Poems 1960-2000 (26 page)

When they were having the Gulf War

I went to the 18th century.

I could see no glory in this life. 

Awake half the night with the World Service,

then off on an early train for news –

secrets, discoveries, public knowledge 

lurking on microfilm or parchment:

‘I bequeath to my said daughter Mary Adcock

my Bedd and Bedding my oak Clothes Chest and Drawers 

my Dressing Table and Looking Glass my Arm chair

my Clock standing in my said Dwelling house,

And one half part or share of all my Pewter.’ 

When it was over and not over,

and they offered us the Recession instead,

I went back further, pursuing the St Johns, 

the Hampdens, the Wentworths to their deathbeds:

‘Item I give to my wives sonne…’

(Ah, so she
had
been married before!) 

‘…Mr Edward Russell fiftie pounds,

and to John his brother ten pounds by the yeare

to be paid him soe long as he followes the warrs…’

Under a hedge was good enough for us,

my Tommy Toon and me –

under the blackthorn, under the may,

under the stars at the end of the day,

under his cloak I lay,

under the shining changes of the moon;

under Tom Toon. 

No banns or prayer-book for the likes of us,

my Tommy Toon and me.

Tom worked hard at his frame all day

but summer nights he’d come out to play,

in the hedge or the hay,

and ply his shuttle to a different tune –

my merry Tom Toon. 

The vicar excommunicated us,

my Tommy Toon and me.

We weren’t the only ones to stray –

there are plenty who lay down where we lay

and have babes on the way.

I’ll see my tickling bellyful quite soon:

another Tom Toon.

For her gravestone to have been moved is OK.

I know she isn’t here, under the nettles;

but what did I want to do, after all –

burrow into the earth and stroke her skull?

Would that help me to see her? Would she rise

from the weeds (‘Dormuit non mortua est’)

and stand clutching at elder branches to prop

her dizzy bones after centuries of sleep?

The nettles, in fact, have also been removed:

a kind man with a spade has just slain them

so that I could kneel on the earth and scan

the truths, half-truths and guesses on her stone.

‘Here lie the earthy remains’ (I like ‘earthy’)

‘of Ann the wife of Henry King’; then (huge

letters) ‘Gentleman’. Not quite, I think:

it was his children who cried out their rank.

Henry was a grazier in his will;

but Anne, his lady, brought him eighty acres

and a fading touch of class; then lived so long

they buried a legend here – her age is wrong.

Homage (or weariness) called her 95,

adding perhaps five years. Her birth’s gone under

the rubble of time, just as her grave was lost

when the church expanded a few yards to the east.

But I know who she was. I’ve traced her lineage

through wills and marriage bonds until I know it

better than she herself may have done, poor dear,

having outlived her age. And yes, she’s here:

I’ve brought her with me. As I stroke the stone

with hands related to hers, I can feel

the charge transmitted through eight steps

of generations. She’s at my fingertips.

Somehow you’ve driven fifty miles to stand

in a beanfield, on the bumpy ridges

at the edge of it, not among the blossom

but under the larks – you can hear but not see them;

and it’s not even where the house was –

the house, you think, was under the airfield

(beanfield, airfield, ploughed field) –

they ploughed the house but left the twitter of larks,

a pins-and-needles aerial tingling;

yet somehow this, you’re sure, is Frances St John.

How do you know? It just is.

She’s here; she’s not here; she was once.

The larks are other larks’ descendants.

Four hundred years. It feels like a kind of love.

What are you loving me with? I’m dead.

What gland of tenderness throbs in you,

yearning back through the silt of ages

to a face and a voice you never knew? 

When you find my name in a document

or my signature on a will,

what is it that makes you hold your breath –

what reverent, half-perverted thrill? 

‘Flesh of my flesh,’ we could call each other;

but not uniquely: I’ve hundreds more

in my posterity, and for you

unreckoned thousands have gone before. 

What’s left of me, if you gathered it up,

is a faggot of bones, some ink-scrawled paper,

flown-away cells of skin and hair…

you could set the lot on fire with a taper. 

You breathe your scorching filial love

on a web of related facts and a name.

But I’m combustible now. Watch out:

you’ll burn me up with that blow-torch flame.

Her very hand. Her signature –

upright, spiky, jagged with effort –

or his hand on hers, was it,

her son’s grasp locked on her knuckles? 

‘F. Weale’. Third of her surnames.

I Frances Weale of Arlesey,

widowe, being weake in body

but of perfecte memory, 

doe make this my last will

in the yeare 1638…

Item I give to my sonne Samuell Browne

my halfe dozen of silver spoones… 

                                 *

They’ve had quite a history, those spoons.

My first husband bequeathed them to my second –

or at least to his mother, Goodwife Weale:

‘one haulfe dozen of silver spoones

which are alone and seldom occupied’ –

little guessing they’d come back to me.

I was supposed to go away quietly

and live at Ashby Mill in Lincolnshire,

there to ‘rest myself contented’ and not

(repeat
not
– he did go on about it)

sue for my thirds, my widow’s right in law.

Nicholas wasn’t one for women’s rights. 

I was to have the bringing up of Samuel,

our older son; but John, our younger boy,

was to stay behind with the man Nicholas called

his ‘trustie frende’, Thomas Weale of Polebrook,

his joint executor. I was to be the other –

as long as I didn’t claim my thirds, of course. 

