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From the age of mangles and kitchen pulleys, it had a smell as unforgettable as steam on washing days, which were always Mondays - four pale green walls of it in the booming back bedroom where she used to leave him. Still, he had a friend to wave to in the wardrobe mirror, a silent, sobbing, bar-rattling partner in distemper, when she didn't come. That cot was a godsend, housework took all day, she said, as she proudly remembered his first memory - a woman's achievement nothing would take away.

The grove was the best location the gang had for reshooting sixpenny matin�es - holidayfuls of Tommy's Revenge and Escape from Stalag Luft III. It was a take-it or take-it friendship that meant it was your duty to escape, punishment to be enjoyed by you, in turn, always your turn, in a smelly, muddy hole. Nonchalant extras strolled across the set, walking dogs, seeing no evil; guards loaded caps, planning revenge. You enthusiastically collected branches and bricks to weigh down the roof, pulled it over you, sat tight and waited.

It was when the tadpoles got too old for the sweet-jar that he went to the quarry, performed the necessary ceremony, and first felt paternal. The water rippled baptismally, as they submerged, shaking off tails in convoys of adulthood. Approving, the sun patted his head, as he turned, on reconnaissance, leading the way up the cliff. And there was the crane! Abandoned, gun-barrel drooping, its last dog-fight acted out on a boy's battle-field. The levers � what a sorry crew they made, the way Monty's men had to leave them, limb-stiff, to the heat and flies: the engine still smelled of heavy action, dripped imagined suffering, retribution �. Suddenly, the Sunday-school sensation was there, squatting in the reeds of his mind, its frog-eyed surveillance, at tongue's length, like a sniper ready to pick him off if he didn't keep low, in hand-to-hand retreat.

A try-again-dinner picked up off the floor, a you-can-do-better carton of cold tea, crumpled, with naughty-boy bent straw, bedwetting from the table, not wheeled away, pulled-off legs, still cycling to work, black toes, snagging aertex blanket, baring Belsen buttocks, and a farted mess to rub reality in. The nice vicar had a way with words: death's a wall and one day we'll see what's on the other side - the need for a good run-up and mind the barbed wire, tactfully omitted, I thought, remembering pulling off the motorway six months before, and the blood bypassing the narrow roads of his brain - the rest of him needing it as he reached for the door with me ringing and her with her trouble in the bathroom, shrieking don't go. And then his slipping, eyes averted, from his chair, made me the stranger he'd never tell what he could see behind him. No last-minute bequest, just an overripe head to catch, the terror in her eyes, and myself hoping he'd go for it there and then - but, always a shopkeeper, he carried on and carried on, after closing time. What a good idea of hers to pop into the nice vicar's church-hall at Christmas to cure the empty house and see about that wall - pity about the children and their toys, getting under her feet.

''Mr Hussein sends his apologies: things are difficult at work; he can't change his shifts anymore to come to these meetings.'' We shall miss you, Mr Hussein. Dexterously your chubby brown fingers wove the fabric of your story, the magic carpet that has flown us into the private mosaic of your heart. Your broken English tumbled from your lips, gurgled as it ran along the rills, brought new life to scorched fields � halving the hurt we'd hawked before you � while you alone held together the simple home the monsoon tried to wash away. Not with them, for they have broken your windows, those who also came to England to find a better life; cancelled too your daughter's marriage, arranged all those years ago; not even with your wife, at her respectful distance of ignorance, can you share your greatest hurt � not the desert trek from doctor to doctor, your sickly child in your arms, not the vulture thermalling the uncertain cure, but knowing that no one wants to ride her bike, that she's lost her friends like handfuls of pretty hair on the bedroom floor. No, Mr Hussein, we haven't forgotten you; we think we should try to see you again.

When she fell ill, I told him the same day. It's terrible, it's terrible � these words were all he said or could find to say, man to man, over the fence, and two yards' gap landed me another planet away. We play the pat posturings of pretence: Christmas card for card, my proffered spanner at his garage door, his squeezed-out comments on the weather � the lips are kept thinner, and it's a brick wall now, not a flimsy fence. A man tanked in double glass, chubbed indoors, cavity-valiumed with TV, he's wired for all-round bliss; hermetic d�cors admit no fear, keep out What's-his-name who's a real-life reminder of what he ignores. Clearly behind smiles, I'm supposed to hide! Mankind � I thought we travelled together: cruising round the sun, a shared cabin-ride? No, a man may ground himself � whenever the sensors detect the Invader outside.

Paul Verlaine pushed open the creaking garden gate. Dew glistened on the flowers in the morning sunshine. Everything was familiar, he said: the humble vine creeping round the arbour, the rattan chairs, the fountain's silvery murmur, the old aspen muttering to itself, roses fluttering and lilies standing proud in the breeze; the larks, all recognisable again, even the Veleda statue, still standing, at the far end of the path, its plaster flaking as before, vulnerable, in the insipid scent of mignonette, and ... nothing had changed. As if I would ever believe that! And yet his time-arresting voice stilled my breathing, like Barber's Adagio.

I have often stood bemused across the river from fabled Pocahontas' grave, once Defoe country, his brickworks and Crusoe, a place you don't name for fear of ridicule, now a murk-rippled Thames' scummy shoreline. Arriving seagulls shriek in derision; dingy dredgers dawdle like shifty tramps; lumpen container ships insult the humbled port; cranes droop and rust, rail tracks disappear under shabby weeds - the only life reclaiming this stretch of river. A lone angler stares at the unyielding water, scant hope in a desolate place.���� Behind me a whiteboarded pub, 'The World's End', named by a jester as though this miserable river front could ever match Finis Terrae. Yet in some ways it does. It is the crumbling jetty, the visible vestige, of our old world - tall ships, clippers, cutters and coasters, purveyors of empire and ten pound liners heading out to Australia. Departures with no landmark, no Three Graces or torch bearing statue, no nostalgic image to hold dear. Just a dismissive wave of a hand.

To what end, from Mallarm�'s example, do I now assemble thoughts of sailing somewhere I shall never know and, arriving, discover was never there? For better the hell of where I am: on my unCarribean island awash with cars rolling up the motorway and rolling back; with these - not melon-smile neighbours that doze on their porch - but surly sods making a quid round the back, or banging home from the pub, as I settle for the monotony of British grub. To what end, Baudelaire, in your sonnet, did you once celebrate eyes that met, paths that crossed in a Parisian street, your glimpse of a woman you might have loved? For better the hell of who we are: bricked into ourselves, in rooms of our own, not knowing, not seeking, other universes; not being over the road, drawing curtains on mistresses' afternoons; not jumping universes to outlive the rollers' run, or fuck the impossible arrayed in the sun.

We have to love our apricot tree, and love it extra hard in winter. That's when we have to love its brain pulsing with synaptic sparrows, ������������ love its coursing veins and arteries x-rayed against the retinal sky. We have to love it for braving it out when dripping wet and aching cold, love it for defiantly sleeping rough, for not coming in at night, not even when bent with snow or gnawed by frost. We even have to love it for making do with sorry scraps of slimy slough scavenging worms have chewed and shat. And we have to love it, too, in spring, when our unconditional love is returned with sprigs of bridal blossoms, a Derby Day hat plumed in glistening green, and, if we've really loved it hard enough, a grinning pride of cherub-bottomed babes.

Heading out of the docks, a lorry turns full-steam into the road; its headlights splash on windows blinking at the evening news. Across the way, a telephone rings several times, and receives no reply. Lower down the road, the pub closes, discharging its contents like a sluice. Next-door flushes, shouts his children back to bed. Yawning cars turn in. We hear a ship lowing at the bar, impatient to come in for the night. The clatter of a train sweeps the sky like a litany of prayers for those at sea. The telephone rings, and will ring again, louder, and louder, probing black water.

I remember, yes, I too remember the house where I was born, and the only photograph I remember is the one I do not have of the front, taken before the war which commandeered for bombs the railings and the wrought-iron gate. I remember the jagged stumps, and the missing gate, like a loss of face; the absurdity of the cloche hats of my mother sadly smiling sadly; of my kind aunt, too, with no kids to spoil, who kindly spoilt me with plums till I was sick, and saved up her suicide for her retirement. I remember the dining-room, agony of long evenings, wind howling under floor-boards, lino lifting, reek of smoke filling the air, the Bakelite wireless in the corner, wheezing and spluttering in and out of life, my father causing friction twiddling dials. I remember the air-raid shelter my parents shared with old Mrs Weaver till the last all-clear, the cat that sulked in the cherry-tree if left for a day; flour-faced Mrs Weaver, my first death at eight; the cat at ten, just a whiff of gas, after his trouble in the coal-shed. I remember the landing, where I stood and it was always cold, and I'd call that I couldn't sleep, as they niggled away downstairs, the one coal fire petering out, a smouldering rumble of a row she would miss when he'd gone. I remember the front room, conserved for special occasions and never used, icy as a monk's cell, my Meccano retreat. I google and see new railings, a new gate - I imagine phantoms gliding from room to room, trampling over the boy on the landing as they traipse through the man on the train.

A sprinkling of spring sunshine and I bet people have already forgotten there was misery on the roads yesterday because of fog, but I'm not forgetting my best friend's had a stroke and can't even remember that in the espresso-bar where we used to hang out, Tommy Trinder kept his trilby on while he chatted to the owner. My dogs yank me past bad taste in music from open windows, so I am wondering if I should be grieving a little because a young couple's shiny new car makes mine a year older, or more so, because someone has left an Australian beer can on a soggy mattress on the grass verge next to the paddock where a bored Alsatian barks at me ten times and gives up. Car doors slam behind me as barbecue-goers spill out and whoop very loudly because they think it's necessary for acting happy and the house they visit is bloody good at hiding its history of grief.

Of every dream that could haunt me, this one insinuates irresistibly, like a bubble that might waft across our summer garden and, disconcerting chattering cat or frantic dog, skim the children's straining fingertips, swirl past your sleeping face, and beam its supernoval menace on me, on me �. This shimmering, hollow dream drifts into a fitful sleep, eclipsing companion considerations, to hold my gaze with its power to chill a smile or cloud an eye; for a brief eternity, it fixes its stippled stare on me, on me �. then, as I switch on the lamp to face it down, it is gone!

Mindlessly at midnight, the first ship farts, then a laugh creases up the river and rips around the docks. Now the bobbing boats wiggle on the tide and link their arms in Auld Lang's Syne - the necessary cacophony of revelry to tug the New Year in and dump the old one at sea.

