Alan Brownjohn

We were registered as a form, and for the first day Left unsupervised alone in a distant room With empty desks to organise our own war. Using books and inkwells was the easy way Of creating bombardments — conkers and apple-cores came In useful also, and in the master’s drawer There were sheets of exercise-paper which would acquire, When neatly folded, the speed of darts to fly Sharply across to send warnings of attack. All the heads on the side of the classroom under fire Dipped for cover under desk-lids when this weaponry Rained down on them — to be picked up and fired back — Though I don’t recall any sort of hurt or harm Resulting from this conflict, which was allowed To go on uninterrupted, lasting throughout Our entire first day of secondary term.

The weekend’s on us, and no means of soothing it or kissing it away. The flat facades of mansion blocks curve towards silence. The sun gets everywhere in this canyon, but property holds its desperations in: the same flying ant is all that moves along the same trouser folds. I go to the park for late afternoon to arrive among the memorials in their set-back space, their immortality in the last century, their short life-spans. What settles on this time is not a haze or mist, but a half-visible moderation of the light among the trees in which appear the hour-long married with their picture-takers, from the distance down the long paths hurrying, where sunlight falls on patches between fallen leaves spread flat by sudden July showers.

They start to say autumnal in the forecasts, And on the Northern Line the shifting panels Look bleached already. I think less about The low-cost rivieras than the remedies At the ends of small pale almanacs for afflictions Acquired by the old, or suffered by loners In the margins of respectable families — Ailments with names we don’t use any more. Each black-and-white ad in the narrow columns Promised miracles on the same unlikely terms, For the sender sitting in a bedroom corner To seal an envelope bought that afternoon... Could I even imagine one such to be my own, With a man returning from a PO Box in Strood And sending by return, as promised, the First Lesson In his course called Why Not Join Me in the Coloured Pages?

He had not recognised me or I him. The place was crammed and rackety, and our eyes Took each other in, and we didn’t realise... We stared, and we ruled each other out until After several glassy seconds I found the will And the nerve to speak. Well — it must be! — He knows my name. In the warmth that dropped on me after the ice-cold air, I’d been looking for someone I knew, to launch a greeting Eagerly after long decades of never meeting. In a crowd of loud unknowns I would still have said I might tell this man from the back of his schoolboy head, And a sureness that the same face would still be there.

Like the machine the day had churned in dark circles, But when at last I came back the whole contraption Had stopped too soon, all its baggage had halted In a stubborn wish to stay there and nowhere else. I wouldn’t know when this had happened, Maybe some time in the first half-hour while I Was abroad it had issued a rap, a shudder, A shake, and a stillness. Its red warning Stayed alight on the closed door. Its water Wasn’t going to break into any outlet, Its porthole gave onto a darkness that refused Any sound or movement, and I found myself Looking out for comfort at a clear night sky. It hadn’t stopped.

Ten minutes — or less — before we step down at one of the ‘London Terminals’, ploughed land restarts and the newest cow-parsley spreads by the side of fields that held on through the April drought. The immediate foreground is dashing on past a stationary middle-distance while a forest on the horizon, darkly capped by clouds, races forward at the same speed. It’s comforting that the laws of perspective and motion apply as I saw them, forty years back, in some lines about love and apprehension. These fields we pass are still, as before, to be considered the green foundation of everything, sending out kind seeds into city yards and squares.