Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

Sometimes I call her ‘she’. I give her another name and call her ‘she’ which is fair enough because she did have another name. But those were my eyes through which she looked, those were my children she cared for.

     Watch us walk across the playground from our apartment block. I am pushing the pram; the baby is in the pram; she has only recently been expected to walk so that the baby can be in the pram. That’s life, I say to Patsy, might as well get used to it. She is getting used to it though she trails behind her in the dust a long length of cellular blanket. Her nose is buried in the stain edging. Louise has brought her pushchair with her dolly in it; it keeps steering itself off the path and I have to keep yanking it back again but I do not lose my temper.

     We leave the pram and the doll’s pushchair and take the lift up to Stella’s flat. We are all going along the road to see the rabbits, Stella and her Mark and her Stephen, me and Louise and Patsy and the baby. Because it is the afternoon and that is what we do, Stella and I.

     Stella is English too. I think she is even more English than I am, though I wonder what I mean by this. After all, she was the one who stayed there and we came back. Stella was so English she could bear to go on being a foreigner … Once Stella went to a Jumble Sale at the English School and came back with a leather pouffe, crimson, embossed with gold. Someone’s husband must have brought it back from a business trip, it would have been presented to him by some Middle Eastern customer at some exotic desert picnic. Our husbands were forever coming home with glittery things, great solid gold watches that didn’t work; brass coffee sets for Turkish coffee, hubble-bubble pipes. None of the glittery things were very useful and there was not much space in our flats so we used to take them to the School Jumble Sales. You could pick up nice things. Stella picked up this pouffe. When she got home she took all the stuffing out. It was stuffed with old clothes.

     ‘Imagine!’ said Stella, ‘really good things! Jerseys, baby clothes, an old eiderdown and this skirt. It’s too good to throw away, it would be all right to do housework in. Look!’

     It was perfectly all right. Nothing wrong with it. Nothing wrong with Stella wearing it and she did. That’s how English Stella was. The rest of the stuff she sent to the next Jumble, except for the eiderdown, which she put back in the pouffe along with their old sleeping bags. And that was typical of Stella: the reasonableness of it. I don’t know why I thought it was a little ludicrous too, and why Emma, who was my other friend, laughed so much.

     ‘She dragged it all out,’ said Emma, roaring with laughter. And washed it! And she wore that skirt for months and it looked dreadful but she kept saying it was perfectly good.’

     ‘It was perfectly good!’

     ‘It was perfectly dreadful!’ said Emma.

     But it was Stella who kept me and my children and her children straight, on that neat path through the day starting with the cleaning and then shopping and then lunch and in the afternoon the nice walk. We had been brought up by good mothers. We knew how to do it and that it was the right thing to do and we expected it of ourselves.

     Sometimes Emma didn’t take her girls out all day. ‘They are impossible,’ she would say, ‘by the end of the day! They won’t leave each other alone! What shall I do?’

     Stella and I would nod and disapprove because we knew what you had to do, which was to build this little cage, this maze or treadmill, this cunning device to get the children running through the day.

     Up this bit, through this flap, over this bridge and now you can have a peanut. Wait just half an hour while I get this done and then we’ll go to the shops. Now you can have an ice-cream. Now we’ll go see the rabbits. Sometimes I wonder how we lived like this, taking such small steps one at a time. And now I wonder how I shall ever learn to live any other way.

     Well.

     Stella and I walk down the road with the children. The road turns towards the village by the pear tree whose leaves are bight red in the autumn sun. The hedge by the roadside is dusty and full of bits of paper and plastic. The first house as you go into the village is shuttered; there is an apple tree at the end of the garden, which hangs over the road. Ripe scabby apples have fallen over the hedge into the grass. Stella and I stop and look up at the shuttered windows.

     ‘There’s no one there,’ says Stella.

     ‘There’s never anyone there,’ I say.

     ‘All those apples,’ says Stella, ‘going to waste. Shame.’ She defends herself in case defense is required of her.

     ‘It’s a pity they should go to waste,’ I say. She knows I am on her side if anyone accuses her.

     So we bend and pick them up and stow them under the pram cover. We find this occupation deeply satisfying. We are getting something free. We are helping ourselves. Usually we feel there is no help for us, that we are helpless and dependent on other people for everything. By other people I mean, of course, our husbands. If we had stayed in England, before the children, we earned money. But now we have the children and we are in Switzerland and our husbands earn plenty of money but we have none of our own.

     We don’t know that we resent this; perhaps we don’t. But we are gleeful, we are compulsive, picking up these bruised apples from the roadside, hiding them under the pram rug, glancing up from time to time at the windows in case there is a mad woman in the attic.

     After the apple trees whose leaves are brownish, beginning to shrivel and fly away in the stiff breeze from the Jura that sets the little red apples swinging and dropping, we go down the road to the rabbit garden. The hutch is set sideways to the road, fenced off with wire netting. The children balance on the low wall hook their little fingers through the wire and press their heads to one side so they can see the rabbits.

     ‘Rabbits!’ says Louise. ‘Lots and lots of rabbits!’

