This is a re-formatted second draft of a poem from seven years ago. Its reference points are likely to be be familiar only to Brits over 50 or those with a keen interest in the socio-cultural scene in the UK during the immediate post-war decade. So for the rest of you...

Start-rite made shoes of devastatingly unfashionable practicality for kids. Like footwear with magical properties out of a fairy tale, donning them trapped one securely and inescapably within the anonymity of childhood. Becoming a credible pirate, cowboy or infantryman whilst wearing a pair of Start-rites demanded an imagination of transcendent power.

Similarly cursed were the corset-like liberty bodices and Chilprufe vests that all children wore against the un-centrally heated cold. In summer, the Aertex shirt provided a measure of ventilation - assuming that one's mother had decided that the weather was clement enough to permit the casting off of the winter lining. All three were the perfect (and almost literal) embodiment of the purely utilitarian garment.

As a child, clad in my livery of infancy, I would stare up at the huge Start-rite billboards with their tiny pilgrims stumping confidently towards the place where the clouds touch the land and I'd wonder what they might find there.



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,
fringed with bedtime story trees. So much is promised us
in a hurting world between here and the vanishing point.