I was to keep the buildings in repair;

I wasn’t to fell any of the trees…

he was going to rule us all from beyond the grave,

my iron rod of a husband, Nicholas Browne,

BA, BD, Rector of Polebrook, Prebendary

of Peterborough Cathedral; puritan. 

Well, I wouldn’t be ruled. I was done with that.

I’d had eleven years of being meek.

So when he tried to shunt me off up north

to the dull retreat he’d set aside for me

(such a fiddly, scholar’s will), I didn’t go.

I stayed at home and married Thomas Weale. 

Yes, I know I was taking another master,

but this time I was doing it by choice;

and believe me if I tell you he was different –

a yeoman, not a cleric; less cold;

and, above all, my little John’s guardian.

By marrying Thomas I kept both my children. 

We made an execution of the will

to our joint satisfaction, I and Thomas

(I was still young, remember). We did our duties –

to Nicholas’s estate, and to the boys

(we had no other children), and to each other.

Thomas Weale was a ‘trustie frende’ to us all. 

No nagging about thirds when his time came:

he left me both his houses, and some land

(for my life-time only – but even a man, I think,

needs little land when he’s dead), and his goods and plate.

Of which to my son John my silver bowl,

to his wife my silver cup; and the spoons to Samuel. 

In witnes whereof I have set to

my hande the day & yeare above written… 

                             *

F. Weale. Her final signature.

Her own fingers twitching across

this very page. Not John’s hand –

he wasn’t there. Not clever Samuel’s – 

his legal glibness would have made

a brisker job of it. The wobbling

jabs of the quill are hers, an image

of weakness spelling out her strength.

That can’t be it –

not with cherubs.

After all, they were Puritans. 

All the ones on the walls are too late –

too curlicued, ornate, rococo –

17th century at least. 

Well, then, says the vicar,

it will be under the carpets:

a brass. 

He strips off his surplice,

then his cassock,

hardly ruffling his white hair. 

He rolls the strip of red carpet;

I roll the underfelt.

It sheds fluff. 

A brass with figures appears. Not them.

Another. Not them.

We’ve begun at the wrong end. 

Room for one more? Yes.

There, just in front of the altar,

a chaste plaque and a chaste coat of arms. 

It says what the book says:

‘Here lieth the body of Griffith Hampden…

and of Ann…’ No need to write it down. 

Now we begin again, the vicar and I,

rolling the carpet back,

our heads bent to the ritual; 

tweaking and tidying the heavy edges

we move our arms in reciprocal gestures

like women folding sheets in a launderette. 

A button flips off someone’s jacket.

Yours? I offer it to the vicar.

No, yours. He hands it back with a bow.

A splodge of blood on the oak floor

in the upstairs parlour, near the hearth. 

Nicholas Brome splashed it here

five centuries ago, the villain. 

Not his blood; he kept his,

apart from what he handed down 

(drops of it circulating still

in my own more law-abiding veins). 

It was a priest’s blood he squirted:

out with his sword and stuck it into 

the local parson, whom he caught

‘chockinge his wife under ye chinne’. 

Not the same class of murder

as when he ambushed his father’s killer. 

That was cold blood at the crossroads;

hot blood in the parlour’s different. 

But he got the King’s and the Pope’s pardons,

and built the church a new west tower. 

There it stands among the bluebells:

‘
NICHOLAS BROME ESQVIRE LORD OF
 

BADDESLEY DID NEW BVILD THIS STEEPLE

IN THE RAIGNE OF KING HENRY THE SEAVENTH.’
 

His other memorial was more furtive;

it trickled down under the rushes 

and stayed there. Easy to cover it up,

but more fun now for the tourists 

to see it crying out his crime.

It is blood: they’ve analysed it. 

On some surfaces, in some textures,

blood’s indelible, they say.

Naughty ancestors, I tell them,

baby-talking my cosy family –

the history ones, the long-ago

cut-out figures I’ve found in books. 

Cut up, too, a few of them: quartered –

you, for instance, regicide

who cuddled a king’s wife, and then

had her husband done away with.

You never touched him yourself, of course;

but wasn’t it your own vision,

to roger him to death like that,

a red-hot poker up his rear? 

Well, he had it coming to him,

you might have sneered (I see you sneering:

a straight man, in that you preferred

women to Eddy-Teddy-bears). 

It’s never only about sex.

Power, as usual, was the hormone;

and two of those who had the power

were my other naughties, the Despensers. 

It wasn’t Hugh the king’s playmate

but Hugh his father who begat us,

through a less blatant son. Both Hughs

lost their balls before the scaffold. 

That was how the sequence went,

for treason: chop, then hang, then quarter.

So fell all three. Only the king

died without a mark on his body – 

or so they say. It’s all hearsay.

Perhaps the king and Hugh the younger

were just good friends; perhaps the murder

wasn’t a murder; perhaps the blood 

of traitors isn’t in my veins,

but just the blood of ambitious crooks

with winning Anglo-Norman accents

and risky tastes in sex. Perhaps. 

Blood must be in it somewhere, though;

I see them bundled into a box,

dismembered toys, still faintly squeaking,

one with royal blood on his paws.