Portrait of a Cleaner
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