GHOST STORY

Returning from the grove of grass and stone,
Grievers gone away, I am left alone
To wander these cold rooms broken-hearted,
Searching for the soul newly departed.
Your scent is everywhere, like morning dew;
As fresh as ever, unmistakeably you.

The house is empty now – less like a home –
With all life gone, waiting more like a tomb.

And how will I bear so heavy a cross?
How to rise above such deep, aching loss?

But in the garden, I think I see you
Standing by the trees, still as a statue.
Then you turn, pale, tearful; begin to walk
Towards me; but now when I try to talk,
You shake your head and pass through me blindly,
And wander into the house behind me.

The day is done, the summer sun has shone.
Dusk fades down. Now even your scent is gone.


(2006)


As the title suggests, this poem is a fiction. It did, however, arise from an actual funeral from which I had returned: that of my ex-wife’s grandmother. I had been very fond of Granny Dolly who was buried in the small churchyard of the village where she had lived.

But this poem is not about Granny Dolly. I had stood in our garden thinking over the funeral that evening and listening to the rustling of the leaves, when an uncanny impulse made me wonder whether I was there at all.

I wrote a very vague outline of the poem shortly after but didn’t finish it for several years. That shake of the head towards the end came, I’m sure, floating up through my subconscious, from the red-hooded dwarf that murders the character played by Donald Sutherland at the climax of the film ‘Don’t Look Now’. He’s so sure the figure in red that he’s been pursuing through the dark, foggy backstreets of Venice is the ghost of his recently drowned daughter, but when the dwarf turns to finally reveal herself, she shakes her head before delivering a terrible coup de grace...

The photograph of Lisa is much more recent than the actual poem but it only occurred to me the other day that it might be the right image to go with the poem.

THE LILY OF MY LIFE

Grandad lied about his age in World War One;
Got gassed; came back to years on the dole;
Worked out his life at the cemetery;
Dead and gone by the time I was three.

Grandma never once used a telephone;
Was even nervous about radio
And switching on appliances and the TV;
But oh, she was always there for me.

In a storm, she turned the mirror to the wall;
Put away the cutlery then hid in the hall;
Yes, she was afraid of all electricity;
But she was always brave for me.

Lived a cold, hard life in a grey city slum;
Raised her children - two uncles and my Mum -
In a sunless street by a high factory wall
And she was always there for them all.

Then cleared by the council to a new house
On a crescent by a green roundabout
With lawns, a shed and a lilac tree,
Where I would play happy and free,

When I escaped from the Hell House
To her cosy, cold-water, corner terrace;
Time and again the regular refugee,
In the house that was a second home to me.

Torn from her head the silky white hair,
One dark night when Mum and I sheltered there
From him who attacked her most brutally,
Whilst she was busy protecting me.

And Grandma would take me to the Co-Op
And hand in hand, we’d go from shop to shop
Trawling up and down that little community
Of Narborough Road, my Grandma and me.

And, later on, I would lean in to steady her
Arthritic body and take her to the butcher,
The baker and grocer - the places she had taken me,
Safely away from my warped and broken family.

I lived with her during her last crippled years
And although that mixed up kid cried the tears
And somehow knew that his childhood was done,
He didn’t really know what he’d had ‘til it was gone.

Born before the twentieth century,
Lily Weldon came into this life a nobody
And seventy-nine years later, she left it still a nobody,
But afterwards and always, she was a somebody to me.


(2011)

My Grandma was a lovely old lady who lived a long life for that time - and considering the physical frailty that increasing blighted most of her life. My Grandad died in 1955, having worked as a verger at Gilroes Cemetery for most of his life. Perhaps it’s from him that I get my fascination with graveyards. Grandma died in 1970 when I was eighteen and I really don’t know what I would have done without her from about 1957 onwards, following Mum’s divorce from my father.

Being a fairly typical selfish teenager with more than my fair share of angst, I didn’t always treat her as well as I might have done towards the end and I often wish I could turn back time and take with me some of the compassion and patience that I often lacked back then.

‘Always there for me’ is a threadbare phrase these days, but it was literally true in this case. I’m not sure exactly where or when the photograph was taken: maybe Bournemouth or the East Coast somewhere c. 1956. It’s one of my favourites but I can’t help but notice that the angles are weirdly askew, as if things are starting to tilt…