Poems By Simon Beechinor

This poem, written in free verse, describes my first year at my senior school. I have recently found supporting evidence for my (clear) memories in the diaries mentioned below. Needless to say, I produced my '...worst ever end-of-year school report...'. It seems not to have occurred to those ostensibly responsible for my welfare to drill down and find out why a previously exemplary student failed so dramatically. My second year was equally traumatic for different reasons, but that is a story for another day! 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 o

This poem is my first attempt at writing in contemporary ‘free verse’. I believe poetry written without a form of control is like music written without order, and it becomes a mess.  The poem is completely unstructured with no metre or rhyme; instead, I have tried to create a readable poem by using sentence structure, punctuation, language and the natural flow of the spoken word. 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