     Lots of rabbits now, in the autumn, all the cages are full. But as winter wears on and we trudge down in the snow there will be fewer and fewer rabbits.

     ‘Where are all the rabbits?’ Louise will say.

     ‘There they are,’ I’ll say. ‘Look!’ One or two matronly rabbits peer out.

     ‘But where are the other rabbits?’ she will say. I will tell her they have gone away. And as the snow melts and the grass springs up and primroses fill the woods there will be, ‘Look! Look, lots of little rabbits again with soft fur and nibbley teeth.’

     The garden is weedy, overgrown, A few unpruned fruit trees, rose bushes, a redcurrant bush whose twigs poke through the mesh. We wish we had a garden. We wish the children could keep pets, it would be the proper thing. Stella and I know that children should grow up with animals so that they can learn about responsibility and about the facts of life and the facts of death. But you can’t keep pets in an apartment; Stella and I know that too.

     Emma keeps a cat, her apartment smells of cat. This cat is not normal. It is a mad Siamese cat with a fierce sexual appetite so that when it is on heat it shrieks and hurls itself round the room, clawing at the wallpaper. It has clawed off a whole section of wallpaper in the hall for which Emma will have to pay the Regie when they leave. We watch Emma’s cat, we say, ‘You can’t keep an animal in a place like that, it’s not natural. It’s not tight.’

     And we watch Emma’s children, confined in her apartment, tearing at each other, at the furniture, at the stack of English comics she keeps in the bedroom. We know the price of keeping wild things in apartments and we take our children out shopping every morning and down to the village every afternoon.

     Margaret, who was a friend of Emma’s, kept gerbils. Gerbis are a good thing if you only have limited space. They are very small so the cage does not confine them too severely, and they do not smell. Margaret had two gerbils who were said to be males but then one had babies. The trouble with gerbils is they shred up the newspaper you have to give them for bedding and the shreds fall out of the cage and mess up the carpet. Margaret’s children used to give their gerbils all the old toilet-roll tubes and cereal packets and they would shred them too. Their little teeth are intended for shredding things, shredding is what they are born to do. Once a week, or even more often, Margaret would take the vacuum cleaner and direct the nozzle all around the cage. Gerbil babies are extremely small; they were hidden under the paper, they were sucked up with the shreds through the nozzle and into the machine. They suffocated before Margaret could rescue them. She said it was a relief really, she hadn’t known how she was going to dispose of them. She told the children they had gone to heaven which the children accepted.

     Brenda lived in Stella’s block. Her son sat in his bedroom and was very quiet. Her husband was Swiss and she came from Grantham which may have been a factor.

     ‘Oh Brenda!’ I said, with too much enthusiasm, more enthusiasm than I could feel, ‘he is so good!’

     ‘Isn’t he good!’ she said.

     ‘Does he just stay like that?’ I said.

     ‘All morning!’ she said with pride.

     ‘Fancy!’ I said. ‘Mine would never - oh they are never quiet They must be at it all day, they keep me at it all day long.’

     ‘He’s no trouble,’ she said.

     The trouble, of course, came later.

     Emma’s girls threw themselves screaming round the room like Siamese cats on heat. Brenda’s son sat in his cot and never spoke. Never did. When he was six they sent him to a very good place, not an institution exactly, more of a sanatorium. He bit his nails until the tips of his fingers were raw and he never spoke.

     Stella and I are walking along the road to the village, past the rabbits. I am pushing the pram, Stella is holding James’ hand, Louise, Patsy and Stephen run on ahead to look at the cowbells which hang above the big doors of the cowshed In winter the cowshed is full of cows, you can see their honey backsides ranged along in the dim stalls, tails twitching. They are out in the fields now. There are not so many as there used to be, you can tell by the number of bells that hang on the cartshed wall. Most of the fields have been taken for building. Just beyond the farm is a field with two cherry trees. In summer they were thick with fruit and sometimes Stella and I would take the children, with their tea in a basket, and sit under the cherry trees. The meadow was full of flowers and beyond the Jura were clear, folded over and over. The branches of the cherry trees would bend low for us. Soon, of course, they would grub out those old trees to lay out new roads and build new blocks but on those afternoons the children picked ripe cherries, impossibly plentiful and sweet, hung the double ones over their ears for ear-rings, munched and munched and spat out the stones.

     Now we pass the barn which has been tastefully converted. No-one is at home. The children press their noses against the glass to admire the arrangement of dried leaves and grasses in a pewter pot on the long oak table next to the pile of amber eggs in the white cracked glazed bowl. When we pull them away their noses have left small sticky marks on the wide window.

     Then we heard a shot. I took no notice, I went on pushing the pram, I thought it was the opening of La Chasse - there were hares and pheasants in the supermarkets already, carefully arranged displays of fur and flesh. They were advertising civet de lievre in the charcuterie; every weekend you could see men in the appropriate clothes stalking the woods with appropriate dogs at heel. So the shot was not remarkable. It went unremarked.

