Doff your cap, Toe the line, Do a good job, Know your place, Speak when spoken to, Don’t talk back, keep mum, Be reliable Hold your knife properly, Don’t leave the table until told to, Watch your step, March in time, Defer to your betters, Salute the flag, Be punctual, Do a good job, Never argue, Be polite, Bow, Scrape, Be invisible.
If you do not do as you are told you have…
A chip on your shoulder, Are bitter, Difficult A maverick A born troublemaker An outsider A thief Or worse Political
Sparkling green walls covered in frosted webs A thousand hedges grid-locked our estate at dawn October school-runs on foot, lawns damp with dew We’d strip privet sticks and collect them in loops
One web on top of another until a sticky shivering Vibrated in our hands, dew running down stalk to palm. We knew nothing then, spun our own stories as we traipsed Slowly toward a school playground fuzzy with chalk
Circles on walls, boards, exercise books and balls Punctured and hiding below those spun nets The exhaled breaths of football careers not yet dead We curved balls endlessly at bare walls
They came back every time,thuds ricocheting Against the garage walls our only release Drum n Bass lives before we knew the words Stamping out glam rock tunes in our heads
Now the lawns and hedges torn up turned to gravel Commuter belt rentals cars packed in like terraces Nothing breathing just dead ground that floods easily The earth covered and the dreams we had floating away
Over the hedges, nets, lawns like vapour trails Heading west to unknown futures no longer there.
A new boy in my old bedroom repeats an overhead kick On a digital platform. Dreams of escape as a ball lands in a net. Cannot hear the milk train on the loop.
Ignores far sirens and sticky hands cradling the dead.
The Loop:
The London – Oxford railway line bypasses my hometown of Didcot on a single track known as ‘The Loop’ to thirteen year old trainspotters…
He needed to talk to someone. It happened to be us. His rolled tobacco slipped from his fingers as he went over events fifty years before. The harbour, Singapore, thunder circling and lightning flashing across the sea. A merchant navy man, sitting on deck with his mates, watching a free show. ‘lf they’s could only ‘arness that energy’.
The same bar two hours later. Someone else who wanted to talk but blocked by E’s, drunk, it came in staccato bursts, the sense, mouthed through a vocabulary borrowed from rap, rave and T.V. Eighteen, jobless, staring through glass at a wet car park, he rocks gently like a ship stuck in harbour.
Improbable squares, steel-framed frogs hopping from aerodrome to aerodrome through an emulsion sky, wool clouds. You could hear them from miles away before they’d flash over the barn and into my wide open six-year old eyes.
Other times they dissolved through the outhouse plastic corrugated roof into distorted birds that rattled like boxes as they headed south travelling so low and slow as if weighted down by air.
Sometimes two would appear together flickering through the tall roses as I clung to the wooden fence head hung back, off balance. l tried to read the letters and numbers painted on the dull grey fuselage.
I imagined them picking up our house. Slotting the wooden walls, corrugated plastic, roof slates and felt, windows, my mother washing clothes in clouds of steam, even our spaniel and me and spinning us all into whiteness.
My first six years I lived in a wooden clapboard house on top of a hill near Wittenham Clumps. We were under the flight-path of Benson aerodrome which is why these aircraft had a profound affect on me.
Below and to my right from this window a Volvo lorry crunches gear shredded leaf, dust and gravel trickles from bumper and wheel-arch. The digging of the new pool has been going on now for two weeks. Yellow digger-buckets mouth the park’s soil and turf into lorries that rumble off, indicators flashing, down dusty A-roads to tip their loads as land-fill or as embankment on the new trunk road.
I used to swim badly across the old pool that’s been demolished splashing a clumsy trail from three to six-foot but no further. Now a JCB arm is swinging deeper than the best then could dive clanking engines and carbon fumes replacing yells and splutters. Pale teenagers, we swarmed round a tin and hardboard kiosk where we’d buy ice-cream speared with flakes every summer.
Now sub-contractors, mis-managers and bankrupts delay completion. Keep us waiting for a false vision of the sea in middle England. Meanwhile every other council-painted door has a fresh veneer and satellite-dishes mark the newly affluent from the newly poor. Communal flats have been knocked down, replaced by home ownership whilst the council chambers echoed to private sector linkage.
Down the road kids clutch change that grows sweaty and sticky as the division between white and blue collars frays at the edges. The water is milky like a disinfectant bath, ice-cream melting. Every Friday my school class fizzed in that copper sulphate pool. Some from that class dived into the eighties, came out with coins but others still stumble round the wire slaked in mud and urine.
