The forgettory

 

THE FORGETTORY

Prove they were in, twelve years ago, a craze

they claim they've always shunned? Or let the phase

lie back? “I never went there” was more sad

than “You won't let that go” after I had.

This is another poem whose only claim to publication is that I threw it into a Twitter conversation.  That was in 2019, and I have already forgotten what circumstances triggered the action. 

I wrote the poem in 2010, and I've forgotten the reasons for that now, too.  My half-memory is that it was for a competition, and written on a bus journey with the rules out of sight, so that the poem turned out to be in some way unsuitable when I looked at them again.

My memory is not what it was, but I don't see much value in a forgettory. I grew out of nostalgia a long time ago; I regard state-sponsored nostalgia as an abomination; and I consider memory to be a valuable corrective.

The remembered village

THE REMEMBERED VILLAGE

After Mum and Dad's Golden was our first return.

We drove through steady rain uphill but missed

the turn, entered the village further west

by the school, followed the S-bend past

hall, vicarage, cross. Walked up the steepest

north-sloping churchyard path. It was mid-August.

In church, the numbers since Dad's time reduced.

After I reached fifty was the second.

Late at night, we drove uphill, northward, turned

in by the school, the village western end;

again the hall-and-vicarage S-bend.

The missed B&B; the phone call, turn round.

Next morning, in dampness, we were shown around

the church, the steep north-facing slope of ground.

We left the village at the eastern end,

Beacon Hill, water tower; homeward bound.

Dad's memorial service was the third.

In a bright March morning, we drove westward,

took the right turn; the water tower, crossroad,

again right, swooping north and down, past wood

gates, left, and left again into the farmyard.

The party walked the unpavemented road

west, south, uphill, the cross, the village grid,

the steep north-facing path in the churchyard.

The plaque unveiled, and many kind words said.

Then path, cross, downhill, left at chapel, led

west to where the Borstal had once stood.

We saw the new-built road named after Dad.

So my lines. They'd make an incomplete

map, lacking streets and homes once known inside.

Returning took from memories no heat,

and the troubled return dreams have not died.

The poem was written in December 2013 for the Holland Park Press 'What's your place?' competition.  It has now found publication in Orbis 180 (p. 6).  It has benefited, as poems in Orbis tend to do, from suggestions by the editor Carole Baldock.

You might like to read my earlier poem 'Wikipedia on the village' and the village's own web site.

The St Pancras resonances

This is a poem sequence I wrote in 1992-1993.  I have alluded to its origins before: around 1988, in a Guardian interview with Stephen Poliakoff about his film Hidden city, I read the sentence (I quote from memory):

While filming at St Pancras Hotel, he was told of another complete station underneath St Pancras, which was bricked up like a time capsule at the end of the last century and now, presumably, awaits the mega-development of the site.

That became an obsession of mine partly because it made me think of so many other things.  The poem sequence looks at them one after another.

A few disclaimers are in order:

The date in Resonance 3 is incorrect.  It derives from a half-remembered entry in a Nicholson's guide.  The closure of the Chesterfield Canal west of Worksop happened rather later.

In Resonance 7, no link is intended with any real person, living or dead.  Googling the words St Pancras Trust (as one couldn't in 1993) brings up links to several organisations with those words in their name, all of which are concerned with far better projects than the truthifying of an urban legend.  And I had better not give any more time to changing the names of the characters.  The characters bear no resemblance to people of similar names who are known to me.

'The St Pancras resonances' was published in Cous-cous 4, March 1995, pp. 10-11.


THE ST PANCRAS RESONANCES

"Underneath St Pancras lies
    bricked up at the end
of the nineteenth century
    like a time capsule
waiting for the other works
    to complete the site
such a darkened terminus."


Resonance 1

The house was old: of course it had a tunnel.
We wished it didn't, but we hoped it did.
We hunted it by tapping on the walls.

    tap    tap    tap

    tap    tap    tap

    tap    tap    tap

    B W A R M ! ! !
  B W A R M ! ! !
  B W A R M ! ! !

which knocked me cold awake.


Resonance 2

The book where Mozart notes the work he's done
is dated seventeen-eighty-four dash one
-- century blank.  Eight years remain unrun.


Resonance 3

Brindley's canal winds level:
north, the remains of brickworks.
West, above Worksop, steeper,
a heavily-locked section,
closed in eighteen-ninety-six.


Resonance 4

Even the twomost years at length
came round again to May,
evening, and they began to end
his time away.

In plain clothes but accompanied
and reading upside down,
Westbourne Park, night in Pentonville,
then fetched through town

by cab to Bloomsbury, fresh clothes,
breakfast, reunion
with many friends, so many, late
into the afternoon,

night passage to Dieppe, spring dawn,
high spirits, Reading charmed
into the castle of a myth,
the King unharmed,

the Queen fêted with strawberries,
sirop de grenadine
for fifteen gamins, and a cake
in pink and green,

much gratitude, much joy in life,
new life, and a new name,
and waiting in the air the plays
that never came:

the work so rich in beauty that
it would shine back the phrase
of those who sneered that such a life
had led such ways

darkened inside him.  Three more years
creaked festering and black
up to November nineteen-hundred,
end of the track.


