'Juniors'

Juniors 
(from my forthcoming collection)

1

Jacqueline Burdett

We were in the same class

at primary school.  Shared

the same birthday.  One year

were told to stand up

so the room could sing

and toast the nothing we’d done.

Slight, she was, freckled:

tawny keeps coming to mind.

Already bringing on a bit of a stoop

to oblige the afterwards.

You’d glimpse her

slipping out to play,

edging the shadows

of the manager’s son

and the town-clerk’s daughter.

She answered each question perfectly

then retrieved her stillness,

putting the world away from her

till called upon again.

She rarely smiled,

perhaps never,

certainly not the day she and I

held an end apiece of coincidence,

like a pageant-flag

golden from a brush of sun

fluttered in a pocket of wind.

2

John Mulligan

John Mulligan was first light,

always.  He filled your eyes

with pan face, turret hair.

His voice was hornets

fighting in a pot,

a Sewanee whistle

when he was carpeted—

which happened as often

as footballs popped

or Tuesday’s beef

was fat over flesh.

His dad would goof away

the Mulligan summer

on any stage going:

Pontins, Barafundle strand,

Palma once, an incredulous busload—

was our class’s Santa Claus,

flushed and belt-looped,

speaking Laplandish

with a Skibbereen tic.

When we walked

through the morning gates,

it was a given that we be

demolished, cobbled up again

from bits and bobs of hygiene

and attentiveness.

But John had Skibbereen

in his shoulders, which would quiver

before the next joke took—

hence the dig of teacher’s fingers

in his back, at which his dad

would decamp from shoulders to heart

and in that little fortress

call showtime,

and on the ceiling

of Holy Trinity Church next door,

the cherubim would get it,

let go their swags of radiance

and howl. 

3

Ian Sanders

 

A wraith,
Ian Sanders was.
When he spoke he’d tilt away
as if meaning to tiptoe
round the outside of harm.

At eight he looked
years after, perhaps
a husband with a thin smile
who provided but walked alone,
who frowned when asked
his children’s ages.  Sometimes
the corner of his mouth would drop
and the day would drop with it.

How to explain then
the twinkle that led him everywhere,
past over-piled coats locking arms
to break their fall,
paintings of home with all the windows
urged to the edges, pots of cress
bred to hang down its hair?

It was because he got adults,
had seen round the back of their world.
He was the boy
who hides in a theatre at night
and tours the magician’s room,
noting how cabinets falsify,
how a hanky begets a dove.

So when teacher’s glare
grew aim and ruler
or Father came puttering in
to remind us how our fingerprints
were all over the apple of Eden
or we were told we’d be getting a day off
because someone who’d never know us
was being important
in a church near the Palladium,
I’d see the twinkle brighten
on the oldest face in the room,
watch as it burned into all the feints,
the sleights, the doings.  

4 

Susan Reilly

There was only the one world
and it was Susan Reilly’s.
Fifty yards from her front door
to the school and each day
she made priceless work of it.
Hers was a nose for the good air high above,
a hand to summon in the shields and lions,
put a fan through its witching play.
She couldn’t meet your gaze dead on—
her eyes would drift up to the blue lands
where Tony Curtis lived, where Diana Dors waited
to gift her a sample of Knight’s Castile.
Royalty, Susan.  Mum was the school’s
chief cleaner, carpenter dad popped in to fettle
on his way to or from the big life.
To those of us who came out of the mists
a mile or more away, whose parents
worked on remote stars with vague orbits,
hers was a country of certain bounds
and charters.  Once she turned up
in her slippers.  When she realised,
she led our mirth, our handclaps to the brow,
let us into her Rubovia to play among its oaks.
You’d think that, for a few cloakroom minutes,
we’d tumbled a trunk of silks
in a place the colour of nothing.

A Rubovian Legend was a BBC children’s television series which ran from the mid-50s to the early 60s, using marionettes for the characters.

Holy Trinity RC Junior [Mixed] and Infants School, Bilston, South Staffordshire, 

1958-1965.