It's only a few days since Christmas, but after the joy comes a niggling sort of ache, here by the sea, with this lonely reveller of festive darkness, shedding needles of rain and a glitter of shivers along the promenade; with this foul-mouthed wind staggering off the tide at closing-time, fetching home a surly catch of staleness from the sea. Stale too, all along the front, the wind's accumulation: gusts of greasy smells, clattering gangs of rusty cans and whispering cronies of crumpled wrappers that lour and loll or lobby locked arcades. And staler still, scumming off the stranded year, and all the years beneath, the skins, the smells of other selves, the damaged, discarded selves - like canisters of waste discharging at sea, corrosive stuff, irradiating, blanching the blood of this resort all hunched up��� and left to play alone in winter rooms in a fug of malaise, with a baffled buzz of wings on the glass, a whiff of death behind the curtains. Look! All the lights are wistful spies, what-the-butlering for a glimpse of meaning in our lives. See, now they peer around the bay, nudge-nudging from window to window for the secrets up her skirts, as holly-spangled Hesper tinsels down the sky, and sidles over here, for warmth, to you and me.

In those days there was snow when the postman trudged up the path on Christmas Day in Birkenhead with parcels in brown paper from aunts I didn't know in Gloucester and I was a Master Somebody they didn't know. The stamp album I dated 1954 soon bulged with stamps on stamp-hinges tastily licked and open-mouth tweezered into the squares, their perforated edges frontiers no stamp must cross, no territory invade. In those days I had to write thank you letters to the aunts I didn't know. Thank you for the stamp album. It is very nice. I am a regular customer in Woolworths. And I now know the capital of every country in the world, and countries that no longer exist, countries that have torn themselves apart or been torn apart. I could have added that. Was the album from you, the smiley Auntie Dorothy I stayed with for a day with the plums and no kids and the Uncle Win who had a squeezy pump for his asthma, who said take a deep breath, that's a healthy country smell? Was it his asthma that made you shock us when you killed yourself? Or perhaps you sent it, the maiden Auntie Kathleen, the youngest who kept the house and who had to do the caring for the drinker I didn't know and won't forget I met him for seconds in a Gloucester street. This is your grandfather, said my dad. You might have had photos by your bedside of your nieces and nephews you would one day leave a thousand pounds to. Or a photo of an airman, a sailor, a soldier, who'd left you longing, who'd not returned, no-one ever said. Postage stamps with bloody histories, from Germany, Poland, Austria, Russia, Belgium, Italy, Spain, Japan. Heads of dictators, kings and queens, emperors, their backsides licked and posted on letters from the dead to the dead, the bombed, the gassed, the tortured, the slave-laboured, the uprooted, the blown to pieces. It's gone, of course, the thousand pounds, but not you, not you, whichever aunt you were, wrapped with love and posted with my DNA bank of millions.

Shopping. They'd be at least an hour. Immaterial what they were buying: essential fripperies, dress material. I started getting tense, all this waiting, and the waste, and the dying - I could try drilling my diamond eyes into the crowd, gilt-edged from new-town jungles to forage in this escalating famine of pavlovian glass and steel � hardened shoppers' faces I might crack into seismic smiles, eruptions of compassion. Why bother? Everyone was right, of course, in a dying world, in a Rorke's Drift undertow to the politics of acquisition. Besides, hadn't they left someone at home to deal with the floods of debris and pot-bellied children that poured through the letter-box? The arthritic grandmother, perhaps, that alluvium of drought, limping to the diluvian dustbin?

Is this all that's left? asks my son, just dropping in. The inlaid wooden chest my father made with love when they were first married served in four houzses before I drove it down South like a coffin to rest here. For years his tools stalled like new in their boxes, until one day I found him planing a piece of wood. I gathered up the curly shavings, held them to my nose in the shed the new people have taken away - but not the smell he said was cherry or the scar on my palm, the red-speckled shavings, when he let me use the chisel. I open the chest in which she stored the linen and towels she ironed with love, the lid creaks, I catch a the faint trace of naphthalene, enough for a flickering memory rush. Is this all that's left? Yes, everything else went into care, except for her two girls on a beach from their last front room, gathering dust in the garage, and his watch, which is broken. Oh, and there's their carriage clock he fiddled with, and got on her nerves, also beyond repair.

Fran�ois Villon is like the must-see gargoyle too far round the other side of Notre Dame, or the stained-glass chef d'�uvre that you miss forever in your hurry back to the sight-seeing coach, so you can't give either a second thought. Yes, but he made a desperate appeal to us all to intercede for him. 'Fr�res humains', he called us, as he contemplated being hanged, his body swinging from the gibbet, five fellow villains for company, rain-soaked, sun-scorched, rotting, pecked by crows. Well, he was a thief and a murderer, and you went to hell in those days if you were a sinner like him. But you could get him forgiven if you prayed for him, and he'd be all right. Absolved. Perhaps. Okay, so it was over five hundred years ago. And, okay again, so it's not clear in his poem how many people had to pray for him to secure his escape from the fires of hell. Nor, of course, you add, did he allow - well he couldn't, it would have been stake-burningly heretical - for his appeal lasting century after century into the enlightened age of sceptics, atheists, existentialists, nihilists and their ilk, not forgetting you sightseers on a mission, who wouldn't give his poem a second pens�e if it was flashed up in the coach. Why should you bother reading his poem? Besides, it's in bleedin' French, init? you might say. (Fran�ois Villon 1431 - 1463?)

She'd been on the Queen Mary, she told the check-out girl. She'd given up smoking, they could see she still pursed her lips, snake hand poised, for the camera. And she'd been a welder in the war, she showed the burn on her arm. He was away, months on end, the Arctic convoys, you know. The tail poised to shuffle forward, done with nodding and smiling, or simply looking away, till she paid and left her mark.

Wheeled along by a nurse, the limp girl in the garden must be in her twenties, with someone's clothes, someone's hair-style; her heels, institution-red; her feet, at unnatural angles, half-dibbled into slippers sliding off the foot-rest. I sense she does not have much longer to live, parked, as she now is, at a bed of sprightly daffodils; defenceless, as she now is, against such a caring act of cruelty.

Victorious Britain still looking defeated five years on rationing and malaise haircurlers and debt bombsites and Brylcreme Union Jacks out of nowhere children out of school lined up in the rain primed and raring to wave all along Borough Road past Tranmere Rovers up Prenton Road West and down to the docks Rain stopped on command queen in hurry, late for lunch open top Rolls flashed by missed her, didn't see her waved flags anyway Ship slipped into Mersey lots of broken glass sailed round the world between repairs and refits called in here and there made chests puff out defending the realm no action, no scare didn't make Britain great again scrapped like the others could've had a new railway like the defeated Still, got her majesty's loo seat in Cammel Laird's museum fur-coated and heated and next to the plaque a Birkenhead News cutting with me, caught waving my flag

Chenonceau: selfies by the coach-load at this ch�teau on the Cher. Chef d'�uvre of hydroponic art, like a house-plant extraordinaire with its feet in running water, it will arch over tea-or-coffee talk, its bloom of transportable culture dropping aesthetic seeds of colloquy, from the salons of the States to the boudoirs of Belarus. If I donned my doublet and hose, I could bow and scrape five hundred years away, make renaissance with the festive dead, bal-masqu� for a whoring king, (la f�te is only a layer of dust away) were it not for the tourists in between. At least, outside, my hawk can soar and blur them out, or swoop to the hand of Diane de Poitiers in her prime, dangling her legs, on the car-park wall.

i.�� 1954 Either mistaken half a mile off target from the blacked-out Mersey docks, or off-loaded onto with full apologies on the way back to the Fatherland, it was a hovering void still faintly overhung with the miasma of loss - but still a house, despite its toppled gate-posts, draughty entrance-hall, open-plan rooms either side, scatterings of deco tiles from where the kitchen was. To think living took place there once, all traces being long since levelled off, where boys in worsted shorts crouched, and killed sixpenny baddies, while neighbours in rooms remembered less and less as rationing came to an end at last. ii.�� 2014 Still a withered hand sticking up, curtain ring on wedding finger, tatter of speckled hem of girl's dress snagged on stump of water pipe, charred scraps of a Liverpool Echo dated���ept mb r���1���4 . ���������������������������������������� Next door the exhausted hotel stares, tired of surviving the bomb, its willow drooping over the wall like a dribbling fountain weeping gobbets of grief into stagnant pools, where swarms of sassy frogs do skinny-dips, all pretending to be the same, and going glug glug in rainbow slicks, hearts all throbbing and throbbing like motorbikes on heat. Small boys could take them home, have little epiphanies with rampant cats, but not Earnshaw, Riley or Reid,�������������������������������� all gone, all bloody well gone, the only one left is me, mucking around with this.

Fierce pain sharked through his arm. Pietro Bornorquod rent air and ears, skeltered fatly through narrowing lift-doors, with desperado gusto of weary traveller. Struck in drop by clanging door, suitcase thudded to resquiescat; strain removed from bargain locks, discharged unwashed contents. Some bovine-standers stiffened British upper lips; others, less patriotic, betrayed national wrapping: blinked round, still chewing cud, sniggered, raised eyes almighty-wards. Lift started ascent in 1968. Bovine standers stared at happening: fat squeak, thud and spill evolving amorphously into huge anal bend thrust malodorously into faces; into phonemes of foreign distress; into tumble of bent man's personal effects from jacket pocket: wallet, passport, papers, dirty postcards and so on, observed by yourself on such occasions. Lift, doors closed in 1968, still making its ascent.

Old Pete? Now he could grow a thing or two, and he did, year after year, even when he got the wilt on him. Gave me tomato plants in spring, for finding his watch amongst my weeds. "Looking for dandelions for my grandson's rabbits. My missus would kill me if she knew I'd lost it." He left going till late summer and there'd be something to pick. I'm here early, just after the autumn mist, pulling up the tomatoes, brown and blighted. I look across to where he raked and hoed, a tommy on a treeless salient. His widow stoops and picks, making things last, dinners for one till winter.

Would he come in and see my Meccano crane? He could help me build something else, but he always wanted to play out instead. Called himself Billy Liddell, can't recall who I was, a third division goalie, I think, chump chasing balls belted down the alley. Suddenly the match would be over: time for a bout of boxing, alley walls for ropes, beating me up till they called us in for tea. Next day at the door, was I coming out to play, or watch his dad's TV, the first in our road, and his sister growing tits and going out. Dropped me like a manager for moving house, from best friend to half-hearted nods at school; five years with his new team and then he left. Heart attack, my mother said one day over tea. Dribbling between goals, a woman in each, drilling one past remorse, only fucking thirty-two.

