BACK IN YOUR SHED

COME AGAIN

AND FAMILY

BORN IN THE LOCKDOWN

WAITING FOR PERMISSION

UNWOVEN WONDERS

STARING INTO FLAMES

GROWN-UP THINGS

ST ELLEN'S

PLAYING IN THE CRATER

REMOTE

Photo credit and thanks: Tookapic & Pexels

And in plainer text for those who struggle with certain font colours:

REMOTE

You scan the flat horizon

Flinging your arms at one with the waving tree;

Following fluff and fleece, eyes wonder-wide,

Dreaming tickle of fur on nosetip

Thrill of cuddle and throb

You giggle at this 

Gambolling gallery

Flush with the wall

Cavorting in HD

Colours bright 

As pixels can paint.

You spread your arms

To scoop and squeeze

Scampering into your flock

But your knuckles knock 

At a cold hard screen.

Window on worlds

Or fabricating fibber?

You sob exasperation.

Remote in hand,

In heart, remoter.

CLIMACOPHOBIA

Photo credit & thanks to:  eberhard grossgasteiger from Pexels

(Climacophobia: a fear of climbing stairs)

Playing statues at the apex of the pinnacle
Of the top of the 'big' slide,
At watering eye-level
With the trunks of poplars.
Except I'm not playing.
Behind me, below me, bump and shove,
Other kids wait-not-waiting their turn,
Impatient to glide back down the shining
Ribbon of glissando,
The squealing slither
Coasting casual on belly or bum.

But there is this trembling 
Stopper in the bottleneck.

I stoop frozen. Jelly leggy. Sweaty.

On some school trip, half way up
Cathedral, windmill, tower, steeple,
Sickening spirals
Jostlers barging,
Climbing contrariwise
Over pocked medieval puddles
In slippery stone.

Or those awful public spaces
Gaping mockery of open plan
Steps with no vertical risers,
Daylight jeering between each tread,
While I steel myself
To bumble down on buttocks,
Blushing cheeks ablaze.

Don't go up one rickety rung
If you daren't come down again.
Life lessons learnt.

Down was always the killer,
The handrail from hell,
The hanging back,
The stepping off
Into cataclysmic abyss,
Vertigo's tunnel
Spinning and pitching.
She who hesitates is lost
In fathomless undercrofts,
Cellars and cryptic crypts.

Bless you, O bless you, terra firma!
I live to kiss the ground.

NEXT TO THE SKIN

Photo credit with thanks: Kaboompics .com from Pexels

I still can’t bear

To wear wool

Next to my skin.

Thanks for that,

Family holiday

Fifty years gone.

A draughty caravan.

The east coast cliffs.

My new white woolly

Jumper with the roll neck

That nearly pulled off

My ears, dragging it

Over my head.

My occipital bone

Would emerge with a pop.

The hand-me-down sweater

Had shrunk in the wash

Squidging my puppy fat

In its greasy cable-pattern

Straitjacket.

Whooping cough

Mixed with pitch-and-putt,

Primrose Puffer,

Smell of rockpool.

My chest disembodied

With hot racking peffs.

Tinned vegetable soup,

Comfort food

That brought no comfort.

I suppose the vomiting

Was already written

In the stars and salty

Tide-charts.

Anyway, it happened.

Suddenly.

The arm of my woolly

Wasn’t quite so white, now.

Fever made the memory,

The touch of wool, distort

Into a nightmare loop,

Stiff itchy filaments

Squeezing my soreness

Rubbing me raw

With every rasp

Tickling, tingling,

Pinching.

 Two years later

At a party,

Under the table

I ate too many

Of those controversial

Chocolate dunkables

Sponge and hidden

Orange jelliness.

Cake or biscuit?

I had to be sure!

Greed not pertussis

My nemesis this time,

Again I was sick.

It only put me off

For a half a day.

If that.

(But still I won’t wear wool.)

SWINGTIME 1963

Buttery sun slants through the nets
Bootees kick into light
Dad’s dependable shunter’s palms
Guide to-and-fro at my back
Terpsichore clock hours bouncing blissful
From Bill Haley’s vinyl track
On the scarlet-lidded Dansette

Toddler pendulum, Dad rocks me

From kitchen cool to living room warmth

Up, lifting, back, forward, toes pointed,

Flying gaspy giggles, you trying to sing,

Floor tilts with subsidence

From mine-shafts burrowing

Blind moles under our valley

Dropped pencils roll from the south

Towards our cramped back yard

Its draughty outhouse, crunchy coalhole

Steam train rings on rails

Shudders the triangular under-the-stairs

Vibrates my heart-space with its presence

I don’t recall the Kennedy shock

When all the world stood still

Knowing where they were,

What they were doing.

I was ready already 

For the Moon landing.

