penwithlit

FOR M.F.H.

I can’t remember being in class with you.

Not socially I mean, but at Grammar School.

If it was Latin you would have been at the top,

As I was usually bottom, lost and

deposed by deponents.

Perhaps on the Rugby field –

we could both have been props.

I couldn’t see without specs and

coming from London, soccer

was really your game.

We might hae rolled down the grass

Together on the Island-

years passed before I knew it 

to be an ancient coastal fort or castle.

With H.C. we might have climbed 

the rock we called “Old Smokey”.

Or did we look and fish together

for mulllies together in rock pools? 

We followed the older boys building dens

-of cardboard and canvas and pitched camps

In tents on the grass like Brutus

Before the battle of Phillipi.

Your father was a printer and to 

my parents a cockney with fair hai rand

ran the youth club with judo in the schoolhouse

next to the textile factory, close 

to the beach and the sea. 

We traveled to Penzance daily on the buses

forgetting those cowboy films we watched on your TV,

we spoke little except, 

I do recall staying off school your

coming around and telling me I had a detention.

What for I wonder?

Towards summer term in the third year,

I borrowed your exercise book

before the Physics exam, my own a mess,

and swotted up calorimetry. I could never

understand how a copper can could have a temperature.

Was it sick? 

To my own surprise, I came top with 

an absurd 98 per cent.So went on to

Measuring “g” with a swinging lath, like

a cricket bat with the Wing Commander

You went forward to Caesar’s Wars in

tripartite Gaul then Greek and Homer.

Where are you now I wonder>

With Russell Crowe in the Elysian Fields?