Year: Weymouth

The white hot swans of summer

are melting out of the bitter glare

which I, a boy with iced dreams,

held them in.

I spray my eye with Right Guard

and promenade

upon the esplanade.

Bikini'd housewives

are golden beach-babes for a day:

The sand is seen

as pastry with too much margarine.

This girl on my arm

where she's been since October

buttons her pink heart forever away.

I am in a black hole

of this past still-winter

(supplementary benefit spent

on a Romantic education,

Chatterton-teethed heating

soul food, ghost rent)

so very far away from the thing I burn for,

I can almost touch it.

(1975)

Student House

I'm using my own words now

Though I'm sharing alanguage,

A small self-furnished room in a sprawling mansion

And little sign of a father now

Save for the ash in the chipped chalice saucer

Which might have been his

(It wasn't any of us)

And the bright steamy kitchen

Against the dark garden of apple trees and mystery

Smudging an uncertainty his brow might have worn

And the door-torn carpet, the worn-out walls,

The shabby curtains in the living room

Housing a decay legend tells me went with him.

And the unwashed plates, the serving knife,

Litteringlast night's supper table,

Hold a nostalgia, cold but not keen, in the dining room

Where we talk and exhale with smoking breath

'Til warmed with the heat of the airing cupboard there

And filled with the incense of cloth aromas,

The room becomes too stuffy and we turn back again

To the hall: the cold, lofty hall with the stained glass windows

Where the telephone on the table and the knob upon the door

Hold no communion with his memory

For if he ever was here seems oddly irrelevant

Knowing now he has gone

And left no address.

(Norwich)

Masculine and Feminine Rhymes

A man who killed his father
Was convicted today,
He was hanged by the neck
Till the crime passed away.

A man who killed his mummy
Was convicted by that jury,
He was sent straight to bed
Without his supper, or a story.

1977: A Haunting

Fleetwood Mac are singing of crystal vision;

I’m mourning the death of teenage romance:

A girl, the short term long vacation dance

Of abstract concrete and revolution;

Oil’s in crisis: my mind’s in sick rotation;

My heart feels nothing of the sudden lance

That smashed its Jericho walls, selling punks

My student sub-let of love’s ancient mansion.

Next door, a Shell garage sleeps: I don’t, haunted

By absence - hers, mine - the hell-thunder

Of vacuum; chase a ghost through every room,

Armed with a Marxist crit. of Roundhead texts

And a Cavalier prayer on lips struck dumb

By Apocalyptic explosions of doom.

(UEA)

Coming Down

September in Powys:we’re coming down

From UEA, the first best friends I’ve had,

The light of golden years, one going mad,

One going lifelong-AWOL soon, and one –

The girl – post graduation, grown

Dearer than they. Welsh and soft and sad

Autumnal, camped-on mountains, wild, and clad

With mists of valediction, seem to frown

Despite bright skies and open roads, on all

Our interactions. Howard plays guitar,

His face a smoothed torment of discontent,

Best man, sole driver of the grown up car,

Which cracked, crash-bound, passenger Martin stalls

And I make notes on how our friendship’s spent.

DIY

‘So simple, even a child can do it’

And proof, too, that you’re a man

With your toolbox, screws and Tough Exterior.

The simple child within, replete with toys

Is, however, after a morning of broken

Fingernails and dreams, weeping with failure.

Man, a rational animal, resourceful,

Undaunted, silences the child and stares

Once again at Directions to Homo Superior.

Waves of Hobbsian violence, subdued;

An urge to destroy en masse, controlled;

Sublimations of complexes acknowledged as inferior

And the finished Creation stands – pristine – flawed;

Infinitely brighter than the deadwood it replaced

But amateur, improvised, a task for the Inheritor.

(This was the Star Letter in in DIY Today, October 1985, and won me two saws I still use.)

Marked For Life

Star Teacher

Look at the sky, child.

That's Sirius (the Dog),

Orion (the Hunter),

There's the Plough.

That's how, according to our lights,

We know.

Now reach.

Anniversarie for John Donne on St Lucy’s Day

I’ve been watching the fairy bulbs grow into the gloom

Of this Cotswold Christmas city street middle afternoon

And it made me think of you.

Poets are finding it hard to get a place

(I’m chiding late schoolboys) and still see Lucy’s face

A dark looking glass through.

It’s been a long time since 1631

Since metaphysics met a physics you never knew

But what you didn’t do remains undonne.

