I Remember, I Remember

Coming up England by a different line / For once, early in the cold new year, / We stopped, and, watching men with number-plates / Sprint down the platform to familiar gates, / ‘Why, Coventry!’ I exclaimed. ‘I was born here.’ // I leant far out, and squinnied for a sign / That this was still the town that had been ‘mine’ / So long, but found I wasn’t even clear / Which side was which. From where those cycle-crates / Were standing, had we annually departed // For all those family hols? ... A whistle went: / Things moved. I sat back, staring at my boots. / ‘Was that,’ my friend smiled, ‘where you “have your roots”?’ / No, only where my childhood was unspent, / I wanted to retort, just where I started: // By now I’ve got the whole place clearly charted. / Our garden, first: where I did not invent / Blinding theologies of flowers and fruits, / And wasn’t spoken to by an old hat. / And here we have that splendid family // I never ran to when I got depressed, / The boys all biceps and the girls all chest, / Their comic Ford, their farm where I could be / ‘Really myself’. I’ll show you, come to that, / The bracken where I never trembling sat, // Determined to go through with it; where she / Lay back, and ‘all became a burning mist’. / And, in those offices, my doggerel / Was not set up in blunt ten-point, nor read / By a distinguished cousin of the mayor, // Who didn’t call and tell my father There / Before us, had we the gift to see ahead — / ‘You look as if you wished the place in Hell,’ / My friend said, ‘judging from your face.’ ‘Oh well, / I suppose it’s not the place’s fault,’ I said. / ‘Nothing, like something, happens anywhere.’