When is an uncle not an uncle? Answer: when he's your auntie's husband and she's your dad's sister so I must have some of her in me, not that I could tell in nineteen fifty-three, especially with her sort of bacon I had to come downstairs to with my stomach turning over, after I'd just been watching the boatmen skulling across the water in the cistern just below the window of the daughter-gone-to-be-a-nurse's floral bedroom where they'd put me for a week. Packed off from a Woodside platform for a compulsory solo holiday in Gloucester aged ten on a steam train which has been disappeared and which had awkward long leather straps for struggling to opening windows with and struggling to close them if you didn't want smuts in your eyes; second visit to a branch of the ancestral family, and the last, I was in another country of strangers who were children fifty years before me some time between Mafeking and Sarajevo. What's to remember? Being shown to a shed to get a lungful of hot onion gas, a child was bound to like a well nurtured onion, and the cabbages making a farty smell at the bottom of their garden, as tall as me at dawn and rolling silver beads down my bare legs, the watering can which helped me escape to pass the time befriending them, the Ford Prefect precision parked with post-war pride after taking me to Bourton-on-the-Water, a child was bound to like a picturesque model village, or Peter Scott's Slimbridge, a child was bound to like pretty ducks, no doubt Uncle Harold did, he carried binoculars round his neck, like an untested meaning of life. He was big in carpets at the Bon Marche, having worked his way up. He rolled out an Axminster, this is an Axminster, he said, a child was bound to like a well made carpet. There must have been a speech or two at his well-earned retirement, Gloucester colleagues standing round, remarking upon his achievement in mats and rugs, grinning for as long as it took. Auntie Elsie would have written to my mum, saying how much she enjoyed having me. What a good eater I'd been and so quiet, put in the front room each evening with the solitaire, not a sound, a child was bound to like a nice game of solitaire. Were they tested or untested when the photographs came from the other side of the world which was bigger then and grandchildren were sequestered behind smiles and wrote compulsory thank you letters to strangers, treasured in a Bon Marche letter-rack like a consolation contre la mort? They didn't say. Pride keeping it shut, perhaps. Uncle Harold and Auntie Elsie have gone to graves in Gloucester, though I doubt if they know it or what became of me or what will become of me and a couple of cousins and scatterings of grandchildren with bits of her and him and me in them, and our fading fragments of memory of their existence, and their graves no-one visits, where people dawdle by, and a fox deposits a sloppy mess.

Birkenhead buses were blue, blue Guy Arabs for school, bus stop in front of a bombed house on Borough Road, the gap filled by Camp Coffee and Senior Service. The 86 was the best in the morning, taking longer, time to get full marks in the French test, for Dave to check his homework against mine, never noticing I was leaning away from his feet. Mel usually missed it, his mum with five to get ready, another on the way with the lodger. Bus late, had to leg it up Milton Road, where Wilfred Owen used to live, caught the 51 on Derby Road. The 51, always in a hurry after school, specially lurching on the bend at the workhouse turned hospital, pressing Port Sunlight shift-workers against us, like bellows, puffing out Woodbines and Surf. Wallasey buses were yellow, yellow Leylands for the seaside, the 11 always smelling new taking us to New Brighton, the oil-stained sand, the washed up German mine. Once, with Auntie Bessie and Uncle Frank, the only time they made the trek to see us, we stretched our legs along the prom as far as Seacombe pier, my dad and Uncle Frank in waist-coats and suits, tacking trilbies into the wind. The ferry docking at Woodside, squeezing tractor tyres against the pier, the gangway clattering above the oily Mersey, the steep climb up the landing-stage at low-tide, being hauled away from model liners in the ticket-hall, Uncle Frank and Auntie Bessie waiting outside the railway station for the single-decker back to Chester, steam trains hissing, weary sighs I didn't know were premonitions of the axe. Chester buses were green, green Crosvilles for family stuff, Auntie Bessie, limping from meningitis, one leg shorter than the other, screams in my mum's ears going back to 1910, gave me port to try and put Jim Reeves on in the parlour. A child was playing with friends, she said, and drowned in the canal. They used to whip the horses up Watergate, said my mum, they sometimes fell down outside her doctor's. A grandfather smelling of birdseed sat all day in a rocking-chair by the bird, neither of them spoke. Uncle Frank carving bits of wood in a shed next to the outside toilet, its neatly ripped squares of newspaper on a loop of string, once he took me down to the Kop at the end of his road to see the River Dee. He had lung cancer and showed my dad where it was. The dreary drone of the journey back home at night, the fifties in the semi-darkness of the New Chester Road, a child peering through a misted window, to whom life seemed fixed the way it was.

Cross-country saved the pitches in winter, fair enough, but made us intellectuals - us express tail-enders - miss the first bus after school. Three minutes from his homework, beanpole Perkins always raced home early, excused by his heart, got his books out, and wasted no time. We kept warm at the bus-stop, killing time, moving pawns. The double-decker from Levers lurched through the smog; we concentrated on our chess, convinced he'd got us licked, in tomorrow's test.

Our train is delayed, passenger taken ill at Liverpool Street; we have to stand behind the yellow line, continues the announcement, omitting the details we can imagine if we wish but our faces don't let on; blank looks of indifference, or calm commuters' courage; it's the way we cope as we wait, fixed on our patchwork of thoughts; and when the train comes hurtling in, we stay behind the yellow line, maybe scan each carriage for signs of distress, stand back as the doors open to let people out, then step on board to sit or stand and carry on with our lives with a show of stoical humanity - or a case of not admitting to that unbearable feeling of being cruelly circumscribed.

Here I am at last, at the end of my life, posting my farewells and seeking peace of mind as I queue for the vessel along the beach; but I can't help leaving footprints in the sand, though they have the power to hurt me, like words, even as they irrevocably fade; nor can I ignore the waves running up to me, like children, thrilling with their ancient stories, faltering with their first few words, forgetting how they went, and running back, trying to remember all that has happened and all who have stood on this wind-swept shore, looking out from the end of the known world to where the vast ocean joins the immeasurable sky in the dank unremitting colour of nothingness.

Slam! They leave the wall-to-wall niceness in charge. Goodbye to the essential pictures in the hall, with its past of other pairings and partings painted out in exorcising shades. Goodbye to the polished smiles of approving guests���� prolonging best wishes in fashionable frames, and just-unwrapped smells in the press-button room, waiting for the evening like the slippers, fluffy as requested from Auntie Pru, and another standing-idle day begins. A second slam! beats the evening draught down the hall. The double-glazed silence slinks off to sulk with the old days in the corner; rodent reveries scurry away to claw at filled-in escape holes. Re-embracing life together, the young couple strip off the world-of-work that gets in the way.

Another dodo moment: impossible for homo sapiens to avoid making it an all-ticket spectacular, one to capture for the memory, to savour, as it were, with a titillating soup�on of collective shame kicking in as an after-go�t, (and more kudos than being at someone's last concert, before he died. Perhaps.) Trailing something of the rescuee brought blinking out of the foetid jungle to be told the war was over, this fabled feline was fuming in his fake forest, cursing conservation's cock-up, (though with penis still intact.) Suddenly, he padded towards me, two poniards in his smouldering eyes, his sneering snarl rasping like an imperial accusation I really didn't deserve. That was when I jostled to the front of the crowd, calmly steadied my aim, and intrepidly bagged him. He didn't feel a thing. I felt elated: I had the screensaver to die for. I duly paused for reflection at the memorials to the dead keepers.

They're demolishing my old school without asking, the classrooms have been emptied for the last time, but the sorrow of their emptiness will hang around, the way the smell of cleanliness at the start of term hurts like a new beginning in the pit of the stomach. Old boys will think on the times they returned: the painful rush of memories at an old desk, images of former selves, the gauntlet of corridors. What's left for survival's indeterminate compromise but a poor elsewhere for reflection on those they knew and didn't know who went off to die in war or life? Even the nothingness that remains of what was lived and learnt is being obliterated: soon there will be no grave at which to mourn.

The class was reading Heaney's 'The Underground.' "What can you tell me about line 9?" I asked. "It's a waltz rhythm," he said, the only one who noticed. There's always a prime memory of those who are dead. The congregation of parents, relatives, neighbours, teachers, classmates, college friends: all their prime memories, put them all together and you might have the great man he could have been. Some made him a musician, others a historian, a prime minister. No note, no past history, no hint. The vicar went for solace, conducting like a maestro the puzzled, the bewildered. No mention of the planning, the purchase of the rope. That he'd had the courage to pull out, not to prolong the battle, the stalemate - no mention of that. You carry on waltzing, I guess he was saying. (Student of mine. Took his own life at university, aged 19. May 2013)

He must have been a thundering highway-truck of a man; he filled the screen like he'd filled his cab, but talked much smaller now; his photogenic sorrow drew cameras off his wife, staring moistly from the sofa's brink. He looked crushed, run down, for he had not swerved to avoid himself. One imagined the family business rusting, abandoned, in the back-yard of his mind. Heaving heavy-haulage man, he must have begged to fade with the brakes, to be ground to dust in the brake-drum he let his son blow clean. (From the days when brake linings contained asbestos)

Day 1 ''Morning! I'm the registrar.'' (�. this is worse than the butchery at Smithfield! Coming to Cobalt Two will cut up your soul�.) ''If you'd just bring your daughter this way, please. All we do today, dear, is measure you up: angular blue lines here, here, on your temples, to position the blocks of lead which will protect your eyes.'' (�. and turn heads in the street!) ''Children do love going to the Sunshine Room.'' (�. old enough to understand she must lie still, but not young enough not to know what she's got �.) ''Do give her time to look around afterwards.'' (Appreciate our concern, huddled over microscopes, earnest laboratories sorting cells, curing that today, and perhaps this tomorrow �.) ''Bye, now, see you again, tomorrow, dear, and don't wash that warpaint off for three weeks! Day 2 She's got blue lines on her bare scalp especially for today. The new girl. There are older ones - you can tell they've been here before: believers in the just-audible hello - the life-enhancing chemistry of nicely forced smiles; house-proud mind-tidiers, trying to hack the ivy out. At least the older ones are well behaved, setting a good example, which looks like courage to the new girl whose name has just been called. Suddenly, her life's like a nasty end to a children's story, turning on her, snarling, reaching for her throat, as she enters the lift down to the Sunshine Room. And afterwards, off to St. Katharine Docks to see the yachts. Come on now, your headscarf's very pretty. Yes, we'll be getting your uniform tomorrow. Of course, you'll be going to your new school next week.

I passed it round the class: a piece of Roman pottery; expected them to gasp, to marvel at something so old: part of a handle, red fired clay with traces of ancient paint; wanted them to imagine the potter at his wheel, his black curly hair, sitting in the sun, turning the glistening jug, attaching the curving handle, adding delicate grooves with the tip of his wet finger, for a pleasing effect at the height of the Empire; reckoned they would surmise he was a potter who would not know how many hands would grasp this handle and carry the vessel which would serve its purpose (for how long?) until it broke, and a piece of the handle was inserted in mortar between blocks of stone at the base of the temple wall, in Municipium Augusta Bilbilis, in Hispania, till I retrieved it two thousand years later; thought they might wonder if a thirsty builder placed it there, after drinking from the jug which slipped from his grip and broke because he was drunk, perhaps; or a cheeky child or a passer-by, sneakily pushing it into place, like carving initials for a laugh or something to be remembered for, before finally the mortar went dry; assumed they'd ask themselves what things of theirs would someone find in two thousand years, what legacy would they leave? hoped I'd left them mine. The ever optimistic teacher. Municipium Augusta Bilbilis: ruins of a Roman city, near Catalayud, Arag�n, Spain.

