WILDERNESS ROAD
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While seagulls fight for lamp‑posts near the timber stores,
Inside the drawer, his folded airmail fades.
Behind those bricked-up windows, boarded doors,
His motor-bike once led your small parades.
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You lost its little rider where the viaduct
Is just a name before some heavy plant.
What relics of his life comprise his dialect
Who wore his khaki envelope aslant?
x
That ancient biscuit tin was once a zoetrope
Which held the eyes of children to its whirl.
Its cogging wheel is rusted now, and cannot hope
To crank again the motions of his girl,
x
And in that jungle cutting by the railway tracks
A picture postcard curls among protectives.
There, behind the hoardings, where they drop their slacks,
The Bay of Naples tenders its perspectives.
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His profile is the King’s, who never comes
To your place, though you know him by the coin
You find beneath the boards, among the crumbs,
And then you wonder will he come again?
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There was a time you lived in rented rooms
And trundled caged-in balls across the floor.
When boys get sent to bed the lids of tombs
May open and their fathers re-appear.
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He gave his epaulets to you in sleep,
And left the horse that gallops on the shelf.
Of rented rooms, there’s little but a heap
Of rubble, weed and cinder ‑ and yourself.
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They flatten homes in order to provide
Sufficient job stability for marriage.
Her wartime hooves went flashing down the road.
She hoped that it would cause her a miscarriage.
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Round the shed where one can hire a helicoil,
Some engineers have cleared another site.
The twanging of a line against a metal pole
Continues madly, far into the night.
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Against an intercity‑shaken fence,
Forsaken ghosts may rip themselves to tatters.
His army knife will not be carried hence
While Morning Glory steals across these matters.
x
My father returned from internment in Australia and immediately trained as an engineering officer and joined REME – the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers. He married my mother, and was sent out to Naples towards the end of 1944, leaving her pregnant with me. To learn more about their story, read The Best Deborah Stories
He was very proud of his bike with its side-car and travelled on it into Naples from the camp where he was stationed to go to the Scala, having fallen in love with Italian Opera. Bikes with sidecars were notoriously dangerous. In Naples, most officers issued them died on them. My father was no exception. Bear in mind one was riding through traffic in a country one was occupying, so most truck drivers had been enemy combatants until a few months before. My father was squashed between two lorries. I was born a few weeks later. I used to love watching the zoetrope he had made out of a biscuit-tin, especially one animation of a naked girl walking towards one.
More about my father here.
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