Gloucester 1981

Marked For Life

Your illegible hand, “Sarah Bitcham, Cardiff University 1932,

Was being formed before my mother was even born.

I came under it in your angry rust sunset,

Your lipstick and powder applied as explosively

As your blistering pen.

Simple sentences were all we were capable of,

You declared, in the accusative. And not a word

We recognised as friendly, or ours,

Or even that brimmed, poet-wise

Of itself, could we use.

You got your red-hot malice into everything.

Sentenced us to the letter of the language…

Only Mr Lawrence - from his solar

Plexus - and Mr Orwell - from his stubborn

Senses - could liberate us, drunkenly, later

From your three years' regime of cold water

And spiritless pages.

You delighted in Literature as some might in torture.

We were forbidden to write, "I liked the poem

We read by Wordsworth." You'd reduce "I liked" to lashes,

Scald three solid bars across "the poem",

Grill a wordas emotive and colloquial as "we”

And with arrows and scrawls that stabbed and blushed

Their brand amid the acne,

Add, in your slap-round-the-face Standard English,

Red-ant stinging the page:

“Simon Lee the Old Huntsman,

By Wordsworth, is an Admirable Poem”.

The twenty second time you repeated that lesson,

Our Fifth Year bulks crammed through the legs

Of our Third Year desks,

I stopped writing altogether, could only parrot

Your shrieked corrections.

But you wounded even those;

Usurped ‘improved’by ‘enhanced’- not because

It was more accurate (it was less) but because

Like that identical lesson on gerunds you gave every

Wednesday afternoon, it proved –as it had for forty years –

How much cleverer you were than us,

How much more incisive you were than the“imbeciles”

Who'd introduced O levels fifteenyears before; how much sharper was

Your Standard tongue than the rest of the Staff's,

The rest of the valley's, fanciful critics, pompous academics and, indeed, the whole English speaking world

Except your mother

With whom you still (at 62) lived.

Well, mark this.

Profiles

Mr Hasbeen was one of the Old School

Before it went comprehensive

Who took Early Retirement (at 92)

To avoid the T.V. E. Initiative.

A winter crow Head, ad hoc, ad infinitum,

Shaking chalk mist from bristling lip and gown,

Acrid odour of cigars out-smelling old satchels,

Varnished wood, books, daps and girls’ perfume;

Crow-footing down on thirty years’ instinct

The corridors he hadn’t seen for five.

At ‘Prayers’ in the Gym, majestically distant,

Sneer-fossiled in close up, with warted cast eye…

The son changed his name to Trendy,

Took a Child Psychology degree

And having ‘worked through’ his Father complex

Is able at last to love schoolgirls freely.

Now soft dads consult him, in Old School ties

And slow promotion teachers, breeding vague contempt;

Youths, a “waste of space” once, thump in to be “prized”,

Ungreyed Heads keep him where old Heads’ canes were kept:

Over child-centred junkfood, education’s reprocessed,

Over therapeutic feedback, grades ‘redefined’.

The rigor of hard-backed old Hasbeen shelved,

The son a new species of nerves – and no spine?

The Driftwood Comprehensive, Dis on Sea poems

1. Parents' Evening

Here we see what the daughters will become:

The puffy and dead-eyed mother

Staring at the father's side, cynical, suspicious,

Demanding where the hell her daughter's

Promise and beauty - which was once hers - has gone,

Even before it's in bloom. Typically it's Mummy

Who interrogates, and wonders, against her own

Better judgement and experience, if the newNew Way

You're peddling is magic after all, and won't all go wrong,

While fathers, bleary from a day's work,

Sit it out grimly, only needled into action

By comments like "he's bottom" or "a berk"

Or not up to it, not capable, not strong,

Or - conversely - agreeing "he has no respect",

Is "dumbly insolent," "ungrateful," "cheeky",

Dumb himself on his daughter…Is her childhood's reject.

2. Mocks

Huddled into football hats and scarves

In their desk terraces,

Stoned on cold and boredom

With fifty two minutes still to go

And nothing left to write about or remember,

Our examinees shuffle and stare

Like a grim crowd at Norwich City

Waiting for a goal that never comes.

In the roof of this breezeblock leisure dome

Propellers flap like aircraft that can't fly.

In one corner, two heaters nibble a glacier.

The floor - a parky one - is marked for badminton

But not for inter-desk ice hockey

As we clatter across it dispensing paper.

