THE PICTURE AT THE TOP OF THE STAIRS

I’m about eight, my fair hair starting to darken,
Dressed in t-shirt, shorts, sandals and ankle-socks,
Clutching bucket and spade, sat on the sand between them,
At the back of a beach, in the front of a wall.
Grandma, on my right, would be around seventy;
Mum, on my left, is in her mid-thirties;
Grandma always looked older than she was
But both seem to me old-fashioned with their forties
Hairstyles: Gran grey, Mum dark but silver at the parting
And both wearing calf-length, flowered frocks.
They sit in deck-chairs holding drinks on little trays
And we’re all sort of smiling, with our backs to the wall.

My sister stitched this picture from a pattern
Made from an old black and white photograph.
It must have been taken by her father - not my father -
Before she was born. I wonder where her older sister is -
A baby then, I think. Perhaps her father – not my father –
Is holding her in one arm whilst taking the picture
With his free hand. He didn’t take many pictures –
Their father – but he did take away almost all of those
Taken before he took Mum and me away from my father.

I’m guessing it was the East Coast in the summer of 1960 –
The five of us packed into one of his old black bangers
With the running boards and yellow indicator-pointers -
Great Yarmouth, Skegness or Mablethorpe, maybe,
Or Chapel St. Leonards in Aunt Agnes’s cottage, perhaps.
The monochromatic British fifties linger on, poised
To blossom forth into the century’s most dazzling decade.

So the story goes, a true story too but beneath it another lies.
The picture seems clearer from the bottom of the stairs
But step by step, it blurs the nearer you climb.
Neither will reality bear too much scrutiny:
The camera’s kind white lies may dissolve under our stares
As when we try to recollect this or that half-forgotten time
And the road forking when we took our right and wrong ways.
Memory’s sunshine can turn to thunder down the ages,
Playing tricks with some of those good old bad old days;
But see how the rainbow arcs above the album’s pages
To shelter us, if we choose, from yesteryear’s rain and rages


(2009)


My sister, Lorraine, gave me the cross-stitch when she emigrated to New Zealand. She later found the original photograph and sent that too. It’s one of precious few pictures that survived the divorce of my parents, because my stepfather – rot his soul – destroyed almost all of them. The original shot shows that my Mum and Gran were actually writing postcards and that behind us was not a wall but a stack of deckchairs. So the metaphorical notion of ‘backs to the wall’ turns out to be unwitting poetic license…It’s the blurry indistinctness of the cross-stitch that appealed to me – like glimpsing a scene through a portal of time and space. Perhaps I should re-title the poem ‘Postcard From The Past’…