BACK IN YOUR SHED

TIME

RING OF RIPPLES

SCENT SENT ME

OPALINE

PLAYING IN THE CRATER

MUSHROOMS

Photo credit and thanks to Emma Jones from Pexels

SPELUNK

Photo credit and thanks to Peter de Vink from Pexels

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.

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

HEATWAVE

You are slanting like light

Across my memory

Colours undimmed

Turquoise and orange of photos

In an album shut since those Seventies summers

Detail gnawed thin by regrets we daren’t revisit.

Thermometer cannot rise to this,

Mercury shimmers, flat figures flickering.

That ladybird plague, the greenfly gorged on every stem

Pets crawling the paths, fur full of wings,

Seeking the refugee shade.

You are parching my tongue

With tears uncried

You are here, even now,

Luminous, crepuscular

You are sunfast.

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.

LOST PROPERTY (Humour/autobiographical)

(Image courtesy of Clipartfest)

Now I'm kept on a short leash by chronic neurological illness, it's easy to romanticise how I used to be a giddy gadabout.

Freedom to
- go on open-ended adventures,
- cycle down hills,
- wander around graveyards scanning masons' chiselled lettering on memorial stones for names of my ancestors,
- go on a summer jaunt to the coast or the capital,
- take a trip to the countryside, a museum, a gallery, a shop full of clocks and mysterious antique curiosities, a West End show, a Wednesday match, a weekend under the stars.

I can't pretend that's freedom I don't miss, even now. I can't just shrug and settle for memories.

Lots of these adventures used to begin at Sheffield Midland Station.

Two occasions spring to mind that have my rosy recollections face-planting with a down-to-earth kind of thud. There were, in reality, times when I wasn't really safe to be let loose on the world!

One of those times, I was in a queue in the main ticket hall at the station. I was juggling my purse, my luggage, a cellphone the size of Scafell Pike, shuffling forwards behind a snake of fellow commuters doing a slouching conga towards the ticket window. Nothing to see here? In fact, I was soon seeing a whole lot less than usual!

Somehow, under the harsh fluorescent strip lighting glaring from the ceiling, my contact lens parted company with my right eye, which was, at the time, attempting to protect itself from the ferocious flicker offensive by pouring out more tears than when Scott and Charlene got married on 'Neighbours' the week before.

I looked down at my chest. I felt gingerly down my front for the prodigal optic. Nothing. I blinked. I squinted. Nothing. At my feet, a sizeable rectangle of jute carpeting at the entrance to the ticket area. I dropped to my knees, feeling about for the recalcitrant lens, narrowly avoiding having my fingers trampled by travel-focused Dr Martens and kitten heels.

I never did find that lens. I wondered for years whether a passenger breaking their journey from Edinburgh Waverley to London St Pancras might some day see a flash of convex glass winking up at them from the Network Rail logo on the matting and wonder who once lost it there.
That would be me.

The second occasion of note at Sheffield Midland was during my days as an undergraduate, shuttling between my parents' home in South Yorkshire and the breezy platform at Leicester, the city where I studied English Lit. Most trains would pass through Nottingham, pulling into the station platform forwards before reversing out as if heading back in the direction from which we had already come. That in itself caused me several heart-stop moments in my greener days.

More than once I'd register the unnerving reversal of direction and leap from my seat to button-hole a passing guard, stammering my fears along the lines of the old Music Hall song 'Oh Mister Porter'; "I want to go to Birmingham and they're taking me to Crewe!" Or, as I imagined, back to Sheffield Midland, thus missing my lecture at Leicester University. The guard would roll his eyes at this common passenger panic trigger:

"Of course you're on the right train, luv. Always happens, you know. Tickets, please!"

It always did happen. I never did get used to it.

I never quite recovered, either, from the moment my last shred of dignity (dignity - what dignity?) fell away on Platform 1 of Sheffield Station circa 1982. The Eighties were a nadir in general due to my vague nods in the direction of fashion. As if corkscrew perms, shoulder pads and blue eye-shadow weren't enough humiliation, there was my underskirt. My pink nylon underskirt with the elasticated waist and the hem of greying lace.

I loved that underskirt. It had done me a lot of service. That underskirt had almost earned its long service medal and retired with a carriage clock and a nice little pension. But before it could rest on its laurels, there was "that incident on Platform 1."