And this long siege itself mocks everything - Barbarossa,

Frozen Storage... everything except exams anyway.

3.Exam Invigilation

Today in Norfolk, a boy has thrown up

Over Intermediate Science Paper 1 and the era

Of caretakers with buckets arriving within the hour

Is history. The June heat is on and, despite

Open doorways blowing papers like seafront litter

Between deckchair assembly desks, it's beginning

To cook the boy's dinner a second time. And the clock

-A candidate has just informed me - stopped on the hour

Ten minutes before I gave them their final time-check:

My shirt has melted from emerald green

To Monsoon purple.....

I haven't felt heat like this since Christmas

When, in response to parental complaints

About conditions un-conducive to exam performance,

We hired four blast-heaters from a building site

To roar like rockets in the breezeblock corners

Of our neo-brutalist Sports-cum-Exam Barn

(Put out of commission shortly afterwards

By a Sixth Former trying to drive through it)

Which still failed to thaw its December heart of concrete.

Good to recall our cornered wellards though,

Microwaved to a turn, hair frazzle-permed at 100 degrees F,

Dysfunctional faces sedated for the first time in four years...

The rising smell of sick retunes me to the present.

Our caretakers - Godot and Son plc -

Send a memo to say they will arrive a.s.a.p.

-Let's go

-We can't.

-Why not?

-We're waiting for Godot.

It's like trying to make a silk purse out of a haystack,

Like trying to tune a pitchfork in a sow's ear.

4. Ofsted

I am being inspected.

After years of imagining,

little blue-eyed men from Saturn,

they’re here!

The one watching me take a register

- noting my hesitation on his clipboard-

looks exactly like Inspector Cluseau.

I feel exactly like Herbert Lom.

He apologises for his trench mac

and tells me he’s from Cheshire.

I smile and squeak -

O that’s nice

(Cheshire my arse!)

The English Inspector

takes two days to land

by which time I am climbing the walls,

leaping out of my skin every time the door opens,

YELLING at kids for talking

during discussion.

Nowshe’s here,

the first day in a purple power suit, the second in puce.

When she talks to me, I can’t concentrate.

I am fixated on how flat the end of her nose is,

the flat empty plains on the far side of Saturn,

a planet that invented SATs and the National Curriculum.

She might not look like

a little blue-eyed Saturnalian

but underneath that approximation

to a human form

lurks a Blimp & Boffin…Government…Education…Policy.

Wesleywon’tshut up of course.

He never shuts up.

I thought that this week

that just for once

he would shut up.

I hear myself pleading, wheedling, whingeing,

wielding all the power of fifteen years

teaching syntax, nuance and tone,

“Wes. Wes! there’s a bloody Inspector in the room!!

Please. PLEASE. PLEASE!! PLEASE!!!!!

SHUT UP!!!!!!!!!!!!

5. On Being Locked Inside A Tiny Room By A Well-Meaning Caretaker

I have been locked inside a shrinking room

Alone with my marking, and it's shrinking still.

I have to get out of here before noon.

I must rise and teach a French class very soon

On a cover whose teacher is safely ill.

I have been locked inside a shrinking room.

The caretaker put right (while whistling a tune)

Its gale-clacking doorlatch from hell. Bliss, until

I have to get out of here before noon.

It took weeks to fix, now it's fixed like glue

And he's done it before, with an unlearned skill.

I have been locked inside a shrinking room.

He proved - FROM INSIDE - why the snag can't resume.

"I can't believe you did that. This is surreal.

I have to get out of here before noon."

Now my life bats past my eyelids, my thoughts swoon,

My lungs are shrunk violets, my tongue a spun drill...

I have been locked inside a shrinking room.

I can wait in boiled calm for a saviour to loom

Or waste my breath in screams long and shrill.

I have been locked inside a shrinking room.

I HAVE TO GET OUT OF HERE BEFORE NOON!

6. Healthy Norfolk

“The assembly on healthy Norfolk won’t be given this morning

As both members of staff concerned are ill,”

Announces the grave-faced deputy.

I choke down a cough and run past nine hundred kids

Without daring to breathe or meet one eye

Up to the smokers’ staff room.

Soon the Monday Morning blues are rocked and ripped apart

By prolonged tear-jerking laughter

And the smokers are feeling better already.

Final Assembly

The unpurged images of term recede

And, hark, the herald angels with dirty faces

Sing in excruciation.

