Holiday Snaps

1. August 11th, 1999

No longer fearing eclipses
As portents of deaths and horrors,
We welcome this one as showbiz.

High on the Northumbrian moors
On the road leading to Alston,
We stop the car to feel the chill
And to see heather darkening
To a moodier purple, dense
With improbable noon twilight,
As the great lump, where men have walked,
Parades between us and our sun.

We feel delight. The big clock works,
(Clearly, though seen through a cloud.)
More delightful still is our toy;
A pinhole pricked in a postcard
Allows projection of the neatest
Perfect and dinkiest crescent
On a scrap sheet of blank A4.

The darkness comes; the darkness goes.
The moorland sheep endure all things
With the passivity of meat.
Rabbits peep from warrens again
And perky grouse strut by the road,
Having been granted no portent
That tomorrow will be the twelfth.

2. Blanchlands

Outside the pub today, a short crop-headed boy
In a Newcastle shirt is flouncing at his dad
And shouting crude words. As a strop, it's impressive.

"It is a number of years," you wrote, "since I stayed
At the Lord Crewe Arms, but no other spot brings me
Sweeter memories." The biographies place you
Here in 1930, with Gabriel Carrit.
In the public bar, you ordered the best champagne.
You played Brahms on the piano. The reactions
Of locals seem not to have been recorded.

Seeing the child, it strikes me he's about the age
Of the Wystan whose passion was to be absorbed
In the grey photos and precise diagrams
Of Machinery for Metaliferrous Mines
By E. H. Davies. But this child, I speculate,
Looks at life more than books. I watch his consistent
Persistent intelligent application of
Spectacular brattishness. His dad soon caves in.

How would you have reacted? With a lecture
(Bristling with German phrases) full of dazzling
Subversive theories of child development?
Or would the fogeyish and slippered persona
You chose in your later years have clucked and uttered
A toughly nannyish disapproval? Or would ...

But I look at the boy again. I realise
That were he say ten years older, then very likely
He'd be just your type, - you'd have fancied him rotten.

George Simmers

If you've any comments on his poems, George Simmers would be pleased to hear from you.