His Name Was Eric.
Eric Barff.
Uncle Eric to us. A friend
of my dad’s when we lived up north.
Old Barffy to him, or Young Barff,
which was more correct, I think.
A quiet man with sandy hair
and a stutter. He lived with his mother
I seem to remember. A pharmacist,
although as children we called him a chemist
perhaps because on Guy Fawkes night
he used to bring us home-made fireworks
and he and dad would mess about
on the lawn in the rain and sometimes manage
to get the things to light, while we watched now and then
from the window. They never did much being just
sort of candles with pink and blue flames but even
such an ineffectual Gandalf lent,
I suppose, a sense of occasion
of excited anticipation to our awkward
attempts to behave like a family. And then
he’d slip a half crown into our hands
as he left. He came once to see us after
we moved to Kent, so he must have missed us.
If I were writing fiction or news
there’d be something more to the memory of two
small girls and a family friend, male
and solitary, but this is a poem;
there was nothing like that, just
coloured candles and half crowns
and a lonely man who welcomed, I guess,
the chance to be part of a family for a bit.
One of the snaps in the mental album
that make up a childhood forty years on.
He’s been around in my mind lately
for no particular reason, just seems to want
some kind of epitaph.
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