White-coated greetings, stinging questions, back with the morning, drone straight at her, then swarm past, turmoil in their wake, a whirlpool of noise, muddying the air, spinning, sucking her into its still-centre of thrumming silence: and she curls herself up in her rolled-up vacuum, her solitary where she hangs out her days one by one, back turned to the here-and-now peeping in, rattling keys. Still, after the pills, a nightingale sings: the trees have sparkles in their hair: wide-armed, she can inhale the world, roam knee-deep in darkness, and be herself till dawn.

Clever it was, of that philosopher to ask: what colour is a lemon in the dark? Yellow, you say, of course it's yellow. But in your heart of hearts, you admit really it's black, when there's no light. And what about that memory - it's locked away, it's buried deep - is it black like a lemon, when you keep it in the dark? You could prise it out, hold it to the light, see the true colour, the way it was, the way it happened, the way it must have hurt.

A sunny day at the weekend, very English, ready to be enjoyed, plants planted, patio scrubbed, decking laid, wine chilled, recliners reclining. The other side of the fence she is getting her washing in. they hear the pegs fall one by one into her peg-box, each with a nonchalant loudness that sounds deliberate. She snaps the rotary washing-line shut, with an insouciant loudness that sounds deliberate. She places the floral cover over the rotary washing-line and zips it up, with a petulant loudness that sounds deliberate. Now she is hoovering, with a haughty loudness that sounds deliberate. She will hoover again tomorrow, so he won't need to shout. When he shouts, he shouts, with a fuck-you loudness that's definitely deliberate. Back in the house, they creep around gingerly like respectful mice, a few more drops of Baby Bio on their blooming resentment.

Waking us up in the night the cat we were drowning is a baby under the water, and the pair of voices bubbling through the wall are frantic divers, cradling, bringing up the victim, draining congested lungs. We step back from the water's edge, discreet pillows over our ears, and, like the coal-tar vaporiser that is the votive candle smelling sweet in a tourists' church, let the pungency of others' pain duly incense the room next-door; and empathy's confessional be a nice old Tardis in the dark, dematerialising us back to sleep.

Bang in the middle of Beech Road, just past the prefabs, on the way home from school in the first year, was where Charlesworth told me what mums and dads did in bed. And the way it was afterwards: I can rebuild more or less the tall brick wall of his house which we used plus the fence of the one next door for unarmed cricket up the narrow path between. And more or less the way I remember, I can dog-tongue after sixes misfielded by the hedge, count the balls that weren't counted, and deserving a bat at last, be a sadist's set of stumps before limping home to tea, and sitting with what he said, wondering if it showed.

In shadow, over by the fence, I watch them come galloping out, trample through the seagulls' camp, secure slowly round and close corrals. Young manes flutter, heads toss vain bravadoes. Suddenly feet shift, break into movement; eddies of delicious panic churn in on themselves; splashing shrieks drench the towering cliffs of sky, then subside, lapping round the million stars like a spent froth of useless S.O.S. It is as if I've not long pounced and dragged one off - what isn't, never was, declare their brazen eyes. So does the quietening bell calling the children in, so do the seagulls, circling back to reclaim their domain.

''Never thought he'd do this on a spring day, not when the house is paid for and us kids are off his hands; filling time's easy - hey, he could have got started on all those weeds! Today's most definitely one for getting out there, for getting stuck in; no sense is there, just staring through the window, letting time go by, rather than fix those fences.'' ''It's the bookmark feeling that's put him out: flat as a pressed flower in a tiresome book - like when you open the garden door that lets in the smell of blossom and sets you back another year - he's just marking the last chapter at the point where people get lost.''

Objection started it: broke the glass tension. Words inflamed one corner, flared around the room. They leaped to their feet; drew burning swords to blaze and scorch; but, turned back by mirror-wit, seared themselves, and caved in, a divided rubble, the protest of embers. From the chair came a dampening-down, delayed to perfection, waving away the stench of politics, as the school was extinguished for good, with a rubber stamp.

Heavy, as forecast, for evening commuters; a ferocious attack, arrows angled in, Agincourt again. In serried ranks, caution or cowardice at the wheel, our carapace motorcade progresses at a stately pace. Street lights, swaying like yellow-eyed brachiapods, wave, spread sheets of gold before us; the wind's applause buffets our cars, spraying our windows with champagne as we pass, cheering us home, victors of sorts.

Step outside today and, penetrating like neuralgia, worsening by the year, the cold air brings to mind something far more chilling than Arctic winds, or ice inside windows in the old house a lifetime ago. A freezing mist hovers in the garden... there were times when it carried plague and beliefs were believed, like those that plague us today. I watch synaptic sparrows surviving on seeds I have placed on their table. With luck, they will live a little longer, before quietly dying in secret, unmourned, a happy death they never knew they'd have. Ready to go at eighty, she said she wanted to die, and again at ninety. Lifeless as a rag doll at ninety-four, slumped over the edge of her pillow, she'd have come apart if I'd lifted her back. Getting her way at last, she recognised me before watching me leave, the way we always see someone for the last time.

She sits like a sausage in front of her telly, wasting one gnarled paw on her barren belly, and craning the other thin claw from drag to drag, between her vain-red lips of a stuck-at-home hag and the fusty air of a draughtless dwindling life. When the telly's done and ruthless night is come, she painfully inserts her frigid frame so glum between the sheets where Earnest turned his shoulder like the last time he died and made the bed grow colder - there she aches away the lonely hours like no-one's wife. She lies with staring sigh for nighties never lifted: soulless years when Earnest's pleasure never shifted across the unstained gap of their bitter union to fill the hollow where once she craved communion with him to gain peace in her mind in place of strife.

It got to him from way back, homing in from an unromantic evening, typically late fifties, a Woolworth's painting dab of sunset hunkering down behind lowering dark rocks, the unerasable thought of her, the sting of cheap shampoo from her dishevelled hair, and, oh no, oh no, coming away non-the-wiser after not blunting an old penknife on the rough sandstone not bearing their names longer than themselves. Still the wry chuckle of water, the sky red-faced with sniggering, and the embarrassment of hair, stranded in time with a dull face, unenhanced by a life-time's exposure. No wonder the old photograph turned sour in his hands - in a postmodernist sort of way.

''Mr Hussein sends his apologies: things are difficult at work; he can't change his shifts anymore to come to these meetings.'' We shall miss you, Mr Hussein. Dexterously your chubby brown fingers wove the fabric of your story, the magic carpet that has flown us into the private mosaic of your heart. Your broken English tumbled from your lips, gurgled as it ran along the rills, brought new life to scorched fields � halving the hurt we'd hawked before you � while you alone held together the simple home the monsoon tried to wash away. Not with them, for they have broken your windows, those who also came to England to find a better life; cancelled too your daughter's marriage, arranged all those years ago; not even with your wife, at her respectful distance of ignorance, can you share your greatest hurt � not the desert trek from doctor to doctor, your sickly child in your arms, not the vulture thermalling the uncertain cure, but knowing that no one wants to ride her bike, that she's lost her friends like handfuls of pretty hair on the bedroom floor. No, Mr Hussein, we haven't forgotten you; we think we should try to see you again.

"We" start Madame Bovary then "we" disappear Googling back to where I was fifty years ago, I come out of the Ecole Normale on Rue Anselme and head for the Caf� de la Butte on the corner. Lyon, hard and bitter in January, exhaust plumes trailing Simcas and Panhards on Boulevard de la Croix Rousse. Pierre brings me a coffee and a newspaper. "L'Angleterre est dans la merde, Wilson," the warmth of his daily greeting, whatever's on the front page today. The man from the British Consulate, blue-veined nose, public school hair, thin strands, John LeMesurier, raises his second glass of white, best way to start the day, he says, and I sneak away into Charles Bovary's classroom, looking round for the disappearing 'nous', the first word of the first sentence that's puzzled me ever since for half a century - such a short time ago, so easy to google back: back half a century times two and I'd be blown up in a boggy trench, which I'll give a miss; back times three and I could speak to Flaubert, ask if he was sorry for the way he used us and dumped us. Probably easier to skype him, you say.

This was at Alan's in '89. We could hear the dishwasher hard at it in the kitchen like an au pair on heat rushing to knock off early. They had a new extension, that was where we had dinner. It occupied part of the garden which we admired after dessert, curtains being pulled back, and lights switched on specially. Surely you remember? It was dark, and a stream ran through the garden, but I said there were no gnomes fishing. We had the other Alan with us, the French Alain on the exchange. the one staying with us I showed "Allo 'Allo!" to, the one I told you asked 'Why do they tok like that?' You must remember now. Look, someone took this photograph - so we must have been there, with the small talk, cigars de rigueur, car doors banging after bedtime, and goodnights vaporising in the cold... You had no coat... you're shivering, perhaps you do remember.

Vacating your seat, you too can make language move: so, elbowing to the exit is the camaraderie of culture, your carriage waits in the stack, concrete pillars are Corinthian columns, and driving up the greasy ramp, an exhilarating surge of metaphor. In the side-streets of reality, you devastatingly refute Eliot: it's all architectured down to size; the sky's a renaissance ceiling you could easily paint on your back, to one of Mozart's greatest hits. Oh, the puddled swish of driving home in the rain, beside yourself with optimism, finding all these original thoughts weaving through the slums, like beauty in rained-on mascara! And reaching home, how can you not admire the castle of your own routine that is better than no slippers and no cooking-for-one-smells in the right place with the photographs at your bedside, to remind you you won't be alone in the bed you've made properly for your fierce contentment? Anyway, you've done with Uncle Vanya sobbing back at the theatre, and quite understandably, you're trying to forget why he was.

i.�� In Attendance From the boundary of cypresses, the cassock-wings of a hang-glider minister closer and closer. On the chapel path, a fresh droplet of black oil from the hearse has put out and lost a human form, only minutes since delivery of the diminutive, beribboned box. Beyond the hedges round each raked and numbered bed, the town, the world, resumption, stand back for blotch-red grief, a couple's stumbling timelessness. Nervously, sympathy gets ready, to be useful, with useless arms. ii.�� A Small Do Engine capacities and a couple's performing dog keep the conversation going; so does someone's child at her elbow, with a noisy toy; or another, with its absence, still. More Camembert? Yes, please, to plug the holes in her pretence, until, on the drive home, the wintry sun breaks through the mist, and a perfect Turner sky, with its therapeutic banality, graces a silence she can bear.

When, without stopping, an express train has hurtled through the station, the commuters do not perceive how much older the people opposite grew while their view was blocked; nor, when another train clatters past in the other direction, do they see it obscure the circle of huts, the smouldering fires and the men with spears setting off to hunt for food - as if standing still's being only where you are, not stopping yourself stepping in front of the horses of the coach you don't see arrive, nor roasting your boar on a spit; as if waiting for a train is only choosing between what is and what isn't, like believing your paper's not a tree, though you're already on board, and leaving yourself behind.

