South of Jarrow
(The March, October 1936)

I stand on our bright step,
all the fear there ever was
dragging at my knees.
The back of my dress hides in my mother’s.
At our garden-end,
history troops along, keeping time
through the hazard beats of spitting.
The cake and cheddar are deadweight
in my squeezebox hands.
A third time, Mother’s fingers
remind me where my spine ends:
‘Well, go on, then,’ she says.

The path is a route-march in June:
it takes all my life to push down it,
only to find I can’t manage cheese and cake
and work the gate’s fangle in one go.
But he reaches over: a stranger
with skin gone to the angels,
the look of a stubborn ghost.
The gate swings upon a world of fathers.
I hoist the doings high.  He cuddles them off
like a firstborn over a sneezing seam of hell.
Drops thanks and smiles on me
till I’m redder than a Hambleton cherry.
Touches his cap at a point far behind
through the air the grownups use.

They file on, set for the barrack-halls,
afternoon soakings, boss-dogs loosed
on Sheffield’s arterial roads.
Hold their lines like we have to,
class by class, assembly-bound--
where the Headmistress waits,
an acre of pink reclining on our lives,
and the music teacher, claws prepared
above major chords, trapping us
between a colourless eye
and a nose nipped with abstention. 

 

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