Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
The hostel women came one summer evening
after tea. The noise brought Judith and me
from hiding-from-the-Germans, our game
in the bushy borders of the gardens
in our block of flats off Finchley Road.
A crowd of women, with some small children –
a few men were outside on the pavement –
were at the back of the building where we were
forbidden to go and the bins were kept.
A row of aspen saplings, planted
alongside the back fence,
Our DNA is filled with wondrous
commonplaces, luminous platitudes:
refugees from pogroms in the Ukraine,
refugees from the Famine in Connaught.
*
This was the house my mother’s family moved to
from 7 Moses Street, off Sefton Park Road,
Liverpool, three years before she was born;
Ma, Da, her two small sisters, her two teenage
step brothers; a rented end of terrace –
with gas, running water, outside privy –
in a cobbled cul-de-sac, where bread
still warm was delivered in the Co-op’s
horse drawn van,
The photo of Stephen Baum and me aged 4
falls out of the back of a book. Each of us
is holding a part of a redundant
Kodak Brownie and laughing in ecstasy.
The battered camera is Stephen’s.
The sun is shining, and we are on the lawn
in front of the flats where we lived. It was spring
or summer ’47. Our mothers
would take us to the entrance of the yard
of the dairy on Child’s Hill so we could watch
the horses and hear the waters rushing
through wooden slats,
At midnight on Sunday the 3rd of April
1881 the Bar lightship’s
paddle steamer tender, ‘Vigilant’,
is moored at Woodside Stage, Birkenhead.
Of the eight crew three were born in Wales,
two in Liverpool, one in Ireland,
one in Sweden and one on a ‘Yorkshire Farm’.
In immaculate copperplate, the First Mate,
my great grandfather, completes the form.
Meanwhile at 52 Harlow Street,
a street that slopes down to Harrington Dock,
where the Elder Dempster line was based
that sailed to Freetown,
Her maiden surname was Eisenberg, ‘iron
mountain’, one that had been chosen for them
from the Imperial list. I was often
uneasy, unsure in her presence.
She hardly ever smiled. I realise now
because I looked so like her son, my father.
She died, from kidney failure, when I was nine.
On the mantelpiece in our dining room
is a pair of figurines – faux Meissen –
brought in her parents’ wooden suitcase, wrapped
in linen, journeying from Leopoldstat,
Low water now and the motley of crabbers
is crammed towards the end of the pier,
leaving space for a merry metaphor
of our times, Uncle Tacko’s Flea Circus,
with its innuendo and innocence,
its knowingness and charm, its vaudeville
of outrageous unnuanced half-truths,
its charivari of anachronisms.
The Bulkeley Hotel on the front (once
a private mansion of many rooms)
and the stone terrace of late Georgian
town houses in this holiday resort
speak of its erstwhile strategic value.
LLANDWYN, YNYS MÔN
THE BOX BROWNIE
SOUTH STACK, HOLYHEAD ISLAND
THE PIER, BEAUMARIS
THE RABBI AND THE EMPEROR