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Crewe

DESTINATIONS & DESTINIES

Driving on education business to Crewe,

a quarter of a century ago,

I stopped for petrol on the Nantwich Road,

and there in a rack with Blur, Celine Dion

and Bon Jovi was Fred Astaire, Volume 2.

How my life changed! So many favourites

on one disc! I put the CD in the slot,

drove off the forecourt, and pressed the switch.

‘Heaven, I’m in heaven, And my heart beats

so that I can hardly speak, And I seem

to find the happiness I seek When

we’re out together dancing, cheek to cheek…’

and the track finished with his immortal feet

tap dancing in my company car.

 

I thought of Israel Beilin – as I parked

at the college to provide advice

on pedagogical strategies –

leaving school at eight to sell the New York

Daily News on the Lower East Side,

plugging songs at eighteen in Tin Pan Alley,

becoming Irving Berlin, auto-didact,

maestro of the music and the lyrics,

making witty, eclectic American

art from those spirited, Yiddisher streets.

 

When I drove away the car filled again

with Astaire’s light, pellucid voice: ‘Before

the fiddlers have fled Before they ask us

to pay the bill And while we still have that chance

Let’s face the music and dance.’

 

 

 

SOMETHING LOST IN TRANSLATION

We are in the thronging, discordant food hall
at Euston Station, London, sipping
a latte and an americano from Caffé Ritazza,
taking the first bite of our Upper Crust bagettes –
mozzarella & tomato, pastrami & emmental –
while looking out for the disabled pigeon
that hops, scavenging, under the tables,
when we are approached, politely, gently,
by a bearded man with a shabby shoulder bag
from which he presents us with
an asymmetrically trimmed piece of paper
comprising a printed list, which appears
as if processed on an Amstrad PC:
‘I am a deaf mute.
I have no work.
I have a family to support.
Please help me, for the love of God.’
He also leaves a professionally produced
Romanian (we think) prayer card.
We notice he has disseminated the sheets
and the cards to all the tables
in our vicinity. He returns for the harvest.
Some give, most do not. We contribute more or less
the tithe of our meal. He takes his printed sheet,
leaves us the card, nodding his unsmiling thanks.
He moves on. The cacophony returns.

On the Virgin train to Crewe, we log-on.
‘Maica Domnului’, the prayer begins
– Romanian, ‘Mother of God’. (The giver
may be Roma, we think – informed judgement
or prejudice). It is, we deduce,
St Augustine’s intercessory prayer.
On the front of the card an icon
of the Virgin and Child is reproduced.
Mother and son are appropriately doleful.
She points to him, as if saying, ‘He is the one’.
Perhaps we have been conned. Maybe
our meek beggar has an apartment at Canary Wharf,
with those other cartoon characters,
The Masters of the Universe, and our modest gamble
will not have paid off. In English, as in Romanian,
‘charity’ and ‘justice’ are Latinate words. The British,
like the Roman Empire, kept the concepts distinct.
Interestingly, in Hebrew, one word encompasses both.

 

 

 

LOST TRIBES

Catching the last train on any Sunday night,

when I was a student, before The Troubles,

they would be there. I would notice them

in noisy farewells clustered near the bar:

the men, red faced, shouting companionably

with the drink, the women calming kids –

the cardboard suitcases, the carrier bags.

 

Changing at Crewe, there would be more of them

to join us for the early Irish Mail –

refreshment bars and ill-lit platforms full

of bothered, now silent travellers.

One night – the Mail, as usual, delayed –

an old man, in a black overcoat,

gripping a scuffed doctor’s bag, its clasp

tarnished, turned to me, saying, in a soft

Dublin accent, ‘British Railways ought to be

bombed!’, and chuckled at what he must have thought

was our shared history and a past gone.

 

With them, waiting on the platforms or jostling

for seats, I felt close, whether real or imagined,

to centuries of unremitted wrongs

held so fresh in memories that it must seem

only yesterday the Black and Tans patrolled,

just a week since the potatoes failed,

a month since Cromwell’s hard-faced soldiery

massacred the innocents at Drogheda.

 

Leaving the train a few stops after Crewe,

I would think of their now unbroken way,

through a slate-black countryside, to embark

for somewhere they knew was home – and envy them

such modest certainty.

 

 

 

POETIC JUSTICE

A wishful thinking editor re-spelt

my name with a T and changed a poem’s

final words from ‘a tramp woman nurses

an infant/under a tumbling sky’ to

‘under a trembling sky’. Humbling to find

an editor’s chance(?) choice of epithet

happier than mine own! Mine was truer.

One winter night, I was changing trains at Crewe

and a red faced fellow traveller

sang, “…not her beauty alone. ‘Twas the truth

in her eye made me love the Rose of Tralee”.

His pale wife shivered by their cardboard case.

His breath condensed like the whitest of roses.

 

 

 

PRO PATRIA MORI

As fire storms travel, we are twenty miles

from the marshalling yards at Crewe, some twelve

and a half from a tracking station near

Wardle, sixish from British Nuclear

Fuels at Capenhurst and slightly more than

four from an unspecified RAF

electronic complex in Sealand – which

all must have their numbers on at least

one ICBM in a silo

east of the Urals and/or west of

the Appalachians.  And so, though there may be

nuclear winter in Hoole, we shall not

see it in our lifetime.