Defining comedy extends into break �. In the playground the fat one they call Elmer is wriggling against the wall again, inviting, enjoying jibes, punches, spit �. Funny, of course it's funny - Moli�re castigat ridendo mores - students quote the introduction for proof. Harpagon, such meanness, such cruelty to his children, servants, horses, deserves to lose his ch�re cassette of cash, and crack up, as if widowed again, to hang the world, and then himself. His howls of anguish turn up the laughter, uncomfortably, despite ourselves. Moli�re, despite himself, is castigating less the mores, more the man, the more he's hooked on money, his love, his fix, the more the misfit, the more he's writhing against the public wall of his private hell, the louder the hoots of derision, to send them away laughing, because comedy has a happy ending, students say, glad of a break. Moli�re 1622�1673), was a French playwright and actor who is considered to be one of the greatest masters of comedy in Western literature. Among Moli�re's best-known works is 'L'Avare' ('The Miser.')

Sadly, I imagine you will wake, too, because the silence has changed colour, the way, fluting across a murky water, a swan's light may gently startle you, gleaming through the curtains of your eyes. Wake, though with the softest of violence, snow has played you a nocturne of lightest down, quilted you in symphonic hush, mesmerised you in your sleep. A captive audience, your fidgeting legs are swathed, your cough stilled, by chords of white � you are laid to rest at every cadence. Oblivious to the cold auditorium, your lulled capillary thoughts are tingling, pleasantly beating time. Wake, and they are jerking the pendulum, flailing, frantically rattling the case; and you are shivering in your bed - horribly alone, except for you, and the Arctic waste to face.

Airtight. No sound. No Is that you? above the TV turned up too loud. No feeble getting up to proffer hand or kiss. No shuffling round the assembly-kit of treasured things that made a home. No ghosts of chirpy whistling days with windows that breathed, seasons strolling in for a chat, grubby knees at open doors, laughter scampering up and down the stairs. No fidgeting between naps, no turning a blurred gaze from the incomprehensible street to cross-examine the other chair. No sobbing into the night. Interminable night, fingering things, like a dealer, leaving a smell.

It's only a few days since Christmas, but after the joy comes a niggling sort of ache, here by the sea, with this lonely reveller of festive darkness, shedding needles of rain and a glitter of shivers along the promenade; with this foul-mouthed wind staggering off the tide at closing-time, fetching home a surly catch of staleness from the sea. Stale too, all along the front, the wind's accumulation: gusts of greasy smells, clattering gangs of rusty cans and whispering cronies of crumpled wrappers that lour and loll or lobby locked arcades. And staler still, scumming off the stranded year, and all the years beneath, the skins, the smells of other selves, the damaged, discarded selves - like canisters of waste discharging at sea, corrosive stuff, irradiating, blanching the blood of this resort all hunched up��� and left to play alone in winter rooms in a fug of malaise, with a baffled buzz of wings on the glass, a whiff of death behind the curtain. Look! All the lights are wistful spies, what-the-butlering for a glimpse of meaning in our lives. See, now they peer around the bay, nudge-nudging from window to window for the secrets up her skirts, as holly-spangled Hesper tinsels down the sky, and sidles over here, for warmth, to you and me!

One of the Forgotten Army. Classics was hard, coming back. Stood the seniors at the rear, his beady eyes smoothed the rows, Elvis after Elvis. March fifty-six. Cross-legged first-years on the yard, you and I, not yet friends, holding it there, on command. The way he got silence, the stillness when he sat down, third from the Head, the broken window side, and the camera raked us like a gun. Dic, duc, fer, fac, second person singular active, irregular imperatives. 'Dick's duck had fur on its fack', he'd snap. Lest we forget. Regula, regulae, feminine, the ruler, of the ruler the edge, sharp, two crisp applications to taut cheeks for each mistake. Enjoyed that? Yes sir. Semper et in aeternum. The Pax Romana that got results. Watch out, Joe's coming, a boy would hiss, like his jailed Japs, smarting after the bomb. Yes, Joe's coming, he'd roar, exploding the room, sending shock waves of loud conjugations - amo, amas, amat � from his empire to the far ends of the school. Dinner-hours, we helped him get his Greek back, you and I: Odyssean trips on mugs of tea. Breathed the smoke in his lungs, the closest we ever got. Read 'Goodbye to All That', he said, and gave us his vademecum.

Between ballets, ends must meet. Hair tight in a bun, feet in the first position, she directs us to our seats, pointing with the wing of a swan, fingers trailing like feathers. Margot at the movies, perfecting her posture after closing the doors. She'd love to see the film, she's heard so much about it, a demure smile as we leave, her slender neck inclining as she dies.

Of every dream that could haunt me, this one insinuates irresistibly, like a bubble that might waft across our summer garden and, disconcerting chattering cat or frantic dog, skim the children's straining fingertips, swirl past your sleeping face, and beam its supernoval menace on me, on me �. This shimmering, hollow dream drifts into a fitful sleep, eclipsing companion considerations, to hold my gaze with its power to chill a smile or cloud an eye; for a brief eternity, it fixes its stippled stare on me, on me �. then, as I switch on the lamp to face it down, it is gone!

And later on, returning home after another of our walks, re-defining myself with a turn of a key - someone who's forever framed in a doorway, forever re-locating himself behind a door - what if, removing the dog's lead, I hear someone playing a piano, am I somewhere someone else, patron or king in salon or court, or just myself, slipping out of time? I listen: the dead pianist, back turned, is pouring out, drawing out, the way they do in middle movements, modulating so many forms of pain. The andante ends with a click, silent as a scythe. I turn cassettes and continue copying, tape A onto tape B, allegro ma non troppo. I see one of me settling into a chair, improvising, copy upon copy.

Removed for ewvision (Fran�ois Villon 1431 - 1463?)

Bayeux's a bit heavy; suggest you leave it for the last day of your stay. Suggest allow whole morning for queuing � toilets essential on arrival � and getting in and out of the Tapestry Museum; hire headphones for grope-control. Follow with organised sunbathing in the cathedral grounds � plenty of bins for discarded packed lunches � with junior member of staff, the vegetarian, while rest of you have your last meal without the kids. Conclude afternoon with a short drive to the Mus�e M�morial � toilets inside the front door � tickets needed for half-group only; first pupils through will do the lot in two minutes and pass their tickets on. So, a few minutes in all plus a pee, leaves ample time for the group photo: taking out the Panzer � tendency at this point for worksheets to fly away � then cross the road to the War Cemetery � the duty-free can wait � review the parade of eloquent standing stones � even cynics like me, herding children back to the coach, grant futility some purpose � if, translating on the memorial arch, ''Nos a Gulielmo victi victoris patriam liberavimus'', we aren't patching together and embroidering. (Nos a Gulielmo victi victoris patriam liberavimus = We who were conquered by William have liberated his country)

In those days there was snow when the postman trudged up the path on Christmas Day in Birkenhead with parcels in brown paper from aunts I didn't know in Gloucester and I was a Master Somebody they didn't know. The stamp album I dated 1954 soon bulged with stamps on stamp-hinges tastily licked and open-mouth tweezered into the squares, their perforated edges frontiers no stamp must cross, no territory invade. In those days I had to write thank you letters to the aunts I didn't know. Thank you for the stamp album. It is very nice. I am a regular customer in Woolworths. And I now know the capital of every country in the world, and countries that no longer exist, countries that have torn themselves apart or been torn apart. I could have added that. Was the album from you, the smiley Auntie Dorothy I stayed with for a day with the plums and no kids and the Uncle Win who had a squeezy pump for his asthma, who said take a deep breath, that's a healthy country smell? Was it his asthma that made you shock us when you killed yourself? Or perhaps you sent it, the maiden Auntie Kathleen, the youngest who kept the house and who had to do the caring for the drinker I didn't know and won't forget I met him for seconds in a Gloucester street. This is your grandfather, said my dad. You might have had photos by your bedside of your nieces and nephews you would one day leave a thousand pounds to. Or a photo of an airman, a sailor, a soldier, who'd left you longing, who'd not returned, no-one ever said. Postage stamps with bloody histories, from Germany, Poland, Austria, Russia, Belgium, Italy, Spain, Japan. Heads of dictators, kings and queens, emperors, their backsides licked and posted on letters from the dead to the dead, the bombed, the gassed, the tortured, the slave-laboured, the uprooted, the blown to pieces. It's gone, of course, the thousand pounds, but not you, not you, whichever aunt you were, wrapped with love and posted with my DNA bank of millions.

Six months after my arrival, the directeur emerged from his office, doing his rounds, I assumed. He met me in the corridor. 'Vous �tes de la maison, monsieur?' I was the assistant d'anglais, I explained, holding out my hand. He clamped it lightly with moist finger tips, and told me the Lyonais were cold people, adding, 'C'�tait difficile pendant la guerre.' Whereupon he adjusted his trilby, minced out of the building like Hercule Poirot, and I never saw him again.

Paul Verlaine pushed open the creaking garden gate. Dew glistened on the flowers in the morning sunshine. Everything was familiar, he said: the humble vine creeping round the arbour, the rattan chairs, the fountain's silvery murmur, the old aspen muttering to itself, roses fluttering and lilies standing proud in the breeze; the larks, all recognisable again, even the Veleda statue, still standing, at the far end of the path, its plaster flaking as before, vulnerable, in the insipid scent of mignonette, and ... nothing had changed. As if I would ever believe that! And yet his time-arresting voice stilled my breathing, like Barber's Adagio.

Moved away but continued our conversations in my head occasional letters and a batch of impenetrable sonnets punctuating half a century since school saved him up for my retirement drive up there carry on where we left off his voice stumbling on the phone who are you of course I remember you shouting at another stroke patient to get out of his way leave the school photograph in the loft with the grief and the sonnets

When she fell ill, I told him the same day. It's terrible, it's terrible � these words were all he said or could find to say, man to man, over the fence, and two yards' gap landed me another planet away. We play the pat posturings of pretence: Christmas card for card, my proffered spanner at his garage door, his squeezed-out comments on the weather � the lips are kept thinner, and it's a brick wall now, not a flimsy fence. A man tanked in double glass, chubbed indoors, cavity-valiumed with TV, he's wired for all-round bliss; hermetic d�cors admit no fear, keep out What's-his-name who's a real-life reminder of what he ignores. Clearly behind smiles, I'm supposed to hide! Mankind � I thought we travelled together: cruising round the sun, a shared cabin-ride? No, a man may ground himself � whenever the sensors detect the Invader outside.