Resonance 5

Two hundred years apart, and parting two
quite other other worlds, having in view
centuries' ends, the stones torn down by rage
turned round at once and parted age from age.


Resonance 6

The run up to the one hundredth psalm
is a run of mounting exultation:
a run all through the nineties
shouting louder and louder,
the whole run, jubilee, coronation, power
over the thunder of floods,
and the roar of the sea itself
declares the glory of God,
the many coastlands rejoice,
the hills sing together for joy
and worship by his holy mountain,
one whole world joyful in the Lord,
serve him with gladness, come before
his presence with a song,
all generations gathered up
in the Old Hundredth,
all people that on earth shall dwell.
Then the mirror quivers in the sun
at slanderers I will destroy,
haughty and arrogant I will not endure,
I will know nothing of evil,
and again it goes off a little.
And next morning --
oh, it's a bit like the first week in January,
it's almost like the-silver-wedding-and-then-the-countdown-began.
There is a forgetting to eat,
and strength broken in mid-course,
and a long time,
a trudge of psalms,
a limp of inventories,
a c.v. of as many blessings as you can find,
before it will go bright again.
But it has more good to run:
the end of the psalms is in mid-century,
a soaring trajectory of praise.


Resonance 7

Lyn discovered she had been once divorced.
We hadn't touched on it for years, and then,
coming up from a conversation -- oh,
money, my work for the St Pancras Trust --
but coming up from that, you know, and after
the News at Ten, I made some cocoa for us,
not fishing for apologies, and held,
she grimaced as I held her hand a bit, I said,
then or later but that day or that week,
I said We've made it up to fifteen years,
anyway, and still going strong, and then,
tactlessly, stupidly, I don't know, I said
That's five times where you got with Harry.  She said,
Harry?  I don't know anyone called Harry...
As if I'd made some silly accusation.
Harry was her first husband.  And, OK,
I know we've talked about it less and less,
as time goes by all memories get awkward,
but there are documents, old letters, photos,
cuttings even.  I got the box, went through it,
showed her them, wished I hadn't, as I think
it left her rather shaken.  No, it's not
a sort of shadow life, with shadow kids
growing and eating, winning shadow prizes.
Harry and Lyn were married just three years.
They hadn't any children.  Was I right
to resurrect it after all this time?
I think so.  She is a librarian,
she tends, or did tend, I should say, to make
herself the rational, the academic,
married as if by accident, and me
harmless enough with my St Pancras Trust
but -- Well, anyway, I think the raising
of her amnesia -- five years of it --
has let her see that (a) she too can be
deluded -- self-deluding -- and, much more,
there really are enclaves of the unseen,
even in your own life.  Who knows, will Lyn
one day again be helping with the Trust?

Yes, the St Pancras Trust -- just Lyn and me
to start with, she was with Harry still,
but the last ten years have seen such a huge
upsurge of interest that I devote
myself to it full-time -- it aims to settle
the truth about the buried terminus.
Because officially there's nothing there,
just a staff car-park that was once a depot
for beer-trains in from Burton-on-Trent, or some say
the old St Pancras Underground -- you see it
west of King's Cross St Pancras, one dark platform --
when that was closed and bricked off, that must be
the grit inside the buried-station "myth".
Or: is it really there? did funds run out?
were the plans lost when history
derailed everything in nineteen-fourteen?  Who knows?

I sometimes dream about the buried station.
The other night, it was a bright March morning,
I was on Euston Road and walking east.
St Pancras clock tower -- in the dream it looked
like Westminster Cathedral -- had a clock
which showed the time with numbers coming out
like the blades on a large-scale working model
of a Swiss Army knife -- you've seen it too.
And this clock signalled, eighteen-ninety-seven!
I ran across the road -- this was a dream --
hoping the buried terminus was open,
and, you know, what else will it restore?
Lyn and me happier again, or reconciled
with Harry, as it does from time to time
trouble my conscience, or them never married,
Harry not outrageously patronizing
to his own assistants, or to me, or ...?
I reached St Pancras, I could see the platforms,
which I had seen in dreams before, dark, empty,
and they were bright, with trains and people -- people
I could recognize in the dream, and shall
if I should ever meet them, but the blades
moved on again, the radio alarm
was hardening the real world, I was waking.
But it occurs to me, that was the day
that ended with her big discovery,
and I think -- touch wood -- ushered in the spring.
That was it, yes.  That was the dream I had --
that was the day, I'm sure!  That was the day!

Canal time

This poem was written in the autumn of 1996 for a themed competition, though I now forget what the theme was. The poem was shortlisted in the 1997 Beehive Press competition, with the result that I got to read it out to a gathering in Merton, South London. The 2006 Bassetlaw Writers competitition commended the poem and published it in the competition anthology.