How quickly it came, like the end

To my sixties swinging

Earthbound then soaring through stardust

Orbiting before the plummet

Two years later, back on the ground,

I run my fingers over those hooks

Either side the jamb painted magnolia

Echoes of where I swung without cares

Where hospital bed now fills the room

With its pulleys and chrome

When the dark blood clot moved into ours

While I was sleeping

And ate my daddy alive.

OUT OF THE MOUTHS OF BABES

“You may call it ‘brown’ but I call it Burnt Umber.”

The things we come out with when we’re kids! Cute stuff. Cringeworthy stuff. Stuff we can’t remember saying, except from tales told about us by grown-ups years later.

I produced the piece of pedantry quoted above when I was about six. Our neighbour, a man in his forties, fresh home from his shift on the railway, had casually remarked,

“That’s a nice brown you’ve got there!”

when he saw me enthusiastically using my new watercolour paints to depict the bark of a tree. I loved daubing. I adored words even more, even then. Loved the shape and texture of the sounds. Loved the feel of saying stretchy vowels and delicious diphthongs that made special patterns and flavours in my imagination.

I was such a polite kid, too. I wouldn’t generally say ‘boo’ to the proverbial goose. But I knew when there was a fantastic magical proper name for something, especially when it rolled mysteriously off the tongue like this “Burnt Umber” then I sure as heck was going to say it.  And encourage others, including adults, to join in. Enter our neighbour.

I look back in horror to think how priggish and precocious I must have sounded. My mum assures me the neighbour laughed like a drain and wasn’t at all offended. He knew I wasn’t a cheeky kid as a rule. It was just that, being me, I’d learned by heart all the special exotic-sounding names on the labels in my new paintbox. Raw Sienna. Ultramarine. Cobalt Blue. Yellow Ochre. Vermilion. Burnt Umber.

If something didn’t already have a marvellous moniker, I wasn’t averse to making one up for it, either. I would go on errands to the local Post Office to purchase a “Post Lauder” as it was in my head when I asked for it at the counter, or “Postal Order” as the rest of the unenlightened populace called it. “Terrid” was my infant mangling of “terrible” and “horrid.” My cousin assures me that when I was little, I used to insist the small rectangular block of wood at either end of our piano keyboard was, and I quote, the “tisstop”. Don’t even ask. 

Somewhere not very deep below my placid exterior, even now, the voice of that pintsized pedagogue and would-be word-wrangler is still biting its tongue. Most of the time. Nearly sixty years later, the memory of the “Burnt Umber” controversy incident still has me blushing brighter than a brushful of Cadmium Red!

SAMPLING GRANDDAD'S (RAW) CAULIFLOWERS

Exploring cauliflower

In granddad’s allotment

Chubby fingers

Tug at cream-colour lobes

Feel bulge and node loosen

Raise cool crumbs to my lips

To nibble. Nibble.

Too shy to spit but gurning

Its attachment to its lurking roots

Its petty refusal to taste right

Triggers shudders.

How could it betray me?

How could it have fooled my granddad?

I’d had cauli for dinner,

Back at home

With garden peas from a tin,

Stewing steak from the butcher

Taties with a sprig of mint

That grew itself obligingly

From every crack in our back yard.

Cauli was never this monstrous

Grubby soil-flavoured thing!

That moment of raw let-down!

Gripe water tasted better!

Clambering back in the sidecar

Dad on the motorbike

Out of the perspex window

Kicking the starter

Till it farted into throb

Purring us home across the valley

The melting moon

Dodging behind the pit wheels

The sunlight turning salmon

On the outhouse wall

The flour-white dust of salt

Icing the bricks like kali*

The longing to lick it

To take the taste away

*  Kali is a local name used in 1960s Yorkshire for fizzy sweet sherbet powder sold as a dip for lollipops or liquorice

TELLING THE TEACHER

Standing by the nature table in your classroom,

Ruckled landscapes of gingham,

Jars of startled lemon trumpets,

Scent of binka and little accidents,

("Who's made a naughty smell?")

Squeak and slough of wax crayon,

Conkers in autumn

Pussy willow in spring.

Stroking fragility,

Sniffing the furry,

Twirling my tongue

One snowy playtime

To taste the fluster and fizz

Falling from forever.

That fossil hiding in the wall,

Ripples of secret aeons

Between the Infants' and Juniors'!

 Coaxed by your compendium of buds and birthing

My eyes, my heart stretched to take it all in,

The wonder of this world,

In music and motion.

We'd made it to the Moon,

Lived a whole decade in our skins

Made collages of how we might dress

In that thing called future,

Rubber-glueing chain mail of foil and button

On sugar paper, chubby fingers

Skipping in glitter,

Imagining.

