THE DEEP POOL - MAY 2003

A beautiful May morning in south Hampshire - Hawthorn flower - May - is out (ne'er cast a clout till May is out), it's my favourite smell in the world: some folk insist it has an underscent of urine, but that just shows that people should get out more, or at least pay more attention to smells...May is the smell of freedom in Spring for me - i first became aware of it when i was about twelve - i'd come home from school in Fife, put my bag down, then walk up a May-covered lane at the edge of town to where an old small farm railway bridge crossed a single track railway line. I'd sit by the side of the bridge till a dinky little goods train slowly weaved its way from the town of Leslie in the west, on its way to Markinch - home of Haig's whisky. The smell of May encloaked me till the train went under the bridge - the driver would give me a friendly wave and a hoot, then the dense smoke and steam (a steam train) and racket would come furiously back through the bridge and overwhelm me for a moment, so that i felt something like panic, certainly a real unnerving...

Then i'd go back home to where my mother would be ironing and listening to Lightnin' Hopkins - 'i got blues in the bottle, but the stopcork in my hand'. There was no TV at all in our street at this time, in fact not much anywhere. I was explaining this to a twelve year old the other day, that we had no telly in those days, and he said 'well,where WAS it?' (I took some 12 year olds to see X Men 2 the other day - when i was their age i loved 'The Uncanny X Men', and i thought the film was brilliant - it caught the Marvel comic values and textures really well - however Jean got killed saving the other X Men and Professor Xavier from certain death when a dam burst - it was more than i could bear, and afterwards i had to have extra pepperoni on my Four Seasons pizza at Pizza Express at Gunwharf Quay in Portsmouth to get over it - well the frascati helped too.

So now, with my mother living close to me in sheltered accomodation, and the smell of May everywhere, i have to go to the small station at the edge of town where the May will be strong, and go to Bexhill, much further east down the coast, and supervise the final dismantling of the family home. My brother and sister will be there, and we will say our goodbyes to the town where our parents had so many happy years after leaving Scotland. It's a strange town, but they loved it, and i won't miss getting the train there, knowing that terminal illness was tearing them apart, being brave, and leaving them again, all of us in ever-mounting duress. We've been wondering if their impressive display of bizarre ceramic teapots is worth anything - a man will tell us next week. There's a guy in this town who conned my mother out of some money - i've considered finding him and greviously wounding him, but i've decided not to - i'm too angry about too much and i'd probably wildly overdo it and end up in prison somewhere awful like Hastings - guess i'll write some songs instead...

Later today, i'm going into the garden to plant some roses round our pet cemetery, then i'll hoe the rest of the garden - the garden shed needs painting too - already gooseberries are showing in the gooseberry patch - i'll make gooseberry and damson wine in Autumn. The old sage bush has died, and it looks spectacular in death, as if it has been sprayed grey for a science fiction film. Deborah feels that it has been 'blasted by something' - certainly it looks that dramatic, but i think it has died of old age. I may be influenced in this surmise by remembering a favourite poem by Anna Akhmatova called 'Willow'....

I grew up in patterned silence
in the cool nursery of the century.
Man's voice held no sweetness
for me but i understood the wind.
I loved the burdocks and the nettles
but above all the silver willow.
Thankfully it lived with me all its life,
weeping branches fanning sleeplessness with dreams.
Strange - i outlived it.
Now a stump sticks up there,
other willows say something in strange voices
under our unchanging heavens.
I am silent...
as though my brother was dead.

18 January 1940.



jl