When I was three we moved from the chequerboard Victorian streets of South-West London with their terraced houses and red-brick villas. Home was now a large detached corner house on a suburban avenue in Norbiton, Surrey.
When King George VI died in 1952, we were a solid, respectable (if, behind our high privet hedges, a slightly raffish) middle-middle class family, ready for the New Elizabethan era that was shortly to commence.
When King George VI died in 1952, we were a solid, respectable (if, behind our high privet hedges, a slightly raffish) middle-middle class family, ready for the New Elizabethan era that was shortly to commence.
[4.] 1952 NORBITON AVENUE
The day they told us
that the king had died
the church bells at St John’s
were inconsolable. The wireless news
came wrapped in Handel
and my mother, ironing in the kitchen
froze, the bright hoof hovering above
creased sheets. On the trolleybus
to school, passengers stared
at their hands. The conductor haunted
the stairs in black. We crooned,
adrift through empty streets.
...
[5.] 1952 LATCHMERE ROAD SCHOOL
In the Assembly Hall shoes barked
across the blockboard floor as we jolted
into fishbone lines. A monstrous silence
bound us; we forgot to speak. My eyes
slid, panic-stricken, across scraped heads
and blazer backs to the black bands
on the teachers’ folded arms, to the melting
ice-cream colours of the Union Jack,
loose-furled beneath the portrait of the king,
to the glaucous sea-green light
that pressed against high windows.
When the hymn broke like the first wave,
least expected, I was caught broadside:
brute music from the baby grand, slammed
hard; the ragged engine of four hundred voices
grinding against the tide. Seized
by a greater grief than my own (motiveless,
unfocussed – who was this king
who had died in bed, not by the sword
in battle?), I sobbed. What did I hear
unlocked inside those throats? What broke,
shook loose and rattled down the centuries
before my birth? That calling out to an old god,
so far from song, an ululation thickening
the air and silting up my breathing.
Gathered up into a lavender bosom,
I was hustled into daylight and a thin
persistent rain. Faceless, my guardian,
she rocked me, rocked me, the two of us
riding at anchor on a dim swell of voices,
storm-broken, soughing like an old wind.
The day they told us
that the king had died
the church bells at St John’s
were inconsolable. The wireless news
came wrapped in Handel
and my mother, ironing in the kitchen
froze, the bright hoof hovering above
creased sheets. On the trolleybus
to school, passengers stared
at their hands. The conductor haunted
the stairs in black. We crooned,
adrift through empty streets.
...
[5.] 1952 LATCHMERE ROAD SCHOOL
In the Assembly Hall shoes barked
across the blockboard floor as we jolted
into fishbone lines. A monstrous silence
bound us; we forgot to speak. My eyes
slid, panic-stricken, across scraped heads
and blazer backs to the black bands
on the teachers’ folded arms, to the melting
ice-cream colours of the Union Jack,
loose-furled beneath the portrait of the king,
to the glaucous sea-green light
that pressed against high windows.
When the hymn broke like the first wave,
least expected, I was caught broadside:
brute music from the baby grand, slammed
hard; the ragged engine of four hundred voices
grinding against the tide. Seized
by a greater grief than my own (motiveless,
unfocussed – who was this king
who had died in bed, not by the sword
in battle?), I sobbed. What did I hear
unlocked inside those throats? What broke,
shook loose and rattled down the centuries
before my birth? That calling out to an old god,
so far from song, an ululation thickening
the air and silting up my breathing.
Gathered up into a lavender bosom,
I was hustled into daylight and a thin
persistent rain. Faceless, my guardian,
she rocked me, rocked me, the two of us
riding at anchor on a dim swell of voices,
storm-broken, soughing like an old wind.