If privilege shared's forfeit repaired, then my searing secret should be aired: for oft I hear the Thump-it Voluntary of Man's New Child � and his pulmonary aubade � when, bleating like a sheep misled, Britain's future tumbles out of bed. Lusty lungs negate the party wall: detonating tantrums plump their pall of poisoned breath on hopeful risers: my 'nice day' is choked by little blighters soon propelled outdoors by irate hand - always when some gardening I have planned. ''Ello mister'' shakes the flimsy fence, mouthing little else that makes much sense. ''Wotcha mate'' demands attention now; I must stay and answer � I know how three neglectful years and mother's pride clobber the neighbour who tries to hide: for, of flying stones, there is no lack; broken toys politely handed back don't prevent the pebble in the eye - will their parents venture out to try? only bedtime halts the fusillade; then begins the wailing serenade�

I have often stood bemused across the river from fabled Pocahontas' grave, once Defoe country, his brickworks and Crusoe, a place you don't name for fear of ridicule, now a murk-rippled Thames' scummy shoreline. Arriving seagulls shriek in derision; dingy dredgers dawdle like shifty tramps; lumpen container ships insult the humbled port; cranes droop and rust, rail tracks disappear under shabby weeds - the only life reclaiming this stretch of river. A lone angler stares at the unyielding water, scant hope in a desolate place.���� Behind me a whiteboarded pub, 'The World's End', named by a jester as though this miserable river front could ever match Finis Terrae. Yet in some ways it does. It is the crumbling jetty, the visible vestige, of our old world - tall ships, clippers, cutters and coasters, purveyors of empire and ten pound liners heading out to Australia. Departures with no landmark, no Three Graces or torch bearing statue, no nostalgic image to hold dear. Just a dismissive wave of a hand.

His mother had done her best to keep his mind on the painting they'd started together, but his pallid nostrils twitched, lifted up, sensed something in the air, or on my face. Scuttling through a gap in the giggling fence of other children huddled round the hutch, he found it easy to slip the catch, and run, his head hidden by the long tall grass, which she had kept on saying should be green, to the rabbit-hole, where he'd not be caught. Clawing down the apple-crumble tunnel, he wasn't sorry he'd screamed this morning as she tried to cut his sharp bunny-nails. The burrow had that nest-of-arms smell like when she was warm-straw in her happy-dress. No, he didn't envy Ben's thick coat of fur: it was good for burying your face in and for drying your cheeks while your fingers gurgled in the soft-water of his floppy ears, till the owl-ringed weariness floated from your eyes, gliding down into Ben's dark vigil of honesty: animal truth that wouldn't blink or look away, a sky-darkness you could sleep in now, soft-centred like the kangaroo-pocket your bedroom used to be. 'Come on, darling.' He could see his Daddy's twinkling stars much more clearly now, 'Come on, love,' all around him, bright, like all the nicest smiles he'd ever known. 'l want to stay with Ben.' 'It's time to go, Daddy will look after your painting.' His mother lifted him up, stroked his hairless head. 'The nice doctor's waiting, Ben will still be here next time.' And another time �. But this time, going home, clawing up the apple-crumble tunnel into the bright starry night outside, we blinked, looked away, and gently cried. (Scene at Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children 1982. Written in 1985)

I remember, yes, I too remember the house where I was born, and the only photograph I remember is the one I do not have of the front, taken before the war which commandeered for bombs the railings and the wrought-iron gate. I remember the jagged stumps, and the missing gate, like a loss of face; the absurdity of the cloche hats of my mother sadly smiling sadly; of my kind aunt, too, with no kids to spoil, who kindly spoilt me with plums till I was sick, and saved up her suicide for her retirement. I remember the dining-room, agony of long evenings, wind howling under floor-boards, lino lifting, reek of smoke filling the air, the Bakelite wireless in the corner, wheezing and spluttering in and out of life, my father causing friction twiddling dials. I remember the air-raid shelter my parents shared with old Mrs Weaver till the last all-clear, the cat that sulked in the cherry-tree if left for a day; flour-faced Mrs Weaver, my first death at eight; the cat at ten, just a whiff of gas, after his trouble in the coal-shed. I remember the landing, where I stood and it was always cold, and I'd call that I couldn't sleep, as they niggled away downstairs, the one coal fire petering out, a smouldering rumble of a row she would miss when he'd gone. I remember the front room, conserved for special occasions and never used, icy as a monk's cell, my Meccano retreat. I google and see new railings, a new gate - I imagine phantoms gliding from room to room, trampling over the boy on the landing as they traipse through the man on the train.

It's quiet - just her muttering and mumbling all day long, and outside, a double-muffled melange of frosted voices scurrying past. The numbness she has, the gnawing, damp, weathering of sensation, has her fidgeting between naps, then turning her blurred eyes to question the incomprehensible street, or fiercely cross-examine his empty chair. The hollowness, the wandering ache, amongst all the dustless clutter of valuable things in the assembly kit that made their latest home, is her, dispossessed of how she used to be. For she remembers chirpy whistling days with windows that breathed, seasons strolling in for a chat, grubby knees at open doors, and laughter scampering from room to room. Now nothing stirs, nothing except time creeping round, outdating the shiny things, like her goldfish stalking quietus round the bowl.

I shall measure out my life with spoonfuls of borrowed ideas and with a pretence of knowing about this and that and poetry. Just tell me the ingredients of a good poem and I shall have a go at writing one. And tell me the right form and shape so that it looks right on the page, and I will knock it about a bit so that the lines end at the right place � Meanwhile, once more creeps on me the urge to write and churn it out like this:

The jolly verse that off my tongue doth trip Maketh all the girls' hearts to dance and skip �

But who has powers these days to sit and rhyme? Sitting and rhyming we lay waste our time. Or perhaps I'll try another tack:

On woeful jazz-days like this I stand and stare and cannot piss �

Write like this and they'll throw it back. 'Ere, why don't I try a little nonsense spoof?

It's late, the cats are howling on the roof, My husband will not be home tonight �

No, this won't do, the subject's too trite! What if I hold a short idea between my teeth like elastic and pull?

Yes but, how far? How far? Far enough's too frightening, Far far too frightening, Far far too Pascalian, much too far to It's a long way to when will I ever ...

Write like this and the answer's never! Well, at least I'm on my guard against self-deceit, ever since a man did accost me in the street, and he did insult me with no uncertain greet ing, and ready, I, to go on my my thought how oft doth wisdom cry out int strasse, a nasty bodger he called me und so me geschtoppt und listund: he said "Write no tripe in cryptic lang uage and eschew lousy lines that just hang together in sepulchral sound sjust knocked around."

We have to love our apricot tree, and love it extra hard in winter. That's when we have to love its brain pulsing with synaptic sparrows, ������������ love its coursing veins and arteries x-rayed against the retinal sky. We have to love it for braving it out when dripping wet and aching cold, love it for defiantly sleeping rough, for not coming in at night, not even when bent with snow or gnawed by frost. We even have to love it for making do with sorry scraps of slimy slough scavenging worms have chewed and shat. And we have to love it, too, in spring, when our unconditional love is returned with sprigs of bridal blossoms, a Derby Day hat plumed in glistening green, and, if we've really loved it hard enough, a grinning pride of cherub-bottomed babes.

�We collected these objets d'art as an investment, a certain elemental evening when the sky was a Fighting Temeraire - imagine it all ablaze and sinking into the sea, with a slow, incandescent hiss. St. Ives blinked in the wind with eyes like stars, and saw this picture, but missed, I think, the details - the lone pair of looters we made, dipping and pecking like seagulls, at the tide's trailing hem. Like louis d'or - these shells, re-perfections of chaos, we pocketed them exactly the way you children did - and came running up to show us, with the Risen Venus glistening in your eyes. It must have been the brittleness of the moment - my suddenly remarking the sea would soon be tall, like a giant to Jack over our heads. And, half a mile out from the shore, we tried to laugh off the threat, gruff and rowdy as it would be, bobbing and weaving around us like a drunken day-tripper stumbling home, looking for a fight to land the killer blow. Still, we were not churned and turned like shells to specks of dust, but it was good being scared, like being unbearably happy with ourselves on a big dipper and not yet divided in death. We knew, of course, you'd be wreathed in smiles, coming to clear the house - you'd find these shells on my desk and handle them with hushed reverence - marvelling at these treasures sculptured in Atlantis.

We have so much to be so grateful for: another day is passing, after another day of sitting looking out through the window, and it is all paid for, and all is included. There are always sailing boats adorning the view, staked to the distance like fluttering white tents. (The paper's fallen onto the floor, pick it up later; didn't bother with lunch, not hungry.) I can see a little blond boy on the beach, giggling and throwing pebbles back into the sea - for his grandfather to pretend they're a pain to retrieve. And there's a man lazing on a lilo, just drifting off. But today's tide is so weary, the waves are tottering; some don't make it and drown like D-Day soldiers. Others gasp, frothing as they crumple on the sand. Strange, they were doing it yesterday, as well. The sailing boats seem to have moved a little, and yet they never appear to move an inch or perhaps they're not the same ones after all. The people on the beach are up and leaving again. Now the setting sun's playing on our windows, beaming our sad reflections into oblivion, and we've gratefully done another day's dying of exquisite boredom and genteel regret.

It was when the tadpoles got too old for the sweet-jar that he went to the quarry, performed the necessary ceremony, and first felt paternal. The water rippled baptismally, as they submerged, shaking off tails in convoys of adulthood. Approving, the sun patted his head, as he turned, on reconnaissance, leading the way up the cliff. And there was the crane! Abandoned, gun-barrel drooping, its last dog-fight acted out on a boy's battle-field. The levers � what a sorry crew they made, the way Monty's men had to leave them limb-stiff to the heat and flies: the engine still smelled of heavy action, dripped imagined suffering, retribution �. Suddenly, the Sunday-school sensation was there, squatting in the reeds of his mind, its frog-eyed surveillance, at tongue's length, like a sniper ready to pick him off if he didn't keep low, in hand-to-hand retreat.

Gary was going to Grenoble, dropping me off in Lyon. It wasn't the Boulevard P�rif�rique that terrifed me in '64, it was his nerves. Back a year later for his final year, sequestered in his college room, he played Brassens and Brel non-stop for his nerves, reliving the shaking of his year in France, a stash of Gitanes to cut himself with. Shaking visibly harder a week before his finals, he saw his tutor and left. Ten years later, by chance in our staff room at morning break, he'd shaken his way out of teaching. 'I've graduated in educational books,' he joked, not sure if it was a joke. Twenty minutes of shaking and manning his display before the lesson bell, then the recurring pain of packing away in the suddenly empty staff room. And on to the next school, another twenty minutes of shaking, to make a sale or die. Brassens and Brel, my reel-to-reel copies, lie side by side in my cellar, like effigies of loved ones finally at rest in a vault.