They get younger each year and I,

To serve them half my days resolved,

Get no younger with them.

The praised boy who fishwise leapt with joy

Five Christmas terms ago

Grins at the clapping school now, sardonic.

Where has he gone - are we going - so fast?

O Jesus! still these discordant Years,

That carping torn, that gong-tormented Sea.

Homecomings

In The Bleak Midwinter

watched

by the rich guarded

silence

of cotswold

farms

and a blinding sun

through bare trees

and the jagged saw

of a dog at the gate,

i wonder

what my pilgrimage

to an indian summer

half a world distant

taught me

about this old track

of unchanged england

wrapped up in compliments,

temporary as tinsel,

a feast that goes cold,

a santa that never

really delivers

as i slide

down my frozen hill

of ignorance

on slight city shoes

made in ahmednagar

towards

a painful wisdom.

Cranham, Glos. Christmas ’94

Homecoming: Cardiff

In a morning sunburst, I address the Welsh nation

On the warm and clear-skied Roy Noble programme:

A late and ineffectual compensation

For the publicity myshow wasn’t given!

In the subsequent deluge I perform to eight punters,

Four of them staff, in the Norwegian Church

On the spur of The Bay, and what bardic wonders

Could stop us all feeling so left in the lurch?

But in May night thunder, in the glow of a lamppost

Under old Welsh iron (a low railway bridge),

My lamps picking routes through perpetual roadworks

Where New Wales Assembles, Tiger Bay lives:

A dazzling young hooker beams affirmation,

Misreads my kerb crawl from venue to Taff Road

(In frantic lost search of my guest house in Grangetown)

As a punter’s – and offers me new Wales for old.

Homecoming: Pontypool

Attending an amateur arts launch out of politeness,

I endure, through a clenched migraine,

The longest speech ever made,

Musing that the Welsh word for précis

Must be

Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyndrobbwllllantysilioggochgochgoch,

Applauding the peroration’s procrastinated peaking

With mountain-spring heart. Then “It only remains for me

To introduce our mainspeaker for the evening…

From The Welsh

Translations of actual blocks of sentences in a 1970s Welsh learners’ book

Peint Mr Juns ydy hwn

This is Mr Jones’s pint.

That’s new hotel.

The river is very dwrty.

Those are official programmes.

Those are visitors.

Those are not the Barbarians.

Tonight isn’t the Big Night.

It isn’t the final score.

This isn’t a rugby ball….

Is Dai the kicker?

Is Dai the son?

Did he diein hospital?

Is the kettle boiling yet?

When does the pub open?

Did she almost win?

Did the child almost drown?

Why did you nearly refuse?

When did she almost die?

The cat didn’t die afterwards.

We didn’t meet the important man.

He didn’t die last year.

She didn’t die before Mr Juns.

When did she die?

Return to Egezeter - via Logres

Wherever King Arthur ruled,

This long slow falling through the West

Is definitely where he retreated

And I, who live in the clear East now,

Sense the pull of sodden clay

And the soft mists of dreaming

Whenever I return.

The deep-rooted crime scenes

And green contours of Celtic seeking:

The Chestnut Mares of the Apocalypse;

The Westbury White Horse of the Avatar;

The Hereford cows of munching contentment.

The lush lakes brimming like earthen goblets,

Drizzle-troubled mirrors of empty sky.

Banks of nettles planted by the Romans;

Fields of corn planted by the Druids.

My boyhood overflowing here

In the hot smells of a farmyard,

Like butter from a churn;

My youth across the channel there

The rock bone-close to the surface,

The grass green-blue instead of golden,

The red dragon of winter Gwent

Mirroring the red wyvern of Somerset:

The sum a harvest in the tongue of exile.

Wherever King Arthur ruled,

This long slow falling through the West

Is definitely where he retreated...

Single to Frome

Westbury White Horse appears out of nowhere

As huge as the God of my infancy.

The train bisects a field of wheat and blazing maize

Into a myth of childhood unvisited for 36 years

And I think, “but that’s Rodden, where I grew up!”

And an hour later, standing there, it’s as if

Some world of ancient legend has come to life.

