David Selzer

OH YES THERE IS!

By David SelzerApril 25, 20190 Comments1 min read1.4K views

You are Princess Ayesha, the principal girl,

in the youth group’s pantomime at St Barnabas,

West Street, Crewe. Disguised as a boy, you are searching

for Aladdin – your true, lost love – in the canvas

forest and the bazaar, among the painted caves

and the amphora. Heavily Max Factored, dressed

in torn shirt and ripped shorts – having crossed the desert,

outwitted each one of the forty thieves, bested

Abanazar, bamboozled the Genie and charmed

Widow Twankey to be downstage centre – you sang

Buddy Holly’s top of the hit parade, ‘Oh Boy!’

Your story – we had not met then – though embellished,

of course. But I can see you as clearly as if

we had – in what you say, leave unsaid, and do not

know about yourself: lovely, witty, determined,

courageous, heart breaking. ‘Oh boy, when you’re with me,

Oh boy, the world can see That you, were meant, for me.’

Note: first published on the site in March 2010.

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A POLITICAL EDUCATION

By David SelzerMarch 28, 20192 Comments1 min read1.5K views

The hostel women came one summer evening

after tea. The noise brought Judith and me

from hiding-from-the-Germans, our game

in the bushy borders of the gardens

in our block of flats off Finchley Road.

A crowd of women, with some small children –

a few men were outside on the pavement –

were at the back of the building where we were

forbidden to go and the bins were kept.

A row of aspen saplings, planted

alongside the back fence, was shimmering.

The women were shouting and banging bin lids.

“House us now! House us now! House us now!”

“Look at this!” yelled one of the women.

“This is how the rich live!” She was holding high

a leatherette hand bag. It was my auntie’s.

I felt guilty. She had explained to Nanny,

“It’s worn. The war’s over, mama!”

We heard a police siren drawing near.

One of the men whistled. The bag was flung

into the branches of the nearest tree.

Back in the flat, high above everything,

I heard Nanny and Grandpa talking.

The Germans had bombed where the families lived.

I thought of me and Judith hiding,

and wondered if I dared tell about

the bag hung in a tree.

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53 WILLIAM STREET

By David SelzerMarch 28, 20190 Comments1 min read1.5K views

Our DNA is filled with wondrous

commonplaces, luminous platitudes:

refugees from pogroms in the Ukraine,

refugees from the Famine in Connaught.

This was the house my mother’s family moved to

from 7 Moses Street, off Sefton Park Road,

Liverpool, three years before she was born;

Ma, Da, her two small sisters, her two teenage

step brothers; a rented end of terrace –

with gas, running water, outside privy –

in a cobbled cul-de-sac, where bread

still warm was delivered in the Co-op’s

horse drawn van, and milk in a pony and trap

from a farm only half a mile away

(long gone now to semi-detached estates);

five years before Da was wounded at Mons,

and the lead gun carriage horse he rode was killed;

seven before the boys were gassed at Ypres

waiting at dawn to ‘go over the top’.

I have lived most of my longish life five minutes

from where my mother was born. Accidental

journeys – personal, ancestral – brought me here

to these streets, where no bombs have been dropped,

no invaders have marched, no citizens shot.

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THE BOX BROWNIE

By David SelzerMarch 28, 20191 Comment1 min read1.6K views

The photo of Stephen Baum and me aged 4

falls out of the back of a book. Each of us

is holding a part of a redundant

Kodak Brownie and laughing in ecstasy.

The battered camera is Stephen’s.

The sun is shining, and we are on the lawn

in front of the flats where we lived. It was spring

or summer ’47. Our mothers

would take us to the entrance of the yard

of the dairy on Child’s Hill so we could watch

the horses and hear the waters rushing

through wooden slats, washing the bottles,

and Golders Hill Park where the sticklebacks were,

and the Heath with its ack-ack emplacements.

The snap would have been taken by my mother

or his. The Baums moved to a semi

in Temple Fortune. My mother and me

moved north. I bought the book much later:

a second hand edition of Arthur Mee’s

‘London – Heart of the Empire and Wonder

of the World’, thickened with age and damp,

in which a child had written in pencil,

on the last page, ‘THE END’.

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CENSUS

By David SelzerMarch 28, 20190 Comments1 min read1.4K views

At midnight on Sunday the 3rd of April

1881 the Bar lightship’s

paddle steamer tender, ‘Vigilant’,

is moored at Woodside Stage, Birkenhead.

Of the eight crew three were born in Wales,

two in Liverpool, one in Ireland,

one in Sweden and one on a ‘Yorkshire Farm’.

In immaculate copperplate, the First Mate,

my great grandfather, completes the form.

Meanwhile at 52 Harlow Street,

a street that slopes down to Harrington Dock,

where the Elder Dempster line was based

that sailed to Freetown, Accra and Lagos,

are his wife, Rebecca, and their five children –

on the opposite bank of the Mersey.

The oldest, Esther, is my grandmother.

She is nine. I remember her as

an old lady in black with no teeth,

who told me stories about her family.

So what she is like this April Sunday

I can only guess: dark, curly hair; her face

already shadowed by her mother’s drinking.

Her brother, George, four, will go to sea

like his Da. In 1915, the ship

he will captain – bound for Liverpool

from Lagos – will be torpedoed off

Cape Verde. From choice he will go down with it.

The sombre curlicues of his father’s script

are preserved forever.

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THE VICISSITUDES OF HISTORY

By David SelzerMarch 28, 20190 Comments2 min read1.4K views

i.m. Clara Eisenberg

Her maiden surname was Eisenberg, ‘iron

mountain’, one that had been chosen for them

from the Imperial list. I was often

uneasy, unsure in her presence.

She hardly ever smiled. I realise now

because I looked so like her son, my father.

She died, from kidney failure, when I was nine.

On the mantelpiece in our dining room

is a pair of figurines – faux Meissen –

brought in her parents’ wooden suitcase, wrapped

in linen, journeying from Leopoldstat,

Vienna, to Whitechapel, London.

She had a hat shop in Hendon. Sometimes,

when my mother helped out, I was allowed

to look into the deep drawers where the hats,

like exotic plants, lay on tissue paper –

but when the shop was full of customers

I stayed in the workroom. There were lengths of felt,

rolls of ribbon, a barred sash window

and a double burner that smelled of gas.

The two shop girls would make a fuss of me.

Each figurine has a young man and woman

dressed and posed as if just emerging

from Marie Antoinette’s rustic retreat

at Versailles, and mirrored in the matching

figurine. Before my time the head

of one of the swains has been glued back on

and the maids have lost a hand apiece

but their expressions of bucolic delight

have remain undiminished whatever

the vicissitudes of history.

While Grandpa did his ARP duty

back east at the Fire Station in Cable Street,

Nanny went to the spiritualist church

in Hendon. The Medium passed messages:

her soldier son was in pain no more;

she would see and hold him once again

forever in the light beyond. The matter

was off limits in the one bedroom flat.

She made cream cheese in a muslin bag

she hung from the cold tap in the kitchen

to make it set. The whey would drip through the night,

minute by minute, hour after hour.

When she made apple strudel the flat

was aromatic with cinnamon.

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