The dinner was in my honour, he said, for the visiting Englishman. French exchange in eighty-eight. Jean-Pierre's friends included another smallholder like him, a land-owning communist lawyer, a teacher, a builder, and a young woman who'd fled from Chile. Whatever we talked about has eroded with time; if Proudhon and land-owning were aired, wine would have kept things light - our persiflage, a safer world, worlds away from Pinochet. The embodiment of grief sat still, a tight-lipped aura we tried to include, to ease the discomfiture that she'd brought with her what she'd left behind. Next morning, a shrill dawn chorus of shrieking, clanging pain woke me like an arresting knock on the door, manhandling me out of bed. Over breakfast, Jean-Pierre smiled, d�sol�, force-feeding, he said, it's cruel but necessary � as if an apology could ever suffice.

Misterioso: Nearly at my journey's end, reaching a vast forest, no extremities, no way past, entering with timorous tread, no path to follow, only a faltering sense of direction. Trees tower over me - cantilevered roof pierced only here and there, filtering dim shards of light, Scherzo: Stumbling through fecund ferns, waking mouldering mulch; inhaling heady exhalations. Long periods of disquieting silence, birds and forest creatures in unaccustomed cowering, no breeze, not even gentle soughing in the trees, only the sound of my moving, and fearful breathing. Adagio: Exhaustion making care for time none of my caring, I reach a point of utter disorientation, a despair that calls for total cessation. Unheard, my cries sound the depths of the benighted nave, its interminable colonnades, its oculus obscurus.

"Let's go, my dear, and see if the rose� " ( "Mignonne, allons voir si la rose�." ) The morning train is crowded, and in the poem a young Cassandre is being urged to go with Pierre de Ronsard in the evening to see if a purple rose has lost the petals which were, ah, so fresh like her this morning. And it has! Alas, being as ephemeral as a young girl's beauty, and the scheming Pierre knows it has even before they reach it. Cassandre de Salviati, aged thirteen, and married off the following year, did she ever give twenty-year old Pierre de Ronsard a second thought, ever read this ode dedicated to her, in the first edition of his Amours emblazoned with her engraving and nippled cones for breasts? And today's young Cassie, office-bound, the right boots, the long thighs and the extended nails, does she give this poem a second thought, if discovered like a resplendent rose amongst briars of suspended arms swaying with the train? But perhaps she needs no urging from some guy called Pierre, and what began at a royal ball in 1545 in the Ch�teau de Blois as a frisson in a young poet's mind, to reverberate for centuries with Renaissance joie-de-vivre, is just some effin' French git goin' on about a bleedin' rose.

Wait for it, you'll hear the old boy really yell! My dad hurled a stone over our back-yard wall, chuckling as it hit the shed's corrugated roof and we shared the shiver of rust down old Joe's neck: old Joe from the back, fat on scrap in the war, still fat in leaner times, had an aging lorry that sagged and wobbled down the alley, gouging walls with great elongated grooves. Fifty years on, I'm googling in on the map, seeing an uncompromising patch of green - the alley, the scrap-yard, the old houses, gone: all demolished, like the site of a heinous crime - compelling this need to preserve what I was shown, if only like rust taking on the corrosion of time.

The church stands helpless above the village, its bell switched to silent since midnight, the count-down to eternity on hold. Second homers, holiday sleepers and atheists: les Rosbifs have bought up Le Lot in numbers. Arrive by night and darkness has dispelled centuries of pain like an analgesic; subsistence wound up like coal-mines and cotton mills; depression and grief sobbed into walls of stone; staying and starving or try emigration. It's a timid bell that comes on again at six; the quietness turns over and goes back to sleep though the summer sun is shining - but it shines to no purpose on vacant, unproductive fields; it's only value that grows on former farms. 1731 above the door of her crumbling cottage, a couple of ragged fields and an empty barn: the old woman had lived on, remembered the last flock of sheep; husband broken, faces of children, those who grew and sailed away. A small pair of leather boots, at least a century old, are curling in the heat, displayed by their new owners on the barn window sill. How quaint, some guest will remark; another will try to picture the wearer: a girl hauling water daily from the well, or the old woman, perhaps, enduring from dawn till dusk, stumbling and sticking it out: one of the world's unremembered dead, who has quietly left something to show.

Vue senior club: the weekly cinema foyer sit-in, waiting for the film to start. Special concession, biscuits and tea or coffee included. Getting there early is easy when there are no weekends only ends of weeks and days lose their names as they're counted down. And it's better to sit through a film they don't get than sit through the sameness they've left at home because some fool told them over the fence they need to get out more and a change is as good as a rest. When the film starts it's too late to decide it's not their sort of film: they're not going to walk out even though the actors are getting more out of life than they ever did, taking drugs like they didn't dare, having sex like they never had, and travelling more than they ever did. At the end they'll stagger out back to the comfort of home they were keen to get out of earlier, and because they'd like to live their life over again, they'll mutter ever so quietly all to themselves: it's all right for some.

From the age of mangles and kitchen pulleys, it had a smell as unforgettable as steam on washing days, which were always Mondays - four pale green walls of it in the booming back bedroom where she used to leave him. Still, he had a friend to wave to in the wardrobe mirror, a silent, sobbing, bar-rattling partner in distemper, when she didn't come. That cot was a godsend, housework took all day, she said, as she proudly remembered his first memory - a woman's achievement nothing would take away.

That's my old B�te Noire sulking on the wall, scornfully resisting my every call. I've tried her with couplets, to no effect; another type of rhyme I must select. She's turned up her nose at my choice free verse, she considers it tasteless and perverse. I'll see if another rhyme scheme will work. Oh, she has her claws out ready to strike; antique inverted verse this cat doth irk, and she'll refuse a line that ends with like. ( Into a sonnet's where this is heading! ) Perhaps it's on half-rhymes she needs feeding, so, I will tempt her in with one more line: come in, silly B�te Noire, don't be a pain.

In those days it was thrilling, after a beer or two, as we turned the corner, like grown men, to hear the band playing Buddy Holly. For it sounded raw in the young evening air, but we, too, were raw, raw all-boys-school boys, mere monosyllabic boys, like our names, Bill, Bri, Mel, Jed and Fred. And we stuck out like one word headlines on the tabloid walls of the pounding hall. Girls were frighteningly pretty and mysteriously multisyllabic, clustering in paragraphs of incomprehensible complex sentences in the editorial of the dance floor. Hard boys, with safe distance boldness, we eyed up and shared out the ones we fancied, from where we dithered. But you flushed and quivered with spot-conscious bashfulness if you were invited to dance, and then what if you couldn't jive and your mates were jeering at the side, and what if you didn't know what to do when the dance finished, and what were you to do if she saved the last dance for you?

We wait for a child sleeping after treatment and have come to this quiet garden for respite. The bench is chilled in the moist autumn air. The Communard-beret'd path-sweeper approaches. Where's the plaque, I ask, that was here last time? (It marked the place where a Zeppelin bomb made a crater and narrowly missed a hospital.) Leaves twitch and worry at the huge circular cover. Council took it, he says, brushing away the leaves, and unrecorded history is hushed past our ears - like not reporting a giant asteroid missing the earth by a mere million miles - in case they rattle the brittle pots of anxiety we've gingerly shelved at the back of our lives.

I'd been proudly keeping my Meccano, as an heirloom in an heirloom of a suitcase, thought I'd have kids who would use it, and then show their kids, but Meccano's rusty metal demised out of fashion and Lego on the carpet immured it in the loft. Seven Christmases and birthdays of patience to get from from set three to nine, then the only presents I wanted had to stop; too expensive to get to ten, even with the electric motor not included. Make do with clockwork, they said. Invited Earnshaw in to see my crane, could help me build something else, but wanted to play out instead. Called himself Billy Liddell, can't recall who I was, a third division goalie, I think, chasing balls down the alley. Suddenly the match would be over: time for a bout of boxing, alley walls for ropes, beating me up till they called us in for tea. Next day at the door, was I coming out to play, or watch television his dad was first to get, and his sister growing tits and going out. Dropped me like a manager for moving house, from best friend to occasional nods at school; five years with his new team and then he left. Heart attack, my mother said one day over tea. Dribbling between goals, a women in each, drilling one past remorse, only fucking thirty-two.

Still in my pyjamas, still here. Been reading online poems. Only just made my second coffee. Retired neighbour walking past my house, upright as ever and dressed for the day. Can't tell if he's deep in thought, or if he's deep. Can't tell what he's planned, if he's planned anything for today, after he's read the paper. Collects it at the Indian's on the Broadway, not at the other one on the corner, though it's nearer, must be a reason. Perhaps later he'll drive off with his thin wife, somewhere they think is nice. Had his car serviced by Dave over the road, got that sorted yesterday. Heard him with a power-saw last Sunday, improvements at his age, must be a point. Flies a flag in his garden. Might be an online poet. You can never tell.

If I went back, I could show them where the air raid shelter used to be, my father's shed ankle-deep in perfumed shavings, and the exact spot on the wall where our cat would chatter at birds taunting him in the cherry tree, or do his post-cattery sulks. They wouldn't want to know, I suspect, that the house used to have sash windows and that my father used a holiday to replace the frayed cords, that the alien-eyed gas masks I used to play with were kept in the cupboard under the stairs next to the broken gramophone with the HMV ear-trumpet and 78s in finger-worn paper sleeves. A house with a crystal set history, faint, crackling, distant voices, pre-war and pre-war making do and mending, mental scars, and physical scars, like the grooves lumbering coal-carts gouged in the alley-walls that were our fielders in summer and wingers in winter. That the gentle giant of a shire waiting where now they park their car smelt like newly baked bread and pawed the road with a restless foot, while the bread man chatted to my mother and winked at me, as he lifted the flap of his leather satchel and rooted for a farthing change, they wouldn't want to know. That the coal-shed smelt like a coal-mine, that a freshly cleft stump of coal was history in your hand, as far removed from the lives of flat-screen folk as beating carpets in the back yard and wringing washing with a mangle, they wouldn't want to know.

The time has come twilight and mist home in on his longship prow pointed towards the eye of the sunset a faint glimmer through the smoke his black cat we placed at his feet amber eyes loving him she braces herself loyalty he never had to demand unflinching as the flames close in

A sprinkling of spring sunshine and I bet people have already forgotten there was misery on the roads yesterday because of fog, but I'm not forgetting my best friend's had a stroke and can't even remember that in the espresso-bar where we used to hang out, Tommy Trinder kept his trilby on while he chatted to the owner. My dogs yank me past bad taste in music from open windows, so I am wondering if I should be grieving a little because a young couple's shiny new car makes mine a year older, or more so, because someone has left an Australian beer can on a soggy mattress on the grass verge next to the paddock where a bored Alsatian barks at me ten times and gives up. Car doors slam behind me as barbecue-goers spill out and whoop very loudly because they think it's necessary for acting happy and the house they visit is bloody good at hiding its history of grief.