And Penny Laneis playing, as then, council-estate loud

From a house I knew when I belonged here as much

As it still does. Meanwhile, back in 2003,

Mothers with tattooed arms sunbathe in lush gardens

Overlooking skips, cars, internet-addressed vans

I don’t remember but also pavements, kerbs

Corners, gateposts, an infrastructure of childhood,

So eternallypresent, in a day so hot, that I wonder

If nothing is real. That face-biting Alsatian still

Haunts his yard of pavement, the Bully still prowls

His wilderness – I see him in every face that looms

Then laugh him off – but they can’t hurt me

Anymore. These privets, strawberry plots and fences,

Insider’s shortcuts, unconscious Mendip views,

This miniature St. John’s Road of what I lived,

Was my first map of the world, my first great

Missionary journey in my mother’s footsteps

On joy-bent feet. I am alone in another one here:

A riverside pilgrimage in bulky middle age

Through this Summer-set town to a first school

Epic in memory (“The Old School House” now)

Then the hospital - to which my mortal

Injuries once weekly carried me. And a graveyard

Whose small acre, once The Universe, the darkest jungle

Of our games, is now a modest haven from sunstroke

And bustle. Leaving the dead I never noticed

When I ran among these phantom children,

Or posed here in gangs of Secondary Mods

Keeping my Grammar School under my cap,

I walk out, blissed, through a stadium of heroes

(Now a small town park under limitless sky)

To spend a blistering half hour getting lost

In pursuit of the street we went up in the world to,

Alas too briefly. The day is an acid flashback

Through innocence, triggered purely by the glory

Of existence. I am a tourist in my own life.

Gran (1909-2001)

You scribble “Are you married?” I reply,

“You came to my wedding twenty years past

To Melanie? - here’s a photograph.”

You write “She’s very pretty” - and I smile;

You add “Who are you?” and I meet your eye

With “I don’t know, do you?” which makes you laugh

And recognise a boy you gave a bath

And bussed to Bristol Zoo in times gone by.

You lived in secrets. Even ‘Doris’, your name,

Might stop us loving you if it got known.

The truth is, how they did things “Years Ago”

When truth stalked cupboards like a skeleton

Thrust hidden hurt upon you, whom we loved.

The truth, the only thing that lasts, is love.

A Country Life

(for Emma)

A Good Friday

Blood-orange sun lazing down into the sea,

Full moon ghosting up the other side of the sky.

All down the sun-slackened tarmac to the woods,

Finches fleece hedgerows like there’s no yesterday

And no tomorrow. Round the graveyard walls

Like over-bred mothers, the fields have ploughed

Through yet another winter, lie back in the sun.

Mozart plays somewhere on a holiday radio,

Notes a tossed incense of joy so alive

It is almost beyond living. The sky

Is full of larks and I’m full of Real Ale

And full of myself anyway: it’s my birthday.

At the foot of a wall of crumbing stone -

A Victorian relic of ivy and railings -

D-A-D stands over a grave in flowers.

“Look, love, I chuckle, they’ve left out the E.”

This tickles my daughter as much as me

And we splutter until I am out of breath…

I am about to meditate on mutability

When her miniature copy of my hand

Hoists me homeward, impatient, a daffodil chill

On the air. Her face is a tiny March leaf,

Her "snuggle-riding" featherweight on my back

Fresh as the daisy that hasn't quite sprung,

A summer in bud. I'm the finished version.

I guess they'll be carving my dates clear as Spring

On one of these stones eventually (paying

The sextons double because of the chalk)

But all in good time. Carpe Diem.

Days like these are worth dying for.

Sedgeford, March 29 1991.

On His Birthday

“You cannot live in the present.

At least, not in Wales.” RST

“The rhymer in the long-tongued room

Who tolls his birthday bell

Toils towards the ambush of his wounds.” DT

All those years ago, I was in a tatty Welsh classroom

Studying Poem On His Birthdayby Dylan Thomas

And now here I am in a tatty Norfolk classroom

Teaching Poem On His Birthdayby Dylan Thomas

(Same textbook, newer edition). I’ve got nowhere

Very slowly and now the clock on the wall (essentially

The same wall) ticks up thirty nine instead of seventeen

As I fidget and fill in time as artfully as possible -

Subconsciously still waiting for teacher to come.

A big-hearted girl in year 8 has just tidied up

My slagheap of a desk because she “couldn’t stand it anymore”

And Caroline next door has crammed my pigeonhole

With a big red balloon and put HAPPY BIRTHDAY

Over the staffroom noticeboard. When I slip home

For lunch, I’ll get all my cards, a request to record

My not-so-slim-as-it-used-to-be volume onto tape for America

And the annual rejection from a Welsh publisher.

