Reading:
It - Four instances I The Five Ten local ghosted into Platform Two, Valves lifting as the engine passed where I was standing. White mist. White noise. Hot vapour shrouds the overbridge. Blinded in the clammy fog I groped and turned to face The Up line where the track curves north toward St. Kew And dreamed my father might be coming on the evening train. But the engine had moved on. The suffocating cloud had gone And I could see once more what was always clear before: That wishing never did move mountains Let alone my parents stuck in London in the war. Evacuation… for the duration… this cruel and endless separation… (The last train to be steam-hauled chuntered down to Bodmin Station.) He could not know it but my father’s final journey Would be home-bound too. In the guards van Reclining in a coffin with the wrong name on. Cars park now where Platform One once ran. Back then, aged all of nine, I think, ‘This can’t be it’. II No buildings yet on that Ionian shore near Metapontum. She in her bikini, Nereid beyond the mysteries of Pythagoras Who, three thousand years before, had set up shop just down the road. Quite alone, the parboiled tourists long departed for the North and home, Only footprints half-obliterated by the on-shore breeze Remained to tell the tale of heaving August. Ombrelloni packed away, recliners stacked between A half a dozen bleached and blistered beach huts. Fine stagione. ‘How soon will it be ours?’ I mused aloud. She turned away, ‘Oh, come on we’re on holiday.’ And so we walked along the water’s edge Rejoicing we had lived to see this place before its pines were felled And concrete covered sedge. I think, ‘Yes. This is it!’ III I got up each day and went to work to shovel trivia across a desk. Another week, another term, another Academic Year. Then one summer day it was my time to go. Teaching was good fun. But the PR side was fraught. My job’d included soaping up the Tory Bigwigs when they came To see this Polytechnic curiosity - the lower orders being taught. My secretary for thirteen years brought me a leaving present. A blue box tied with fancy ribbon held a gift-wrapped copy Of The Times from twenty years before. News from the very day When I stepped through that fatal door all unaware That it would be my doom, or at the very least a beast whose fangs Would puncture thoughts of fame and drain creative life-blood From those very things that might have made my name. Fun was had along the way that’s true, but two decades of an only life Is no small matter. Despite successes: a medal, some paintings shown And bought, learned papers and a book or two, the verdict Has to be a ‘thumbs-down’, given what I’d sought. Many times - and not without regret - I think, ‘Was that really it?’ IV A tilted view (my bed was level with the window sill. Sky, and below that, treetops in our woodland, Leaves still tender-green; beyond Mount Ararat. No Noah’s Ark on our one though, Just old Sir James there strapped immobile in his chair With pipe and wine. Although long dead he gazed down From his sculpted sepulchre to lord it over his domains. A later generation had him walled up in the parish church. His tomb-gazebo still remains, a picturesque retreat, Open now for shooting parties and for wealthy guests Who pay to stay (and some to marry) in what was his seat. Cars crunch gravel in the yard. Footsteps on a stair. ‘The doctor’s here.’ ‘Ten years’, they said. Well, I’ve had twice that so I can’t moan. ‘It’s always ‘time’s up’ when that morphine drive goes in.’ Or so opined the carer when my neighbour’s life was on the wane. Well, narcosis by electric pump must be preferred to never-ending pain. So now, more scared than I had ever dared admit, I think, ‘Too Late. This is the Big One. It.’
Peter Lloyd Jones 