YELLOWING DAYS
5. PASSING THROUGH
I was just passing, nearby,
And I detoured to show them.
"This is the village where I once lived," I said,
"In this cottage of still-standing stone, all
Of 30 years ago. I've not been back since.
It now looks, well, so small;
I can almost touch the sill of my bedroom window.
And can this be the wall where, with my ten-bob bat
I played the ball, to emulate my hero at the time,
Called "The New Boy" then,
As I glanced one off my legs for 4?"
Kingcups, hazel, and iris gold there were,
Not here now though, but familiar still,
Here, where I once played
Where the sign says "Quarry Road".
Now filled in and overgrown
With bungalows, built for newly-weds,
Walls newly white with plastic boards.
"I used to play here" I explain to a suspicious mum.
"All these were here when we moved in" she says,
"And we've lived here, oh, at least two years,
But we're moving soon. Nothing to do, the place is dead."
That must be Daisy. She and Cecil owned the farm.
I'd recognise her by her chest, a wonder to behold
Even for a pre-pubescent 10 year old,
Now, alas, like autumn's swallows, long-gone south.
"Do you remember me......?"
Says she sold the farm when Cecil died.
Now sits behind a desk three days a week.
Tends phones instead, for the local village taxi firm.
Good Lord! There's Liz's Mum. Eighty, if she's a day.
"Do you remember me....?"
Says Liz moved away many years ago.
Married a potter. Had four kids.
Lives on Hayling Island I think she said.
But now I'm here, I see the rosy bubble's burst;
Time has leached the colour out.
Many of those I once knew have died, have moved away,
While some, like me, are just passing through.
So on the whole, a mistake I think, to think
The past remains quite as you remember it.
Better to let it live in memory where you can hold it
Year by year. No one will ever know.