Then I’ll ease on the moccasins Melanie bought me

Which make me feel like a New Man. But I’m not.

I’m an Old Man, a Boy, enjoying his birthday

Up the Mountain, playing truant from everything

With my dog, Tan, running at my heels.

March 29 1995

Look, I have come through

I hear a moan - of the earth, but unearthly -

On the other side of the wall.

I creep round, girding my loins from some horror.

"A lamb's having birth!" pipes a child, beckoning.

I join the haggle,

Watch the quiet kindness of humans

As the lamb's bud-horns lock her

In the coffin of her mother's womb,

Watch them wrestling with spindly legs, dashing for aid,

While, irrelevant but insistent,

A turkey courts hens round our shins,

Feathers at full sail, twirling in absurd vanity,

Tattered, matted, red-sore raw and ugly beyond belief.

A man returns with a lifeline of coarse string.

A woman helps him coax birth

From the patiently groaning ewe.

The lamb is dead on the hay.

They lay it at the mother's mouth for her to lick.

"Is it all right?" asks someone, stupidly.

I knew it from the start.

....But the lamb stirs.

My heart shouts with the joy of it.

Life!

Stubborn, hopeless, quivering

Life!

Gressenhall, March 1993

After The Show

Lying in a cornfield with you

near the edge of the harvested bit -

but still with plenty of the summer left -

gazing at shooting stars,

wearing stage-clothes and a Union Jack

thin against the long night's sudden cooling,

Lying in a cornfield with you

leaving an us-shaped impression

that will last all summer,

drunk as a kite on Granny Wouldn't Like It *

and an after-performance high, discussing

sex (as usual) and stolen horses -

Leaving an impression that will last

when the corn and the stubble

and the ghosts of this long hurt summer have gone,

when the winter corn is sown

in the flint-bared soil,

when the next green June is grown.

Lying in a cornfield with you

talking about love and a lasting commitment

and an ideal company of players

who would live to perform them,

suddenly believing

they're all here with you.

* A real ale brewed from such cornfields as these.

Recollections Of Recent Family Holidays As My Daughter Steps From Childhood.

The last time we went west on holiday

From our workaday alarm-clock, flat-out East,

It was late August, like now. Then,

(In Puzzlewood, in the Forest of Dean)

We came upon a great twin-trunked beech

Edged with rose-sunlight in a dark place.

One of the trunks, low down, had a third

That echoed you, sturdy outgrowth

Of your parents' two decade rooted union.

I didn't write this then because it seemed

(a) Hybrisitic (b) too pat and (c) because you'd

Already complained about exposure

(In my poems) in front of your mates.

Now I don't care. There are things too precious

To keep to oneself. Your childhood

Has been like a thread of heaven,

Through all my work and days

And, like this poem, I'm recording it quickly

Before I lose it. These past few nights

Of hip-replacement purgatory

Under rotting canvas on a Welsh mountain

Sloping everywhere (in the general direction

Of Dante's writhing Inferno) at once

Have recalled Puzzlewood all too sharply!

And now, at "half night" as you call 3 am,

We moon out together for a call of Nature

In mountain grass as sweet as Eden

Amid every spook our fears can summise

An inch from the stars of Paradise.

Somewhere in mid-Wales, 1997.

Going Up

You could just say that we were there for you:

In fact, your last exam I sneaked behind

Your desk and checked your answer line by line

As if that school could still find ways to screw

Up your one chance as they’d just failed to do

With your true application and strong mind -

But by this August morning all is fine:

You’ve made your sunshine ‘A’s and you are through.

The strain breaks now in tears of harvest home

And though I numb it (drunk in scratchy corn

And staring, supine, at the moon above)

The truth remains – that soon you will be gone

To bright new fields of discourse, campus dawns

Beyond the tug - and give – of parents’ love.

Sedgeford October

Somewhere mellow between

the end of the overblown blackberries

and

the start of the harvested leaves

fused flies

on clinical sills

hint at bleached sun

and

in the hedges

thistle winds to come.

To eyes trained on histrionic heights

of Welsh adolescence,

this stubborn serenity,

these mediaeval colours

are

endlessly reassuring:

a great grey blanket billowing unbroken from the North Pole,

wild chords of geese in its folds;

the flinty, dependable noun

behind mists of adjectives.

Fall

This first fallen leaf, grim turd

Of all that March green light and hope,

All that high blue summer it inters,

Does not appal. I’m gladit’s gone

With all its apprehensions

Of consummation. Let it loose.