     But then there was another shot. And from the door of the house by the pump where the children were used to dabble their hands in the water running out of the trough into a stone gulley, where we have seen cats sometimes but never a human being, there emerges an old woman. She looks across at the house opposite, at the upper window and her mouth opens. She screams, ‘Jean Paul! Jean Paul!’ Her hands flap helplessly, she covers her mouth with her hands.

     I look up to where she is looking and there is a man at the window. The barrel of his gun is resting on the sill; he is aiming across the back garden, over the field to the Customs post. He fires again …

     ‘Look Mum, says Louise, ‘there is a man with a gun.

     ‘So there is,’ I say, knowing I must be calm. ‘Fancy! We’d better go over to the other side of the road.’

     ‘We’d better go home,’ says Stella.

     We take the children under the overhang sheltering the cowshed. There is a very strong agricultural smell though the shed is empty.

     Louise shouts, Poo! Poo! It’s all stinky!’

     I say, ‘Shut up Louise and hold on to Patsy ...’ She does and looks up at me as if she is wondering whether to be frightened.

     Someone must have called the gendarmerie already; a car rounds the corner and parks by the water trough.

     Stella says ‘We’d better get the children away. We’d better get back. Jamie, shall I carry you?’

     ‘Carry,’ says Jamie. Stella lifts him but two gendarmes are getting out of the car and another car is pulling up.

     ‘Excuse me,’ says the gendarme, barring her way. ‘You can’t got through there. Stay under the wall. You will be in the line of fire. Excuse me.’

     ‘What is it?’ says Stella.

     ‘It is a madman,’ he says. ‘You will be in no danger if you stay where you are. Everything is under control.’

     But he is speaking French of course so we are not sure if we have understood him.

     Jamie says, ‘What did he say Mum, what did he say?’

     ‘It’s all right,’ says Stella.

     There are people in all the doorways now. An old woman has crept out of the house with the rabbits, small children peer from the farm yard, the woman from the converted barn, the one who must have arranged the dried flowers on the polished table, and the one from the house by the pump who is waving her hands ever more frantically and screaming, ‘Jean Paul! Jean Paul!’

     The village is suddenly alive with people.

     ‘What’s wrong with that man?’ says Louise. ‘He fired his gun, I saw him. I can see him. Look!’

     ‘Keep in, Louie,’ I say. ‘Keep under the wall.’

     ‘I want my tea,’ says Louise, whining, ‘it’s tea time. What are they saying?’

     ‘It’s all right, love, ‘I say, reasuring her. ‘We’ll go home soon.’

     We can see two men creeping along the fence towards the back of the house. From the road in front a gendarme is shouting up at the man at the window.

     ‘Jean Paul! Can you hear me? Don’t be a fool. We have you covered. Just throw down your gun. We will do you no harm. Throw down your gun and come out quietly, keep your hands above your head. We are your friends.’

     We can follow this dialogue quite easily, it is familiar from television.

     It is not as exciting as it is on the screen but it is more frightening because that is a real gun the man has in his hands. It is his army gun, he keeps it oiled and ready in his bedroom cupboard like a good Swiss citizen. He keeps his uniform and his tin hat too; we can see the thick greeny wool of the jacket as he steadies his arm on the sill. Across the field we see a car pulling up at the Customs post. The Customs man comes out of his house and the man at the window fires again but he must have missed because the Customs man skitters back into his house and the car accelerates away with its little cache of frontalier butter undiscovered in the glove compartment.

     The two gendarmes must have found a way in at the back. Suddenly there is a scuffling and a shouting and the man disappears from the window. After a time they drag him out of the front door, quite close to us.

     ‘Ah!’ he screams, he struggles. ‘Ah mon Dieu!’

     They pull him roughly across the road; he lets his army boots drag in the dust. We hear him quite clearly and we understand. He says, ‘Ah mon Dieu! Il n’y a pas de boulangerie en Mategnin!’

     Then they get him handcuffed and push him into the car. As the car drives off all the people who have been standing in their doorways and under the overhangs and behind trees out of the line of fire turn to each other, exchange exclamations and rest their hands on their hearts to demonstrate how upsetting it all has been. Poor Jean Paul. He always was a bit. Would you believe? His poor mother.

     They go back to their houses and we do not see them again.

     ‘What did he say,’ says Louise. ‘What did it mean?’

     ‘He said there was no baker in Mategnin,’ I tell her.

     ‘Why doesn’t he go to the Migros?’ says Louise.

     ‘I expect he does,’ I say.

     We start back. The tops of the flats are just visible over the corn in the field with the cherry trees.

     He must have got his bread at the Migros. He must have walked every day towards that forest of tall blocks and along the winding paths through green lawns where sprinklers played all summer, where thin saplings stood braced in their neat beds and on to the shopping precinct and into the supermarket.

     There he would find bread. But there was no baker in Mategnin.

     We went home, to England.

     Why? they asked me. Why?

     And I said, Well the children were getting older, schools, you know, we had to think about the future.

     And, Well, he wanted to come back. Prospects. You know.

     And, Well, we didn’t belong there, we were foreigners.

     And there was no baker in Mategnin.