From My Home Encyclopaedia:
I have a vague memory of my father, pot-bellied and seemingly a torso
with an assumption of legs, but led to bed, assisted by my mother as
politeness would say, approximately drunk, as a swaying object
somewhere about the fourth year of my reign.
In our small flat. Which appeared to possess a hall of sorts, like
the illusion of perspective, bridging the between of the two bedrooms
(the smaller, mine; the larger, theirs) and the living-room (ours)
which was where, in stage terms, the language claimed we acted out our
lives.
He does not then seem to appear for years, though for sure he too
lived with us. He had to do something called work, by day, which was
distant (sometimes two bus rides away) and alien, as unlike as Welsh,
and at nights was required by the pub, where George met the Dragon,
the union, and his mates. Which my mother condemned, for the drink.
But the plain and ever-present fact of his absence she did not
protest. Otherwise, he must have inhabited that same mist that covers
so much of my early (and more recent) memories.
I think he recurred when I measured eight, as I recall an evening
before the still-then coal-fire, a glowing snugly winter's evening,
when my mother urged and urged me to mock his nose (its largeness) his
tea (its undrinkability) his friends (their smell) his importance (its
littleness). That fades, and I am sitting on the floor and he is high
and seated above me but mumbling in a voice he tells me means that he
was born elsewhere, not, God forbid, here, mumbling all his funny
(unfunny) stories of his childhood, of crowding with brothers and
sisters round a pot yum-yumming at the prospect of stewed peel of
potatoes and apple-rind, of his trousers damp from the wash that
stank, of horse-shitten cobbled streets, of fresh milk in churns, of
playing with hot coals in braziers, swinging them faster and faster
around in an arc from his bare knees to his head and he laughs again,
his out of place, living in his own world, alone and loveless at the
hearth at the heart of his family, laugh.
And I can retrieve too a Saturday and a day-trip on the Midland Red
through Tewkesbury (where we stopped for toast) and Upton-on-Severn
(where from the upper-deck I watched how the river looped about the
houses like a noose about to close) and Evesham, with all its
close-packed churches, of which I remember nothing.
And, too, I can re-stock a road by a beach-front at Rhyl (it might
have been) or Weston or somewhere else to the west and on the coast
again, walking between and joined to their hands and sensing people,
adult people, (my parents) for this time at least together, smiling.
And a restaurant where we ate plaice. Or sole.
And once seeing him cry, from the numb cold of his bricklaying
hands, that fed us all, in the bitter world that was his alone and
winter.
--
David Bircumshaw
Website and A Chide's Alphabet http://homepage.ntlworld.com/david.bircumshaw/
The Animal Subsides http://www.arrowheadpress.co.uk/books/animal.html
Leicester Poetry Society: http://www.poetryleicester.co.uk
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