31 Postcodes - Poem 3

 

Dead meat

I’m hanging upside down 

from an elm tree rope ladder.

School dripping from my hair,

I could hang there forever.

A gang of kids up to whatever

in the big field at the back.

Bikes, dolls, kissing, pressure.

Bits of dinghy in the garage,

and a freezer rammed with flesh,

half pigs, whole lambs,

no magic set could save them.

We still had Gran, and the telly,

the clump of David’s platform shoes

on open stairs. I remember

getting the fuck out of brownies,

sucking up rural sadness.

One neighbour died of cancer.

One used a shotgun on himself.

I took up sleepwalking,

turned the fat TV dial as far as it would go.

I just saw snow.

RF

Video/audio for this one here.

In about 1974 we moved back to a village, this time one called East Cowton in North Yorkshire, and into a modern 4 bed house in a small street full of other modern 4 bed houses (modern for that era anyway). There was more of a garden, and fields all around where I got up to any bother I could with all the other kids from the street. 

My Gran still lived with us for a while in this house (until she had to go into a care home, I think) but now both my brothers were absent most of the time (most of the 6 of us went to some kind of quaker boarding school for secondary education). When the brothers came home all they seemed to do was eat and so my Mum specialised in mountainous meaty meals and ample puddings. 

I had German measles in this house (or measles, there was some disagreement between my Mum and the doctor on this). It meant lying in a darkened room for a couple of weeks – it wasn’t exactly Robert Louis Stevenson levels of childhood illness but I do have strong memories of it. No-one I knew had TVs in their bedrooms in those days so it really was just lying there in the dark feeling weird. 

Again, I’m not sure why we moved from this house but we did after just a couple of years. There were a few tragedies in the street so that may have contributed as my Mum had already had more than her share of tragedy (widowed twice and other stories). Also, she wasn’t really a suburban street kind of person so maybe that was a factor (the village wasn’t technically a suburb but our street looked and acted a bit like one). I remember being excited, not sad, to move. I guess by this point I just expected to move every few years. 

This poem is part of the annual Fun A Day Dundee project where participants try to do something creative every day for the month of January. You don't have to be in Dundee to take part and there are other Fun A Day projects around the world. People post as much of their work online as they want to (largely on Instagram but it can be elsewhere too). This year I am posting a whole poem a day (one poem for each of the 31 addresses I have lived at, covering the period 1967-2021). Videos/photos of the poems show the places remembered in the poems but were taken from recent Google Street View. The videos are on my Instagram, maybe elsewhere too. Use the hashtag #fadd2021 on social media to see other people's online contributions.