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| The Poetry of Nicholas Hancock The Poet of Despair Published by The British Hancock Society with the permission of the author. |
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DEATH OF A PARENT It was under silver paper stars in sin's room where I'd climbed the North Face of the bookcase for guilty sweets at five years old that I learned life's awful secret. My cries brought my mother running. 'One day you and Daddy will be dead!' Hard to communicate the cold blindness of life beyond the aid of protectors. She hugged me, no doubt suppressing laughter, pressing me to a warmth of flesh still irrigated by blood I now knew would stop: they would leave me alone in the streets of a Bognor where everyone but I had died and the only sound a clinking of pebbles at each sad breath of the sea. They are both long since dead. Then one summer evening at half past nine years old in the grey-green panels of a drawing room my hand paused on the spine of a book and my mother said, balancing a small coffee cup: 'We're divorced now, Daddy and I.' I pushed the book back in the shelf, slammed my way out of the grey-green room where heavy windows looked out on a dying copper beech, wondering even then at the violence of my grief. I don't know the man, I thought. And I feel as abandoned now as that five-year-old under silver paper stars. It was as if the man strapped into his gleaming Sam Browne belt was already dead. He became a thank-you letter I had to write at Christmas and the occasional writer of notes to me containing the scorned phrase 'ever so'; he became a moody caricature in my mother's histories, a manic-depressive unable to bear the strains of marriage, who had slipped away for holidays by himself while the gallant mother fended for us with a little help from a nanny and servants. When I saw him again he'd had a stroke, and he lay on a cot downstairs. 'He's a dead weight,' she said, 'and I must struggle to move him.' His second stroke killed him, and his small wife had no more lifting. Of course I went to the funeral. As ropes lowered the big coffin I realised that half my childish fear had come to pass without a ripple on the pond of my indifference.
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