PEPPER WITH BAKED BEANS

While my mother was out in Kenya
squeezing ticks from the ridgebacks’ twitching skin
beside her second husband, Christopher Gibbons,
tea-planter, tannin-tanned on neck and knees
(always complaining of Kaffirs and God-Botherers),
my own second mother, Kitty, Greenways School cook,
and her son Bob rescued me from a people-drought.

All that arid summer after the coach
had swept waving boys up the drive,
these two – and the kitchen staff – kept me sane.
There was Dorothy Conio, large-hipped slopper-out
of chamber pots (I once held her fitting legs
on the kitchen floor while Mrs Davies slipped out
Dot’s dentures); June Box bursting out all over,
minded one of her anonymous babies, or at night,
switching the light onto cockroach rustle, poured us strong tea;
unlovely Ethel, butt of kitchen jokes, whose chest,
it was alleged, sprouted hair.


Bob and I raped the great yew on the lawn,
making two bows we could barely bend.
We hunted the Sherrington withies
for fabulous game of Cannibals and Anthropophagi.
One evening we bused to Warminster, rowed out on the lake,
saw Beau Geste in black and white at The Palace.
Back in the school kitchen, we had Kitty warm up baked beans,
fry us bread. And on that steaming pile
I shook black pepper in a thick scum:
mouth on fire, I was a legionnaire
burning my candle at all its ends:
the highest of haute cuisine has never quite
reached that pinnacle of excellence.
And, as we slurped the feast, Kitty smile-squinted
through her smoke, fag-end glued to her lower lip.
‘Like slumming, don’t you,’ she said.
‘Oh yes,’ I agreed, ‘you bet I do. This is the life!’


And it was.
If I could choose? – That woman in the White Highlands
squeezing ticks, or this one, honest as rock,
warm as baked beans? Ah Kitty, it would be you,
I think – but you’re both dead.