Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
Paris, 1920
The treaty was signed in the Exhibition Room,
overseen by Marie Antoinette’s
dinner service. Like porcelain owls’ eyes,
they were witnesses of the delegates’ harsh
geometry, the fretwork jigsaw of desk
wallahs – Ottoman Mesopotamia
become modern Syria and Iraq.
Gertrude Bell was one of the delegates:
daughter of a philanthropic iron master;
Oxford graduate like T.E. Lawrence;
cartographer, mountaineer, linguist;
archaeologist, administrator,
public servant;
Dreamily among the leaves, uneasily,
in my age, up a shining ladder
I am plucking plums – discarding those
rotten, prune-like encrusted with sugar,
or pecked at by passing tits and dunnocks.
I pass the whole, ripe ones down carefully
to my granddaughter, who holds her bowl
high as she can. You look on, pleased for us both
and concerned. Later you will place the blushed plums
in a wide shallow dish of the deepest red
adorned with foliage –
And suddenly there, through the high sash window,
is a rainbow – lit by the westward sun –
from behind the church and over the park’s
leafless, lichened trees to the gated, faith school.
This is the season of illusion and sleight
of hand; the season of the braying bluster
of blinkered donkeys spooked by mayhem
in a cathedral city; the season
of the wet slap of the laundering of money
on the banks of the gun metal Thames;
The simple memorial of slate and part
of a propeller was relocated
from the mountainous North Stack, where the plane crashed,
a mile to sea level in the Holyhead
Breakwater Country Park. The US
B24 Liberator bomber
was based at Valley ten miles away.
Returning from a radar jamming raid
over Northern France in very bad weather
the B24 overflew and, making
a re-approaching circuit, ran out of fuel.
Believing the aircraft was over land
the pilot ordered the eight non-commissioned
crew members to bail out.
Our felucca tacked across the river Nile
to Aswan from Kitchener’s Island –
with its well watered botanical gardens
and its straight boulevards of tall palm trees –
gifted to Lord Kitchener of Khartoum,
pre Great War, as Egypt’s Consul-General.
As we approached the east bank, out of nowhere
it seemed, a boy appeared along side us
in a small zinc bath paddling with his hands
and singing, “‘Michael, row the boat ashore!
Hallelujah!’” – the old slave song learned then turned,
In more civilised days we might have appeared
on Wilfred Pickles’ radio show
‘Have A Go!’ and when he asked our age
and we told him he would say, ‘Seventy five,
ladies and gentlemen!’ and they would applaud,
and, before he asked ‘What’s on the table, Mable?’
and instructed ‘Give them the money, Barney!’,
he would ask how long we had been married –
more applause – and then he would ask us,
in his warm, BBC Yorkshire voice,
for the secret of our years of wedded bliss.
THE ROPE SWING
THE ROPE SWING
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