UPWALTHAM

Upwaltham at three years old

was an unrepeatable magic.

The South Downs dozed above the farmhouse

under their veil of hornbeam, oak and hazel

while inside the kitchen

paraffin and a spice of creosoted beams

filled me to overflowing.  In evening lamplight

incandescent mantels hummed

and little moths sacrificed themselves in candle flame.

Going to bed was a dance

of dizzy shadows up the stairs.

When sleep took me away

Mrs Chapman told me she would tiptoe in

to screw down the wick.

Morning opened my eyes. The pale pink plaster,

framed in black oak, glowed in gold of early sun

while a promise of frying eggs and paraffin climbed the stairs.

Through stirring chintz came a quacking, a bleating.

And I emerged in the cool early sunlight of the back pasture.

‘Mum!’ I screamed, ‘the baa-lambs are quacking!’

(So, anyway, I’ve been informed.)

There were afternoon teas in that heady scent -

home-made blackberry jelly

on a rich thickness of Cornish cream

and blue rings of flame that whispered under kettles

while slipping smoothness of tart September fruit

bruised my palate with its urgency.

And suddenly I was five

and playing in Mrs Chapman’s room

with her son Christopher

when she upped and took off her clothes

as she would a tea cosy from the pot.

I remember pity

for this woman crippled by fatty growths

where her chest should have been.

The seasons and the harvests passed

as I stood on the shrinking island turf

watching the tractor leave its furrow wake,

a gift for birds

rising and falling in weaving hordes.

And there was the Earth, my mother,

fuming invisibly rich, warm-rich mist

as Greg Chapman undressed her with hidden shares

and gleaming mouldboards

that pressed back her skin.

Ferguson hum of Diesel bees

under lee of woods

waving a wild architecture of leafless twigs.

The summer before war was to be declared

I was six,

and the Sussex woods

droned with the sweet song

of a biplane’s single engine.

Too young to wonder what I was

or care,

I watched the green corn’s waves

and passing shadow-clouds,

but young enough to know

the gravity and bubbling mirth

of what I saw.