Let it all come down.

fromMemorial

November 11 1996.

Around the village memorial

A local brass band is playing.

The duffle-coated, white-bearded bugle player

Does not really approve

Of “tributes to men who line up

With medals on their uniform chests.”

Just at the point where the heart

Should be hanging on the notes,

He jazzes it up,

Turns the Last Post

Into the Temperance Seventy.

I can smell the dead Autumn leaves

On the still air.

More distantly, I smell

A generation of condemned men.

A fallen summer incenses the pavements.

You’ve opened the door of this flint cottage wide.

It's letting out all the heat

And, like the broken chairs your bulk entails,

It bothers me that this bothers me.

You're standing there with your wife

In the distressed brown leather jacket

You got on the insurance.

Your bullshit face

Is stunned with reverence.

You smoke,

Pause for a long time between puffs.

For an age, it seems that you feel too respectful

Ever to put the cigarette to your lips again

And when you do,

The fact that it's a roll up, like a soldier's,

Make it somehow right.

As so often, I hate

The person I am in your presence.

I'm in the middle of a story

Telling you about the bugle player

When your reverent abstraction

Silences me.

I'm fascinated

By the change in you,

Overcharged, overcharging

Child of the '80s,

From self to love.

I'm thinking

He's an old bollocks

But I love him.

Later you tell me, you were thinking

About your granddad:

“If he hadn’t survived the trenches,

I’d have never been born.”

It’s the most awful thought in your pantheon.

England Win The World Cup (1966/2003)

November rain and bales of mildewed hay,
The soil a cemetery of summer's yields,
A brief grey day of mud on lanes and fields
And everywhere the fragrance of decay
And on some field ten thousand miles away
The other side of Earth, a gritty heaven builds
That's made of sweat and English dreams, and gilds
An hour to last as long as England may.

And thirty seven years is laid to rest

As I remember an unbroken heart

That Beatled to a drum that couldn’t fail

Believing then that Britain was the best

At everything, believing now we’re part

Of something greater, striving for the grail.

The Wash

Dirty December

sunset spilled

on the rippling Ouse

like oil.

A factory -its

smoke clouding

the English sky -

And seagulls,

faces like free-fall

angels

screaming on the grey.

fromNorfolk Carol, 1996.

1. Christmas Eve, 3pm

The elements of Christmas -

Fire and ice -

In this tempered Arctic sun

That burns in the trees.

In these pools like skating rinks

Deep and dark and even.

Ice

In the flinty ground

And the bitter Easterly.

Fire

In the solstice sunset

Bleeding the black woods

And its ice-pink afterglow

And its fire-blue areola.

Ice

In the barn-wide rising moon.

Ice

In my soul as I'm turned

To the unlit wings

That cradle and grave

The sunset's light show.

Fire

In my soul

At a rising star

Burning like ice

In the polar blue.

Fire

In my hearth at home

(Crackling through logs),

In the farmer's field

(Roaring through twigs),

Red-raw and orange

Tongues of life-lust:

The vital, stripped down

Simplicities of winter.

3. Christmas Eve 8 pm.

My daughter's dropped the torch
From iced fingers
Snowing the bulb
So the batteries don't connect
To its heart-warming glow
And we can't see the carol sheet...
But the wagon is hung with fairy lights
Frosted with moonshine
And we look like a Christmas card.
And we finally get

Past the too-crowded Inn

To the Promised Place-

A stable of prototypes:

Some faithful sheep farmers
With a vision of angels
If not of the road;

Three love-crazed riders

As seen on Look East

(Come out of the sunset

On secret paths

Across low fields

Of mud-chastened pasture

And shoots of corn the green

‘Green’ used to be

When the world was young,

Through winter-silent

Norfolk afternoon villages,

Church windows glinting
Like texts of mediaeval Latin)

An unmarried mother
(With a "lily-white"
King Herod of Sleaze
Biting her back,
Her face pure as Venus,
Her faithful Joe
Not quite the winner
Her parents had hoped for)

And tucked out of sight
Behind a bottle bank -
A babe in a crib.

The outlook
None too bright
As I lift our broken lamp
And the brass strikes off
And my voice stumbles in flight
Yet in thy dark streets shineth
The everlasting Light,
The hopes and fears
Of all the years

Are met in thee tonight.

The Music

Life is a bitch, but the songs are great.

In the gloom before work, let the radio play,