We could never have dreamed,

We babes of the boom,

Your weekday words 

Whispering down all our tomorrows,

Rhythmic reminders

You are still somehow

Incurved nurture round our eggshell childhoods,

Tender to tease us out of ourselves,

Believing in us

Till we could

Believe in ourselves.

THE WINTER OF '63

The winter of '63 was the first winter I really remember as a toddler, growing up in the Dearne Valley, Yorkshire in the north of England.

I thought they would all be like this - the coldest winter of the 20th century. 

I remember the snow banked up the side of our house as high as the top of the downstairs windows; the snow falling in through the back door when my dad came home from work at the station, the frozen rails and the steam from the trains in the icy air; the adventures of making snowmen, snow dogs, snow lambs, snow horses, snow igloos, snow angels; the icicles hanging from the back of the coal-house, the outside loo freezing up and the chill of the tin bath we had hanging from a nail in the back yard; the ice inside the bedroom windowpanes, with no central heating but a smelly paraffin heater upstairs; the cloak of silence over the valley as it muffled the pit hooters, the crunch of feet through the village, the bleak singing of the birds in the frozen hedgerows. 

The excitement and anticipation and sheer wonder at this world of whiteness was overwhelming, untainted by dread and disappointment, with slush and slippy rinks of treacherous thaw an unknown thing for the future. 

ATTIC

When I was little, I dreamed of writing in a magical attic.

I dreamed of just having an attic!

Back then, in Railway Cottages, painted Railway Green with Railway-regulation paint, we didn't have one. No attic to go writing and dreaming in. Only a dusty cockloft where my dad would store those once-a-year, just-in-case household items, reachable only by adults, only by ladder. Only an outside loo and a coal-shed of similar compact dimensions in our little yard, where the zinc bath hung from the brickwork, the bath we filled with kettle-and-panfuls of boiling water the night before school.

But I wrote all the time. On the dining table. On the three-legged tipsy stool my granddad made. On the dressing table surrounded by scary mirrors that made you look every which way into the shadows in the corners in the fading lemon light. On my lap. On the couch in the front room with the big light on before tea. In my bedroom. In the garden, where steam trains whooshed by and sometimes sizzled to a stop at our branch line station, spiriting my imagination away to wondrous unknown horizons beyond our valley.

I was writing my world a word at a time but still I would dream of my writing attic. Was it out there, lonely, waiting for me?

I dreamed the Moon would peep in through the little window set into the roof, peeking encouragingly at my scribblings. The sparrows would twitter in their cosy nests under the eaves, urging me on to tell them stories.

I've lived in many houses, many manses, flats, digs and dives since those dreams first melted into maybe.

Then one day, illness sneaked up, smacked my hands off the wheel of working, dismantled my strength, drained my batteries, clogged my muscles and bones with rubbery uneven pain, fogged my clarity, burgled me of my old whirlwind of energy, pickled my possibilities.

I moved here, forcibly retired with half my life still not written.

A little rented house in a village where woods, streams, fields and wandery ways have crept close enough for me to visit them on my better days. A garden full of flowers that imagine themselves into colourful calendars of the passing seasons. Eaves laden with sparrows and a clear southern view to track the Moon sashaying her catwalk arc towards the west.

And guess what else was waiting here for me?

My attic.

My writing space. My rooftop chamber of dreams.

I feel so blessed. I feel its joy, its sigh of relief surrounding me as I write.

I hope I was as worth its wait!

For my long-vanished twin: song of a wombtwin survivor

Vanished twin, I still miss you.

I love you.

You are always with me and always have been.

You always will be, treasured twin of my heart.

Wombtwin survivor, born an only child.

I dreamed you and felt you deep in my gut in unspoken places. I asked about you. I traced you with my feelings and fears, my missing piece. 

Together we were “fearfully and wonderfully made” in mum's womb. Conceived together in love. Awaited with expectation, trepidation, excitement.

“I have to tell you, you might be expecting twins!”

That first appointment, when the midwives palpated mum's stomach to find out about us, they caught the whisper of both of us, in the fragile fluid that cradled us in our amniotic sacs.

No ultrasound in 1961. No man on the moon. No TV in our house. The steam trains thundering by at the bottom of the garden. But you know that. You were there, where you were meant to be. A heartbeat away with your heart that never saw the light of that October morning when I broke through, head first, large domed skull, tearing mum's tenderness, away from you.

I'm so sorry you couldn't come with me. But thank you that I carried you out with me, unseen as mist, like a deep taste of the ocean beyond and the constellations above us, pricking out radiance through the autumn sky. That you let me live.

I smelled you in the bonfires and heard you in the crunch of the autumn leaves, I know I did. Even though words would not reach you. I tasted you in the exciting glow of those early birthday candles that lit the front room in our cottage when the world was dark by five o'clock. The sweetness of icing and the creaking polished stability of the old sideboard.