Do I know Mad Malcolm? Yes, and we still talk about him at our weekly do's. Connie's usually the one who starts, reminding us about the time when he brought in a poem to share but, really weird, he'd painted it onto a canvas he'd specially braced, all proper professional-like. He reckoned he'd packed in a lifetime's experience, good Samaritan attentive as he was to every cry, his backwash of starry similes radiating wisdom from the beginning of time, his beaded metaphors glistening on tingling telephone wires like raindrops of succour, and all that. Derek - he has to get over his fit of giggling first - tells how Malcolm sneaked it into Tate Modern and saw him lurking in a corner, miming a hooded statue scowling at the visitors as they silently shuffled past him, (who comes up with these crazy exhibits?) till the gallery closed. Mavis always maintains he muttered something unrepeatable about Philistines, wrenched his poem off the wall and sulked all the way home. Back? No, he's never been back, but we still talk about him.

When is an uncle not an uncle? Answer: when he's your auntie's husband and she's your dad's sister so I must have some of her in me, not that I could tell in nineteen fifty-three, especially with her sort of bacon I had to come downstairs to with my stomach turning over, after I'd just been watching the boatmen skulling across the water in the cistern just below the window of the daughter-gone-to-be-a-nurse's floral bedroom where they'd put me for a week. Packed off from a Woodside platform for a compulsory solo holiday in Gloucester aged ten on a steam train which has been disappeared and which had awkward long leather straps for struggling to opening windows with and struggling to close them if you didn't want smuts in your eyes; second visit to a branch of the ancestral family, and the last, I was in another country of strangers who were children fifty years before me some time between Mafeking and Sarajevo. What's to remember? Being shown to a shed to get a lungful of hot onion gas, a child was bound to like a well nurtured onion, and the cabbages making a farty smell at the bottom of their garden, as tall as me at dawn and rolling silver beads down my bare legs, the watering can which helped me escape to pass the time befriending them, the Ford Prefect precision parked with post-war pride after taking me to Bourton-on-the-Water, a child was bound to like a picturesque model village, or Peter Scott's Slimbridge, a child was bound to like pretty ducks, no doubt Uncle Harold did, he carried binoculars round his neck, like an untested meaning of life. He was big in carpets at the Bon Marche, having worked his way up. He rolled out an Axminster, this is an Axminster, he said, a child was bound to like a well made carpet. There must have been a speech or two at his well-earned retirement, Gloucester colleagues standing round, remarking upon his achievement in mats and rugs, grinning for as long as it took. Auntie Elsie would have written to my mum, saying how much she enjoyed having me. What a good eater I'd been and so quiet, put in the front room each evening with the solitaire, not a sound, a child was bound to like a nice game of solitaire. Were they tested or untested when the photographs came from the other side of the world which was bigger then and grandchildren were sequestered behind smiles and wrote compulsory thank you letters to strangers, treasured in a Bon Marche letter-rack like a consolation contre la mort? They didn't say. Pride keeping it shut, perhaps. Uncle Harold and Auntie Elsie have gone to graves in Gloucester, though I doubt if they know it or what became of me or what will become of me and a couple of cousins and scatterings of grandchildren with bits of her and him and me in them, and our fading fragments of memory of their existence, and their graves no-one visits, where people dawdle by, and a fox deposits a sloppy mess.

''Never thought he'd do this on a spring day, not when the house is paid for and us kids are off his hands; filling time's easy - hey, he could have got started on all those weeds! Today's most definitely one for getting out there, for getting stuck in; no sense is there, just staring through the window, letting time go by, rather than fix those fences.'' ''It's the book-mark feeling that's put him out: flat as a pressed flower in a tiresome book - like when you open the garden door that lets in the smell of blossom and sets you back another year - he's just marking the last chapter at the point where people get lost.''

Not much you can do with jealousy, store it, save it, turn it into anger? Direct it at Jacqueline Sassard? Call hers a retirement too early? But would she even care, as she daintily does her shopping for things she doesn't need today in Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat? Not much longer for this life, rich Gianni Lancia back home with the framed photos of his dad's racing-cars in the gated villa, decadently awaits her return; because it's still buonissimo having la bella donna he seduced away from all that - stardom, looking beautiful - giving her the chance to run off with him to Brazil at twenty-eight, and she took it. Why not? With a neat plunge of a knife lifted down from the wall, Jacqueline killed St�phane Audran, still working over sixty films later. Why waited on the bed to reclaim lover Jean-Louis Trintignant, but Chabrol didn't reveal what we imagine happened next or tell us what happened to Why. No need, we know why: it was La Fin, as, never to be caught on film again, Jacqueline slipped away overnight, from biche c�l�bre to biche anonyme. (biche = doe, chick, babe, not bitch )

What goes from A to B and itself never turns but turns A into B and back to A in turns? What brings a divertimento back as leaves turn to carpet and trees to feel the ache in rain turned grave-side sleet? What drives us on to B with our faces turned to A, and why do divertimenti only distract, and finally dismay?

Birkenhead buses were blue, blue Guy Arabs for school, bus stop in front of a bombed house on Borough Road, the gap filled by Camp Coffee and Senior Service. The 86 was the best in the morning, taking longer, time to get full marks in the French test, for Dave to check his homework against mine, never noticing I was leaning away from his feet. Mel usually missed it, his mum with five to get ready, another on the way with the lodger. Bus late, had to leg it up Milton Road, where Wilfred Owen used to live, caught the 51 on Derby Road. The 51, always in a hurry after school, specially lurching on the bend at the workhouse turned hospital, pressing Port Sunlight shift-workers against us, like bellows, puffing out Woodbines and Surf. Wallasey buses were yellow, yellow Leylands for the seaside, the 11 always smelling new taking us to New Brighton, the oil-stained sand, the washed up German mine. Once, with Auntie Bessie and Uncle Frank, the only time they made the trek to see us, we stretched our legs along the prom as far as Seacombe pier, my dad and Uncle Frank in waist-coats and suits, tacking trilbies into the wind. The ferry docking at Woodside, squeezing tractor tyres against the pier, the gangway clattering above the oily Mersey, the steep climb up the landing-stage at low-tide, being hauled away from model liners in the ticket-hall, Uncle Frank and Auntie Bessie waiting outside the railway station for the single-decker back to Chester, steam trains hissing, weary sighs I didn't know were premonitions of the axe. Chester buses were green, green Crosvilles for family stuff, Auntie Bessie, limping from meningitis, one leg shorter than the other, screams in my mum's ears going back to 1910, gave me port to try and put Jim Reeves on in the parlour. A child was playing with friends, she said, and drowned in the canal. They used to whip the horses up Watergate, said my mum, they sometimes fell down outside her doctor's. A grandfather smelling of birdseed sat all day in a rocking-chair by the bird, neither of them spoke. Uncle Frank carving bits of wood in a shed next to the outside toilet, its neatly ripped squares of newspaper on a loop of string, once he took me down to the Kop at the end of his road to see the River Dee. He had lung cancer and showed my dad where it was. The dreary drone of the journey back home at night, the fifties in the semi-darkness of the New Chester Road, a child peering through a misted window, to whom life seemed fixed the way it was.

Has the pinched face of a mendicant monk, wears a grey habit, scurries busily from matins to vespers, makes frequent stops, hands held together as if to pray, then forgets and does another little run, shows off doing irreverent tricks, flicking his trailing scarf.

Archived comments for Squirrel

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barenib on 24-02-2014
Squirrel
I'm hoping that the red squirrels are going to make a big comeback! Your first two lines are my favourites here, John.

Author's Reply:
Thanks for reading and commenting, John.

Gerald

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Leila on 24-02-2014
Squirrel
oh I like this, lovely little poem...Leila

Author's Reply:
So pleased you liked it, thanks.

Gerald.

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chant_z on 24-02-2014
Squirrel
Beautifully penned. I had to look up a few words here and that's a good thing. Thanks!

Author's Reply:
Thanks, chant_z. Pleased you like it. Gerald.

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jdm4454 on 25-02-2014
Squirrel
Wonderfully tight and descriptive - one can easily see the picture your words have painted. The first two lines are exceptional..."medicant monk" simply beautiful. And I adore the title...thanks for sharing......jim

Author's Reply:
Many thanks, Jim, for your fulsome praise. A poem that I thought would go nowhere. Not a ten, surely, but thanks. The title, of course, took me hours of work!
Gerald

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Bozzz on 26-02-2014
Squirrel
Brill Gerald, would love to have more - the animal has so many behavioural quirks. David

Author's Reply:
A bit of a short and simple one. Thanks, David.
Regards, Gerald.

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jdm4454 on 26-02-2014
Squirrel
Gerald -- it may seem to you like the title is obvious and simple, but since you never allude to any particular species in the poem, the title could be "What am I" and after read, it is so obviously a squirrel. But with the title not, the squirrel or some cute title, but simply "squirrel" the picture you paint evolves with every line to match the photo the word "squirrel" conjures in your mind......every bit worth the 10

Author's Reply:
Hi Jim. I did think putting "What am I?" but there was no point as it's so obviously about a squirrel. Thanks, Gerald.

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ValDohren on 26-02-2014
Squirrel
Lovely, I can just picture the little chap. You describe his behaviors beautifully.
Val

Author's Reply:

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Buschell on 28-02-2014
Squirrel
I think you could describe lead or perhaps builder's rubble and make it a thing of beauty. Your gift. Dazza.

Author's Reply:
Don't think so but I'll give a try - builders rubble, ha! Thanks fot your flattering comment, Dazza.
Gerald

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A try-again-dinner picked up off the floor, a you-can-do-better carton of cold tea, crumpled, with naughty-boy bent straw, bedwetting from the table, not wheeled away, pulled-off legs, still cycling to work, black toes, snagging aertex blanket, baring Belsen buttocks, and a farted mess to rub reality in. The nice vicar had a way with words: death's a wall and one day we'll see what's on the other side - the need for a good run-up and mind the barbed wire, tactfully omitted, I thought, remembering pulling off the motorway six months before, and the blood bypassing the narrow roads of his brain - the rest of him needing it as he reached for the door with me ringing and her with her trouble in the bathroom, shrieking don't go. And then his slipping, eyes averted, from his chair, made me the stranger he'd never tell what he could see behind him. No last-minute bequest, just an overripe head to catch, the terror in her eyes, and myself hoping he'd go for it there and then - but, always a shopkeeper, he carried on and carried on, after closing time. What a good idea of hers to pop into the nice vicar's church-hall at Christmas to cure the empty house and see about that wall - pity about the children and their toys, getting under her feet.

Heading out of the docks, a lorry turns full-steam into the road; its headlights splash on windows blinking at the evening news. Across the way, a telephone rings several times, and receives no reply. Lower down the road, the pub closes, discharging its contents like a sluice. Next-door flushes, shouts his children back to bed. Yawning cars turn in. We hear a ship lowing at the bar, impatient to come in for the night. The clatter of a train sweeps the sky like a litany of prayers for those at sea. The telephone rings, and will ring again, louder, and louder, probing black water.