From Landmine Poems 1992-1996
This is an old poem that was never published it was too political, too edgy, too working class in the early 1990’s. To fit into a poetry world dominated by the white middle-class in those days took a certain amount of camouflaging.. some blended in well like Armitage always cloaking their politics ( after all he was a probation officer when I met him hardly a radical occupation).
I resigned myself to being an outlier in poetry then and frankly little changed…This poem was about the slow spread of corruption that started with the council house sell-off…..land-owning became a badge of the new right. It mattered not that many got left behind or that the environment was trashed as long as the showers of gold trickled down to.. well the gutter.
I stole Mr Parr’s photo he will not mind he owes me one for a favour I did later and it the perfect image of a country on brink of selling its soul.
We all went diving for change in broken fountains….
“Never knew what hit them , the impact must have been tremendous to have left that much blood on the road, looked like it had exploded”.
My father talking about the accident. One side of the car had caved right in and there was a bloodstain twenty yards long across both sides of the road.
“What was left of the deer was laid on the grass like a sack of bones”.
Ten days later.
In the same kitchen he is gingerly fingering row upon row of tiny pink pills.
“Everybody’s on them these days” My mother says, trying to lighten the road ahead.
But we could all see what he could see.
Moving through the trees.
His mother heart failure 65. His mother’s father heart attack 65.
Right now I prefer not to look too far ahead. But I can feel movement deep in the forest of arteries and veins. Something unseen and unexpected pushing out..
Toward the lights.
Addendum: This poem was written in 1991 my father remained in good health until 2002 when at the age of 70 he was diagnosed with advanced pancreatic cancer and died in 2004.
Another poem from my back pages. From an overall collection called
You lying exhausted in another room, me taping, trying to drag some of the past with me. Three stories up in West London I think of old friends, forgotten journeys and the cracked ceiling reminds me of ice and cars swish beyond the stained curtains.
You say I never talk, never explain things clam-up, freeze-up, a tight-lipped Englishman. You should have tried talking to my father and his step-father, stood in a field mid-winter. Tried catching a word as snow blurred the hills and kept the rooks clinging to the high trees.
Cold as winter cattle, boots white with frost they’d say nothing, just stamp chilblained feet and whistle the dog back to the track they knew lay under six inches of fresh snow. Their maps were in their heads. Now I clear mine and stumble on the edge of a new path.
Forgive me my sullen silences, my outbursts at years of missed chances, frustrations, laziness. Tonight there is no spate water froze across meadows, no fields buried under six foot drifts, yet I can feel the words tugging at me wanting to arc a white half-acre unleased.
Another poem from my back pages. London 1992.
From an overall collection called Landmine Poems 1992-1996
No not a reference to Sergeant Pepper that was 20 but out of curiosity here an unseen poem from 1991. Ah, but I was so much older then I’m younger than that now..
ENGLAND SWINGS
Soho doorway, December ’66 sleet melting on daisy-patterned plastic raincoat, seeping to salt lines up purple suede slip-ons Her front teeth bite her bottom lip as she shivers, flicks her fringe, and waits for a Mini-Cooper S to arrive in a spray of slush, Boutique lights flash in chrome wheels splattered with ice, laced with tinsel.
Saturday morning, December ’86 she stands outside her mum’s semi as her hubby shifts furniture out. Cascades of bills, snaps, cards fall from a draw into the dustbin. Then a photo of her at 17 surfaces from the layers of 20 years. Bobbed hair, raincoat against chequers, she is staring, unwed into space as flecks of snow speck the black lid.
Shaun Belcher was born Oxford, England in 1959 and brought up on a down-land farm before moving to a council estate in the small town of Didcot in 1966 just as England won the world cup..
He studied fine art at Hornsey College of Art, London from 1979–81 where he sat under a tree with Adrian Mitchell.
Began writing poetry in the mid 1980s and subsequently has been published in a number of small magazines and a poem 'The Ice Horses' was used as the title of the Second Shore Poets Anthology in 1996.(Scottish Cultural Press).
He now lives in Nottingham, England after two years in Edinburgh studying folk culture and several years in the city of expiring dreams working as a minion at the University of Oxford.
He is currently enjoying retirement from 20 years of teaching and hopes to write something on a regular basis again. He has been involved in various literary projects including delivering creative writing workshops in Nottingham prison for the ‘Inside Out’ project.
He supports Arsenal football club.
Favourite colours therefore red and green like his politics.
We have not won the world cup again since 1966 and Shaun Belcher is not as famous as Simon Armitage although his songs are better.