Those mirrors, the space between the bubbles in the bath water, always gave me a rush of terror. Reflecting lightbulbs. Kicking away stability like the sky was rushing in and I was marooned on another planet. In my panic I closed my eyes. Was I afraid not to see you there, mirroring me? Half a century later I still tilt the mirrors down where they can't mock me that you're still not here.

From the earliest days I was always fantasising being other people. Usually characters that caught my imagination. I had a whole invisible galaxy of animals who were my invisible friends. To understand people I became them. I always have. Acting out in my mind the actions and reactions of others. Whole families of children named every breathtaking beautiful name I knew, and some I didn't.

Telling stories as I waved grasses quietly in my hands where nobody could watch me, down our garden, behind dad's garage. Singing songs that never ended. I was caught in the world where you should have been to play the other part. I needed nobody else, though they seemed to require my presence. I was happy alone. Because you were filling the lack like a swan's bent neck staring back from the glassy pond at it's happy image.

Once in my teens, on a bus, I heard a baby cry. Somewhere deep inside, in the quivering place in my stomach, I heard a baby's cry, on and on, that refused to be comforted. Sadness that went so deep it was a tear that couldn't mend itself. I know that was you. Part of me, but wholly other. My mirror and soulmate from the first day I breathed in life's potential.

“Are you in pig?”

That hurt my mum. Some drunken bloke mouthing off near the Horse and Groom, in drink and seeing her pregnant. Were you already absorbed into the warm silence, by then? I feel so protective to you and mum. That was ok for me, but not for you two. I wonder if you heard that?

We would have been inseparable. Sampling Granddad's cabbages down his allotment. Making him think of his mum and his younger brothers, each of them with their twindom that had shaped his own consciousness, running across the summer fields and over the stiles towards Hoyland at the end of Victoria's reign.

You weren't in the physical world to share dad's bike with him, the man things, the boy simplicities, direct and compelling and blunt. So inside I was both daughter and son, girl and boy. I never wanted to coddle dolls or dress up like a queen. I loved the wild outdoors and knowing and naming every plant, creature and corner of the landscape. The places we would have explored together, I investigated and claimed for both of us.

I saw the pegs and the line and put more and more pegs in. Extra and over till the line was heavy and full with wood, like so many birds on a wire. Some for me and some for you. Because I didn't have you to play with. Yet in my soul I did, somehow.

We were conceived in January. Maybe somewhere in the middle of the month when the nights were freezing. Those old sash windows, they used to get ice on the inside and when snow came it drifted half way up the yard wall on the entry side and huge icicles hung from the back of our outhouses where the outside toilet pipes dripped. By Easter, I guess you were gone to all intents and purposes. But not to me.

When I was little, I dreamed about a little dog who would be my shadow, to be with me like you should have been with me. I met him when I was thirty six and he was perfect. My little man. The dog I saw in my dreams all those years ago. Just as you are real to me, as if you had been born fifty years ago, holding my heel or me grasping your fingertips, sibling and sister.

I always craved a soulmate. But in reality nobody can carry that and not be your twin. They would always fall short or be smothered, or misunderstand that need for wordless symbiotic merging. You are my other half and you have never left me, not for a moment. I cannot need somebody else like I needed you, so I am still that singleton. Whole apart, yet wholly partial, filling in my own silent blanks, making my own peace out of the chaos of our brokenness.

Some words say things for us. We understand them with our spirit.

I hear the words of this song that Leona Lewis sings and it says so much of how I miss you, it always makes me cry from that deep wound you left when you lost the fight to be fully formed. I'm so sorry I flourished because you stepped back into the still sea of before. But I know I can and must survive this, strengthened eternally now by our twinship, by the love and healing tenderness of our Maker, for which I will be thankful every day of the remainder of my life.

“RUN” -words by Snow Patrol, sung by Leona Lewis around 2009 when my beloved pet dog died, bringing up all these age old feelings. Here I am, singing this my way, for my vanished twin as I move on without him.

I'll sing it one last time for you
Then we really have to go
You've been the only thing that's right
In all I've done

And I can barely look at you
But every single time I do
I know we'll make it anywhere
Away from here

Light up, light up
As if you have a choice
Even if you cannot hear my voice
I'll be right beside you dear

Louder louder
And we'll run for our lives
I can hardly speak I understand
Why you can't raise your voice to say

To think I might not see those eyes
Makes it so hard not to cry
And as we say our long goodbye
I nearly do

Light up, light up
As if you have a choice
Even if you cannot hear my voice
I'll be right beside you dear

Louder louder
And we'll run for our lives
I can hardly speak I understand
Why you can't raise your voice to say

Light up, light up
As if you have a choice
Even if you cannot hear my voice
I'll be right beside you dear

Louder louder
And we'll run for our lives
I can hardly speak I understand
Why you can't raise your voice to say

http://www.wombtwin.com/