A Lifetime In Verse

Listen to: Noon at Sea The sun spurns the landsman’s mark, Of the clock tower’s hourly chime,  She keeps to her diurnal path, And to her shining zenith climbs.   I, braced against the deck’s,  Unruly heaving, pitch and roll, Stand bullied by the punching wind, And hold her in my sextant’s eye.  The vernier proves her progress, Towards the summit of the day,  Then I bear witness to her crossing, My meridian at noon that day.

This poem is about a cleaner whom I came to know quite well. One day I asked him what he did during the war, his reply shocked me and I thought his story deserved to be recorded. Listen To: Portrait of a Cleaner The old cleaner bent to his mop and swabbed the washroom floor. ‘You surely must have been there, Alf, what did you do in the war?’ He was small, silver-haired and stooped, an invisible man to most. He rarely spoke, a quiet man, in simple work engrossed. He looked long at the mirrored wall, when a younger man replied, ‘Oh, I had a busy war, boy,’ and then spoke on with pride. ‘I was a miner here, in Pontypridd,’ his lilting voice compelled me, to pause, to stand and listen well, and so he told his story. ‘Over two hundred of us left, we volunteered to fight ’gainst Franco and the fascists, to help freedom in her plight.’ He was no lettered Thomas, but made my time stand still, his were the annals of working men, and like the mariner, held me by his will. ‘We came home, beat, in

Listen to: An English Boarding School She said I “must get away from” him. Now, fifty years later I’m reading his diaries, page by page. Perhaps I’ll find out soon why I needed to escape. My new home, a boarding school, was ‘character-building’, they said; perhaps you know the type? Regimented and authoritarian. Our spartan, cold dormitories reeked of sweat-stale boys, or suffered the wild west wind, blasting through uncurtained windows. Our cold and cheerless walls echoed with the relentless clatter of shoes on cold, stone floors. My constant reminder of the austerity I endured. Dull and bovine seniors, Empire-quality demented thugs beat, harassed and humiliated us, sometimes naked, under freezing cold showers, from dawn until dusk. Under a crippling lack of welfare, I longed for someone to be decent, to know me and care. Once vibrant and curious, I withered like a fire-blighted pear. Fear gnawed at my stomach and tore at my mind. Often I hid, alone and alert, ready to flee at unfatho

Listen to: A Guardian of Empire We must go to school somewhere, and mine was an idyllic island, of unbounded childhood joy. A bulwark of English tradition amidst the social upheaval, the anarchy perhaps, of the ‘60s, with a progressive outlook, if one was of the Edwardian era, for it was a training ground for the Guardians of Empire. And I loved it. I was steeped in its timeless values:  of fair discipline,  academic excellence, and sporting prowess. Our gaggle of ancient and venerated teachers, all veterans of wars past, of Ypres and the Somme,  Normandy and the Yangtze Kiang, tried to shape my impressionable mind. They did better than my parents to foster my intellectual curiosity, my moral compass and a lifelong love  of literature, mathematics and science. They referred to me,  affectionately, I think, as ‘The Admiral.’ And I loved them. My memories resound with the boisterous laughter and chatter of young boys. We were constantly busy in a kaleidoscope of lessons,  games of cricke