All Change Here

The History: All Change Here

I

Do not lean out of the window.

When they enclosed the common land,
peasants lost their grazing rights.

A watercolour farmhouse.
Shire horses, Lion and Captain,
pulled the plough,
delivered green meat to the brewery.

In the Great War, sometimes
you could hear the guns from France.
One Sunday teatime,
tinned salmon.
The barn cats went wild.

The farmhouse slid into the sea.

Ancestors. Ghosts.
Kingfishers catch fire.
Dragonflies draw flame.

The last man beheaded in England
was fifty-two, a Methodist lay preacher,
married, father of many,
desperately poor.

The axe fell after the rope—
a final bureaucratic flourish.

When the knock came at the back door
we hid the toaster.

A coronation mug.
One lump or two?

No one wanted it.

Drummer in the Grenadier Guards,
from Battersea,
missing, Ypres, October 1914.

Another queue.
The sheets sewn down the middle.

Spirit guides on the sideboard.
A silver fox farm in Canada.
Ancient Egypt Speaks
and fairies in the garden.

Whatever next, said the cat,
when its tail dropped off.

II

A life in service,

there was no pension,
and when she lost the cottage,
and the money ran out

Press Button B.

Stale tobacco.
Three people waiting.

The Daily Herald, Observer on Sunday.
And the Evening Adver.

Front page of the Daily Mirror
All stand for

The verdict.

The annual visit, bacon for breakfast
and family matters mulled
after the children were in bed.

So many secrets.

A walk on the seafront and
a ten shilling note.
“I try to be good,” she said,
“but I don’t always succeed.”
A Boots token at Christmas.
Much loved. Long gone.

Please have your ticket ready.

Wounded on the Somme.
The black flies were bad that summer.
Medals under the bed.

Mind the gap.

She hid it in the airing cupboard,
under the towels.

Be grateful.

And every Sunday the letters.
Like church.

Penalty for Improper Use £25

They were from Yorkshire,
if you please.
Proper linen tablecloths though
and the brass polished.
Tea, or pudding?

Her knees were playing up again.
Besides, it was Sunday.

East Coker! East Coker for West Coker.
Milton Undersod.
Wastelands.
Sodding Chipbury.

All change here.

Stand on the right.
Keep left.

III

Pitchforks and spies.
Light the blue touchpaper.

The sky went dark.
The crops failed.
The rent came due.

Stand back.

Married in a frock coat.
Pneumonia and
the ‘flu and a January
grave in Taranto.

His long underpants
airing by the kitchen range.

The first order of business
is item three, paragraph two,
on the third line—

Half a pound of tuppenny rice.

Strict chapel and the police constable
read the Bible aloud before supper
and prayer
always.
Dropped dead in the garden she did
with a blackberry and apple pudding
already in the basin.

Gentlemen lift the seat.

Pip, old chap—

Sorting letters on the Night Mail
Nottingham to Lincoln.
A union man. In the Territorials,
read poetry, dreamed
of a smallholding.

Two Beaufighters midair.
The debris fell into the allotment.
The gatekeeper and the Special,
drinking tea mid-afternoon,
having a smoke,
killed instantly.

Is that the time?

Put the cat out.

IV

Please stand back from the platform edge.

The station master grew lupins.

The train now arriving
at Platform 3—

I, too, dislike it,
these faces in the crowd.

Passengers will please refrain
from flushing toilets while the train
is standing in the station.

The winding lines on the beach.
No donkeys.
Cold, hungry.
The Miracle.

After the first powerful, plain manifesto—
bridges and houses,
hedges and ditches—
The 11:45 Great Western Railway service
to Bristol Temple Meads calling at Swindon …

is delayed.

Silent miles of wind-bent grasses.
Past cotton-grass and moorland boulder,
the pink, the violet,
the white and the blue—
Gold Flake.

Please remember
to take all personal belongings
with you.

North Atlantic.
Troop ship convoy
from the Clyde.
Bucket and spade.
Kitbag with pocket diary and
an Atlas.

Lemons and almonds from Tunis.
Baby picture to the desert.
Ointment and socks to Italy.
Volcanic ash in an Oxo tin.
Cigarettes from the E.C. sorters.
Oranges from Palestine.
Every letter numbered.

Wait until the train stops
before opening the door.

After the goods van,
age three, alone,
St Pancras to Chesterfield,
horse and cart.

Milk churns into town.
The best pork pies.
Next, please.
Plaice and chips.
Malt vinegar.
Stewed nettles.
Nut roast.

A children’s home in Chalk Farm.
A houseboat loaned at Sandbanks.
Spiritualist Lyceum school on Sundays.
A scholarship. Vegetarians.
Teacher training, and trains from
Victoria and Waterloo
for Sunday rambles in Surrey.
North Wales with
The Holiday Fellowship.
A summer in Bavaria.
Marienbad. A refugee
turned away at Croydon Airport.

St Michael’s School, Pimlico.
With the infants’ class
taken to an unknown destination—
the countryside.

Two sisters so close
until the rift.
A summer funeral.
Four cousins unmet.

This is a westbound
Piccadilly line service.

Stand clear of the closing doors.

A long way from home.
Terminating at Heathrow
Terminals 1, 2, 3 and 5.

Please fasten your seatbelts.

Number nine.
Number o-nine.
And what of the cat?
Lives—
or tails?

 

The featured image: Postcard detail: Looking towards Brighton along the cliffs at Roedean, showing the old disused road from Brighton to Rottingdean, the Roedean Road and haystacks and farm buildings of Black Rock Farm. The year is not established, but it looks very like 1919 or 1920.

dVerse

It started with a visit to the Metropolitan Museum in NYC. It was the Raphael exhibit, and in one of the last rooms the art was roped off to keep the people back. A man leaned over the rope to see more closely, and triggered a disembodied voice that intoned, “Stand back. You are too close to the art.”

And then on the M4 bus home, a young woman stood near the back door and the automatic “Please stand away from the doors” was activated over and over again. And I thought about all the bureaucratic instructions and warnings that surround us. We are hemmed in and enclosed by rules,  laws, policies, best practices, guidelines, and all the rest that create the dissonance between authority and what we think of as our personal freedom. And so the “poem” began – drawing the contrast between the voices of authority and the real messiness of our lives. And in this particular case, the stories of members of my own family a generation or more back. Ordinary lives swept up in the whirl of world events over which they have no control. 

It’s intended as a kind of soundscape of cultural change told in layers of history, family memory, transport announcements, scraps of poetry, and domestic banalities blended into one. A confusing and disorienting collage of loss and dislocation that borders on the line between the absurd and the tragic. Thank goodness for the continuity of the cat. 

My brother Chris would have been the only one to get all of these references. He died last January, so this is in memory of him and all that we shared.