I knew the waistband was getting a little "tired". The elastic wasn't so elastic, any more. That day, as I strolled from the concourse onto Platform 1, I felt a distinct slackening around my midriff. My mid-length skirt covered a multitude of sins. I wasn't certain if it was my knickers, my underskirt, or those 'serviceable' taupe tights that might be threatening to wrinkle around my ankles. I was only aware of an impending sense of doom.

I quickened my steps along Platform 1 towards the Ladies, to snatch a moment of privacy before my train arrived to adjust whatever undergarment was slowly but surely migrating down over my hips.
The passengers on Platform 2, parallel to my platform and adjacent, were obscured, thankfully, I thought, by the length of an intercity train with many carriages.

My underskirt, however, had scented its moment of liberation at that point, and would wait for no man. Or woman. Or, indeed train.

As the elastic finally gave way and the underskirt slumped like a puckered pink wreath around my feet, I followed what now seems an unthinkable impulse to step out of the thing. I did so with some magnificent hauteur, I like to think, or I would have done, if I hadn't almost tripped over its loop of textile smugness as I strode on towards the shelter of the conveniences just as the intercity locomotive pulled away from Platform 2, leaving me exposed to the gaze of all humanity.

I know I missed my own train before I finally re-emerged, hoping my audience on Platform 2 had dispersed to their various onward destinations.

No. I didn't stoop to scoop up the forlorn underskirt. It may still be there, along with my lost right contact lens, in the great Lost Property Office of memory, or imprinted on the traumatised mind's eye of some unfortunate punter on the 2.47 to Bristol Temple Meads.

MY DAD: BORN THIS DAY 1924

Today would have been my dad's 93rd birthday.

He isn't here to celebrate it with us, but we remember him with love through the years.

Dad died at 65, 20 years after suffering a series of massive strokes at 45 (or as the doctor airily insisted to my mum, who knew only too well what had happened, "It's just a touch of bad bronchitis, Mrs Barrass!"). The doctor walked out of my parents' bedroom that day, leaving my mum bereft and alone with the obvious lie that my dad had merely a bit of a chest infection, even though his speech was slurred and he was weakly doing the opposite of every action, pushing away when he should be pulling towards, spilling when he should be holding steady.

Only a second opinion brought diagnosis, but soon the ambulances were on strike and he was forgotten for much of the time he should have been fetched to physiotherapy. Such were the times at the dawn of the 1970s. The strokes left him permanently disabled and unable to do anything without support. For many things he most loved, that meant not enjoying them at all, ever again.

At 8, I saw the happy, strong, capable, funny dad who used to stand on his head to make me laugh and gave me fireman's lifts till I was hysterical with giggles, turn overnight into a stranger who struggled to make himself understood by slowly spelling out words on my old toy chalkboard with magnetic letters, choked at almost every meal and lived in a huge hospital-issue iron bed in our tiny front room with calipers, pulleys, feeding cups, commodes, canes and humiliating helplessness.

No more running down the path, past the freight weighing shed, across the yard, along the platform to meet him at the little station at the bottom of our garden where he worked as head porter and shunter. No more that thrill of hearing the purring crescendo of the engine of his motorbike as he arrived at the school gates to whisk me off home or on some impromptu adventure in the Yorkshire countryside.

Dad overseeing my first steps on the lawn

But that happy, strong, capable, funny dad was still inside that often child-like, stubborn stranger as I learned to understand, growing up in the shadow of his loss of freedom and dignity. So many things remind me of him with thankfulness: maps, bikes, unplanned picnics, cherry genoa cake, corned beef sandwiches with brown sauce, trifle, playing patience, silly black-and-white movies, radio comedy, pit ponies, mystery outings in the motorbike-and-sidecar, steam trains, railways, picking the second favourite in horse races on TV, the spiral staircase up Hooton Pagnell church tower, watching the wrestling and scrambling and snooker, tinkering with things, laughter with crinkled-up eyes.

Me & Dad near Filey, c1965

My next book, Cloudhover Solstice, is dedicated to him, set in the places on the beautiful Yorkshire Coast my dad loved and which, without him, I might never have discovered or laid down such treasured memories that keep him alive in my heart. I could go on, but I'll just say:

"Happy Birthday, Dad! We love you and we'll never forget!"

Dad & his only child - yours truly, 1961

My dad, porter at Bolton-on-Dearne railway station in the last days of steam.
Quintessential Yorkshireman and a decent, lovely lad.

WHERE I GREW UP

Bolton-on-Dearne in the old West Riding of Yorkshire's Dearne Valley, in the railway cottages in the 60s, just in case you were wondering! 😂

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/