Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Miscellaneous Frontmatter
- Another Look
- A Great-Grandfather
- A Great-Grandmother
- Grandfathers
- Grandmothers
- Birthplace
- My Mother and her Two Brothers
- Their Wedding Photograph
- Sticks and Stones
- Hickory Dickory
- Jolson Sings
- First Day at the Grammar School
- Catching an Old Film on Television
- Days of TEFL
- Snap
- May 1997
- Emma at Seven Months
- Somewhere Down the Line
- No Joke
- For the Man I Used to Go Fishing With
- Fishing in the Grounds of a Therapeutic Community
- Not at his Best
- Dead of Winter
- ‘Committal’
- The Dovecote
- The Idea of Order at Hunts Cross
- Jupiter Optimus Maximus
- Squeezing a Poem out of Me
- Fragment
- Something for Gael Turnbull on his Seventieth Birthday
- Making an Arrangement
- An Invitation to Breakfast from Sydney Smith
- Hiroshima
- Sez I Sez I in Stephen's Green
- Seventh Heaven
- At Drumcliff in 1997
- Getting There
- Mnemósynon
- Moonlight on Leros
- Olives
- The Quality of Greek Light
- Scottish Waiter Bringing Squid
- Funerary Monuments, Aegina
- Taking the Hexameter a Walk
- Moonlight on Aegina
- Whalewatching – Vancouver Island
- Seventh-Storey Heaven
- Sarah Biffin
- Ancestors
- In the Dock Canteen
- On Tape at the Old People's Home
- Winter Solstice 2001
- A Long Way from Home
- Publisher's note
Grandfathers
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Miscellaneous Frontmatter
- Another Look
- A Great-Grandfather
- A Great-Grandmother
- Grandfathers
- Grandmothers
- Birthplace
- My Mother and her Two Brothers
- Their Wedding Photograph
- Sticks and Stones
- Hickory Dickory
- Jolson Sings
- First Day at the Grammar School
- Catching an Old Film on Television
- Days of TEFL
- Snap
- May 1997
- Emma at Seven Months
- Somewhere Down the Line
- No Joke
- For the Man I Used to Go Fishing With
- Fishing in the Grounds of a Therapeutic Community
- Not at his Best
- Dead of Winter
- ‘Committal’
- The Dovecote
- The Idea of Order at Hunts Cross
- Jupiter Optimus Maximus
- Squeezing a Poem out of Me
- Fragment
- Something for Gael Turnbull on his Seventieth Birthday
- Making an Arrangement
- An Invitation to Breakfast from Sydney Smith
- Hiroshima
- Sez I Sez I in Stephen's Green
- Seventh Heaven
- At Drumcliff in 1997
- Getting There
- Mnemósynon
- Moonlight on Leros
- Olives
- The Quality of Greek Light
- Scottish Waiter Bringing Squid
- Funerary Monuments, Aegina
- Taking the Hexameter a Walk
- Moonlight on Aegina
- Whalewatching – Vancouver Island
- Seventh-Storey Heaven
- Sarah Biffin
- Ancestors
- In the Dock Canteen
- On Tape at the Old People's Home
- Winter Solstice 2001
- A Long Way from Home
- Publisher's note
Summary
I
George Simpson
A glass circling newsprint, like a glider in a slow sky,
over words a mind might travel safely with indoors.
Better not disturb this old man with his football scores,
sticking-plastered specs, pumps on the fender warming
themselves for going nowhere; nor that African Grey
a son brought home, muffled, like a cremation,
in velvet drapes, tongue-tied, given no say.
Better be seen, not heard in this cramped place
of obscure pieties, emotional inbreeding, shifty
with secrets, no history spoken of, except
when the house swelters with accusation,
and someone sullen says it's time to ‘learn a thing or two’.
Yet this is home to a man who knows ‘how others lived’,
who once sailed oceans, balanced salvers
up and down companionways, banged knuckles
on the cabin doors of toffs in astrakhan, concert pianists,
divas in mink-coats, boa'd women befuddled with cocktails,
asking what the sea was like again today.
You get no answers now. Slouched in the gloaming,
and no longer mattering to himself, he won't budge an inch,
not an eyelid, for you to learn your clamorous little thing or two.
Will hear none of it. Like talking to the wall or to oneself, to ask:
where were you, George, when the girl conceived? Coachman
or steward? Sliding hands over horseflesh or walking waves,
tilting salvers? Which uniform and when? And whose signature
on the letter tucked in your pocket when you bore her off,
clutching her brooch, to Cockburn Street? Was it then you looked
for other jobs (there are three years to fathom still), and
climbed (forever in service) those red-funnel gangways?
That letter, George, (I'm told) spoke of gratitude …
were you prevailed upon? paid off? Was it recognition
for rendered services or hard-to-credit altruism?
Your photo talks of innocence, eyes dreamy as a child who's just
left sleep behind and found a pleasant world come back.
II
Jimmy Bilsborrow,
scrambler up rigging, unfurler of topsails, another who knew
what the sea was like, how it tossed ships and splintered them,
how it bored or humbled with its almost always emptiness;
and on land later a man loading sacks, crates, boxes, the odour
of dockside warehouses about him, blood-oranges, apples,
spiky pineapples, raisins my grandmother trickled through flour…
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- Getting There , pp. 8 - 9Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2001