In response to this week’s Poetry Rehab prompt https://wordpress.com/read/post/feed/31982590/800499948, I repost a poem I originally posted in February this year as part of the original poetry course. The poem is one of an ongoing series on the theme of childhood memories from the 1960s and 70s.

 

School through Fog

Early morning treks to school

down the once hawthorn-lined lanes

trimmed now into neat suburban roads,

flanked by spanking-new government-funded semis and bungalows,

and on into the little town center

with its grand neo-Gothic town-hall

and off down the road to the old schoolhouse,

are swathed in choking smog

and swaddled in stiff sternly monitored uniforms

in various scratchy shades of grey.

The collective soot of last night’s warming fires

hangs like fall-out over the freezing dawn,

a paranoia in the lungs;

a lingering nightmare left by last night’s TV.

The fog at times is darker than the blackest pea in the pod.

We pick our way through it by memory alone.

Senses numbed by coats and gloves.

School sucks, but at least it is warm and comforting

and makes us march, sing, dance and pray.

Milk is free but made rancid by unrefrigerated crates.

Still we have to drink it down.

The back-rooms are a dark museum to a long-defunct cotton industry,

Full of ghosts of workers and slaves;

a place to comfort and flirt with fearful girls.

The world is full of interesting doubt and imagination

and the cold certainties of science, discipline and the C of E

are dull as the water of an undredged ditch

to any normal child’s lively mind.

Perverts and the privileged are encouraged to thrive.

Everyone is itching to get back home

to scratch chill-blained feet free of daps

toasting them against the wires of a coal fire,

eat poached eggs on thickly buttered toast

and glue eyes to a ghostly greenish black-and-white television screen,

seep in the homely holy smell of Dad’s cigarettes,

gas leaking from paraffin lamps, as miners strike

and the government rations the electricity supply.

Playing old parlor games by candlelight.

The fug of Churchill’s funeral;

Kennedy shot;

Dad’s Army on TV;

home fires snoring and burning

—the fat of victory;

The comfort of a thick blanket

And a hot water bottle filled from a kettle;

the fog of old wars

choking and rocking us to sleep.

The gleaming glass aluminum

NHS neonatal and family planning clinic,

winking like a light-house through fog:

hope at the end of the road.