I never knew my great-grandad
Nor saw what colour hair he had.
I can't be sure what job he did,
If when the rent-man came he hid.
I know that he was never rich
But not if he'd a nervous twitch,
Nor if his teeth were real or false.
I never saw him dance the waltz.
What cigarette brand did he smoke?
I wonder could he crack a joke,
Forget to button up his flies?
I think he must have liked stand pies—
A treat for all in Yorkshire life.
Perhaps he drank and beat his wife.
I must admit, to my great shame,
I can't be certain of his name.
I've only grandad's word for it
That great-grandad was such a shit.
We travelled to Barrow just the once
round so familiar Morecambe Bay
and down the Furness peninsula
through Grange-over-Sands and Ulverston
to inspect the town where granddad was born,
to which his father had come up from Devon
and where he left the clanging shipyards
to train for the gentler craft of baking.
What remains of that overcast day
is not family history, which came later,
but a persistent memory
of a corner café and beans on toast
(white sliced) for family tea.
My father was sailing the ocean,
My father was well out to sea.
A U-boat fired off two torpedoes
And that might have put paid to me.
He came back, came back
My father came back and had me (thank God).
He came back, came back,
Now what are the chances of that?
My dad passed the eleven-plus.
His parents said, that's not for us.
He could have gone to Bradford Grammar.
Became an ironmonger, knew a hammer
From a hawk or handsaw.
I too passed the eleven-plus.
Went to grammar school. No fuss.
On the whole I'm glad I went.
Knew without telling what Hamlet meant—
Because of my dad.
The milkman's horse used to leave
my dad presents.
Galvanised by opportunity, dad collected
the soft warm brown lumps
with a shovel that grated on the tarmac.
Behind the shed was an old water-filled
galvanised dolly-tub into which
my dad stirred the dung to make a brown liquid
with which he filled the screw-on tin reservoir
of a rusting old Flit spray
for pumping over the tomato beds.
When the milkman's milk started to turn,
left too long in green enamel jugs
my mother poured it into a muslin bag
to hang dripping over the sink
to leave a curd cheese residue
that could be eaten with a salad
of sliced tomatoes straight from the vine.
Dad's trade was ironmongery.
He sold mitre blocks to bishops.
He sold saws to dermatologists.
He sold clocks to town halls.
He sold locks to hairdressers
He sold bolts to tailors.
He sold fingerplates to restaurants.
and peelers to policemen.
He sold cups to footballers
and catches to cricketers.
He sold hammers to actors.
He sold pans to critics.
He sold hooks to songwriters
and kettles to timpanists.
He sold doormats to husbands.
He sold planes to airlines.
He sold screws to prisons.
More of an irony-monger really.
We spent still time together, he and I:
two half-hour drives each day, respectively
to work and school. We'd talk of this and that,
or nothing, crossing craggy Pennine moors
to smoky towns. We came to terms, the man
and growing boy, before the parting when
the talking was sporadic, on the phone
and from our separate lives.
And at the end we spent a little time,
a half hour, he and I, near silent now,
unsure on my part if he knew me or,
by his silence and his distant eyes,
determined not to say goodbye, he lay
unreachable except through memory.
And I, surprised, was in the driving seat.
On moving day, the last few straggling pieces
gathered in the last of a hundred boxes,
the final check complete, a last still moment
is captured as the van doors close.
I stand with back to the sink, pocketing
memories that refuse to stay behind.
Although the table where she drank is gone,
the back-lit dust motes crackle
with our energy, not quite spent
these four years on, but now free-floating.
The sharper incidents, suffused with time,
cling in soft focus round our departure.
Three weeks on, my son and I go past the house.
Our doors and windows stacked against the wall,
the bathroom open to the world,
and mounds of plaster barricade the front,
crushing the tulips and the flowering shrubs—
the place that we called home reduced
to bricks and mortar. The best response,
a shrug, does not resolve uneasy hearts.
The crumbled fragments of a family's life,
the screams that rise up from the rubble,
pursue us up the road and into Jacob's dreams
from which he wakes and sobs at midnight.
Next morning on the carpet
beside a pile of entrails there's
a neatly severed head.
We should mount it
on a matchstick
says young Jake
And place it on the ramparts
of the garden wall
to warn other mice.
True craftsmanship must be the sign
Of making edge and corner square
Or else the finished job will not align,
So each stage must be done with care.
For help I call my teenage son;
I'm glad to say he does not shirk.
He knows perfecting skills is fun—
And folding sheets is real men's work.
© David Fisher 1962-2019