TOTALLY OPTIONAL PROMPTS – ROAD SIGN

Before the media dam-burst that was the advent of commercial television in the mid ‘50s there were only billboards. Towering like vast windows onto an exotic world, they dominated bombsites, mile-high factory walls & those ragged patches of no man’s land next to railway bridges.

To an 8-year-old trotting alongside his fast-striding mum heading for the butcher’s in the high street they loomed & passed, clouding out the sky with their jangling colours & juggled typefaces.  Ambiguous messages alluded to truths that lay just out of reach – presumably part of that elusive dimension that would only be comprehensible ‘when you’re a bit older’. Glamour, power, speed & indescribable happiness seemed to be the prizes that attended those arcane transactions that the billboards demanded.

Nearly all of them dealt with the alternative universe inhabited by parents & teachers. But one of them spoke to me directly. It was a billboard in the forecourt of Norbiton Station. It stood alone from the others forming a dramatic backdrop to the little chalet newsagent from which my father bought his News Chronicle every morning on the way to work. Throughout the boundless centuries that constituted the passage of time in those pre-teen years this billboard bore the same advertisement. It was for Start-Rite children’s shoes & it featured a pair of tots striding purposefully along a tree-lined highway towards that point at which parallel lines meet.

I’m no longer entirely sure what it was that the ad said to me. I know only that the dogged onward stride of the two tots along that dye-straight avenue filled me with ineffable optimism. I wanted to join them; I knew that in their company all would be well, all manner of things would be well as we strode forth along the open road & thence over the hills & far away...

This poem looks back, looks forward.

VANISHING POINT

Those Start-rite kids:
a tam o’ shantered boy,
a bobble-hatted girl,
both austerity booted

and utility wrapped
against the winter
of the world.
I used to wonder

where they were bound.
Somewhere far away,
so swaddled and determined.
I bet they had their gloves

on long elastic through
each sleeve. I bet they had
their Chilprufe vests, their Aertex
shirts buttoned up across

their breakfasts.  Bet they had
hope in their hearts, dreams
unconsumed by fire or water,
as each set sensible foot

on the long, straight highway.
So much is promised us
in a hurting world between here
and the vanishing point.