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If William Wordsworth had grown up in Chadwell Heath in the Nineteen-Fifties
William Wordsworth
In The Prelude Wordsworth writes of how his upbringing in the Lake District fostered his spiritual and moral development. This poem considers how he might have fared if he had been brought up in suburban Essex, with not a mountain for miles, and with the A118 flowing nearby, rather than the mighty River Derwent...


Was it for this, A118, thou flowedst
With rumbling traffic on past Ilford town
With its not ungrandiose shops, through Seven Kings
And seedy Goodmayes, towards Chadwell Heath,
Where your great lorries made the soundtrack to
The years in which my infant soul was formed?
Oft have I stood and waited at the lights
At Whalebone Lane, where, library book in hand,
Have I learned patience while the pattern changed
From red to amber, and then on to green,
Until my cue came to set forth a childish foot
On the surface where the Green Line buses ran
Not unimpressively upon their way,
And where the large and rattling foursquare vans
Of Pickfords and such firms would lumber noisily.
This grinding music and their petrol stench
Did form the very being of my soul.

And I recall now how one summer’s day
I had a longing to enjoy a film
(It starred, as I recall, one Bernard Bresslaw,
A favourite of my youth.) Therefore did I
Purloin from my long-suffering sister’s purse
A coin sufficient to allow admittance
To all the joys a cinema could provide.
Yet as I walked beside the busy road,
The very cars did seem then to reprove
My naughty act, and as I slowly neared
The Gaumont, all its mighty dark grey bulk
Upreared as though in towering accusation.
I turned, and slunk away, and yet it seemed
To follow me accusing. I determined
To straight away return that guilty coin
Unto my sister’s purse where it belonged,
Except that I did pass the Sunshine Stores,
Which sold delicious sweets, so I went in,
And squandered all my wealth on sherbet dips.

George Simmers
If you have any thoughts about this poem, George Simmers  would like to hear them.

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