CANAL TIME

Canal time's different from other times.
Canal boats happen at another speed
than bikes and cars and trains and planes. The voyage
Leicester to Stratford can be interrupted,
you can drive to Heathrow and fly to Spain,
come back the same or other ways, rejoin
the Stratford trip, and lose none of the wonder
belonging to a boat and journeys south;
and in itself canal time magnifies,
has Nottinghamshire's flattest full of echoes
from more remembered places, has West Stockwith
the Suffolk coast, has rock a Malham Cove
as high as lost, a Mahler's Resurrection,
has the steady climb west out of Worksop
so steep, so locked, it was unnavigable,
the guidebook says, by eighteen-ninety-six --
and resonances there as well: the last
century's end, Wilde locked behind brick walls,
the urban myth, time-capsule of a station
waiting beneath St Pancras. So I saw it,
those gateless weirs, weedy stretches of water,
overgrown towpaths, not so long ago.

But now they're working on the locks again,
putting new gates in, strengthening the banks,
laying fresh towpaths, clearing weeds. St Pancras
plans a deep-level station now for real.
Strange thing, the past: keeps altering; canals
may prompt, like rivers, elegiac thoughts,
but needn't lie down under them. What is it
that has a century an interruption?


Bassetlaw is the district of Nottinghamshire where I grew up and still have kin. The urban legend about St Pancras is one I came across, around 1988, in a Guardian interview with Stephen Poliakoff about his film Hidden city. It contained the sentence (I quote from memory):

While filming at St Pancras Hotel, he was told of another complete station underneath St Pancras, which was bricked up like a time capsule at the end of the last century and now, presumably, awaits the mega-development of the site.

That buried station became an obsession of mine. I wrote to British Rail for information about it. They knew of no urban legend, but could tell of a low-level depot for beer trains from Burton on Trent. I won't pretend I scoured libraries for books of disused stations and underground curios, but I did touch on the matter in a desultory fashion, when visiting friends who collected such books and such stories. And, be it admitted, with people who didn't collect them. They hadn't heard of this one either. It finally drew from me a sequence of poems in the early 1990s, which I called 'The St Pancras resonances'. I may come to blog that in due time.

The 1996 poem is neater. It dates from when the buried St Pancras was beginning to occupy less of my mind.

Blurts

This is the sequence of poems I mentioned back in February, the one about the "fragmentary vocalisations, unconnected with their immediate circumstances, that one utters in response to awkward memories." At that time, I made a link to another online manifestation of the work, but that manifestation seems to be not always there when wanted.

'Blurts' was not conceived as a sequence, but written as the individual parts suggested themselves to me in 2003-2004. It was published in the language quarterly Verbatim 30(i), Spring 2005, p. 17, following one of the fastest acceptances I've ever had. 2004 was like that.

Blurts turn out, or at any rate their driver, the sense of living in a perpetual jangle of remembered gaffes and peccadilloes, turns out, to be more widespread than I once thought. I have shown the below sequence to people and found, gratifyingly often, that the response is one of recognition. On the other hand, the counting of blurts, by means of a stopwatch, appears to be an idiosyncrasy of mine. I call it blurtmetry, and have used its name again for the present blog. For an account of the genesis of blurtmetry as a hobby, see the British Science Festival 2011 poetry competition, 15th post; however, it found no other enthusiasts, and my family were relieved when I abandoned it after three years.

Verbatim is in abeyance at the moment, and greatly missed.

BLURTS

(i)

Some gaffe has bubbled in my memory.
"You idiot!" I mutter, meaning me.
Somebody overhears me and feels meant.
Another bubble's on its long ascent.

(ii)

Whispering “DEATH!”
is a waste of breath.

(iii)

My rule -- Don't talk to someone you can't see --
may help me see that one or other hears.
It doesn't stop blurts of apology
to teachers I've not seen in thirty years.

(iv)

Solo,
I bark Sorry! staccato
for an old peccadillo –
a sort of self-vendetta.

Recalling what I can’t recall
finds cracks of resolution
in battering the party-wall
edgeways with noise-pollution.

(v)

A blurt of the usual sort,
in a prayer, would stick out like a wart.
So in church, when an old thing went off in my head,
I converted the blurt to a silent stop dead –
and “The man’s half-asleep,” people thought.

(vi)

Another wordless blurt's the thick-blink wince.
Perhaps it was your music that set ringing
the trigger memories, laid down long since;
I did not mean a slight upon your singing.

(vii)

Treading two steps in ten on words that trigger
the sort of memory that stops me dead,
I'm glad to find the English language bigger
than lists of what I wish I hadn't said.
Indeed, if I went through the dictionary
on purpose to stain every word with me
and PowerPointed® the resulting story
to seminars on lexicography
(“CLEUGH I illiterately mispronounced,
NOUP I wrote in exams, under-prepared,
PORRET accompanied a cheque that bounced,
DRAN and I've just now realised why she glared”),
the words I'd left unstained would make the thing
so gappy as to be embarrassing.