Part One: Early Times
Nick, small, in the moonlit corridors,
Dreaming the redistribution
Of “old D” dinner money
Taken from Cheeseman’s office*;
The next day, I sit in the dinner hall,
All lunch, my face turned away from mashed potato**;
At the weekend, you refuse to play football
With a group of bovver boys
And liberate us both by charging at their baffled leader;
Later, in a school game,
You refuse to play for me
And walk off;
Tricky.
Separated in secondary school,
My routine sneer forces Banson
To bundle me from the room
While you were the only boy at Dunstan’s
To “take on Narky Jack.”
At times ugly, uncouth, uncivil,
We swore at teachers,
Wrote manifestoes in our heads
And would not be told.
I loved and feared our defiance,
Our rebelliousness,
But I cherished our room together,
The bunks that dad was so proud of,
The religious rocking in the dark,
The quest for “deep” music
And the beginning of the eddying,
Monotonous, wordy,
Pretentious, transcendent,
Night- time conversations,
As two voices merged into one,
Earnest Monks on the brink of explaining
Something,
A Brothers’ Order.
.
Part 2: 50 years later
“Pear upon pear waxes old, and apple on apple, yea, and cluster ripens upon cluster of the grape, and fig upon fig…these were the splendid gifts of the gods in the palace of Alcinöus …… A description of the gardens of Alcinöus, the King of the Phaeacians. (The Odyssey Book VII, Homer).
Stepping off the veranda,
He knots his flaming scarf,
Igniting the day:
Thrush sing, bees hum, pears swell,
Elegant boatmen skitter like a young Nick on a watery dancefloor,
Black poplar branches sway,
Beer and wine cool in a ditch.
Tasks distribute themselves favourably:
Someone to prune
Someone else to mow
Someone to gather
Some sawing, far-off I hope,
A fire to build.
As Marvell said, “How could such sweet and wholesome hours
Be reckoned but with herbs and flowers.”***
Later, tweed is left hanging
On a courteous branch,
An untroubled relative shifts position
And turns a page,
A rabbit pauses.
Tea is served, then dinner,
A fire crackles into life,
Beer and wine appreciate the attention
And gurgle their consent
While round the fire the choir of voices,
Family and friends, youth and age
Celebrate off-grid civility,
A sweet graft onto gnarled stock.
Within all this
An old brotherly antiphony
Assumes the air.
Murmuring between gulps of beer,
Our voices know the way the air flows:
Sometimes clogged with too many words
Sometimes pretentious
(Why not?)
Occasionally fluent, even transcendent
(At least it feels that way under these stars),
We’re finding our place again:
The others have gone to bed,
But, like Wallace Stevens’ pigeons,
Our voices, released long ago,
And with much still to say
“Make ambiguous undulations as they sink,
Downward to darkness on extended wings.”****
.
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*Cheeseman = the headteacher of our primary school
** In a 60s primary school you weren’t allowed to leave food
***Andrew Marvell- The Garden
****Wallace Stevens – Sunday Morning
David Plumeridge May 2022