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

Before they gut-shot the town, Caedraw was that part of the system which extended from the Iron Bridge to the Fountain, and was approximately a quarter of a mile lengthwise. It was suspended in the abdomen of the town by folded misanthropic streets.

     Caedraw was divided into two parts — the hooded appendix of the Arch, and the main stone area of sharkjawed streets, not more than ten feet in width, backing straight onto the river, marching smooth and opaque, but nervous and muscular over the projections, past the whitewashed yards of houses.

     Many of the houses were pubs, and most of the pubs were cider houses with essential cheap quinines against the grittier palsies of low-life, in this intestine and caecum of the town, inhabited by faecal personae for whom death is an anus marked exit.

     Solomon is one of these tragics, and you’ll meet him now if you follow me over the Iron Bridge and along the river to Caedraw, its whitewash inflamed and ulcerated in the sunset.

     I am a bit young to be drinking, and indeed my secondhand overcoat is old enough to be my father, long-suffering and subtly starched by the vomits of such a drunkard son.

     First stop the Mount — the bar is permanently locked so that Auntie can water the cider in peace, and you have to go in the back room and play rings with Downey, or drink in the passage where Johnny Brien the Jesuit-faced fairy, potman, waiter and butt, is a compulsory factor in the environment. A timorous pismire of a man, he complains to Auntie whenever a particularly abrasive insult has stuck in his craw. And now he twitters through the hatchway for my pint.

     “A pint of cider please, Auntie”

     I accept it placing my ninepence on the wood. Held to the light, it looks like piss. I suck off the top of it and shudder kinetically into the back room, edge round the ring table and seat myself on a hard dark bambooy chair. Downey is there and he smiles, his collapsed face recovering slightly about the lips, as he reaches for a handful of flat black rubber rings.

     Now over the cobbled hump of the Iron Bridge. It’s almost a blasphemous parody of Paris with everything shrunken. The Pont de Fer with the Seine dwarfed to a trickling sewer and elderberries instead of chestnuts.

     Next, the Iron Bridge Vaults, a terrible pint of cider, an anarchic clientele, and a landlord curiously like De Gaulle in face and stature, and he feels bound, every other minute, to force his authority upon his paying rabble. This is Glyn the Vaults. A half suffices here, and as I nurse it down, Johnny Pollen is on his knees, singing a localised version of Sonny Boy.

“I was coming along by the Goitre Pond,
eating my packet of sandwiches,
and then I see Sonny Boy,
coming over the fields —
I didn’t even have time to eat
my sandwiches . . . . .
When there are grey skies.
never mind the grey skies . . . . .”

     Across the road to the Plymouth. The barman is faceless and anti-personal. In ten years time, the tweezers of memory will fumble with granules that are already shadowy. He is grey. He is old. That much is certain. The pint of cider is full of floating fragments that look like small coal. Blue wax from around the bung. He flicks the glass and they sink to the bottom. I drink two pints quickly.

     Now to the Greyhound. Nineteenth century streets, but so narrow and full of left-angles that the effect is mediaeval. Quasimodo could settle here unnoticed, but Frankenstein would be conspicuous by reason of his height, and now, drunken turd that I am, the street grips in peristalsis as I pass between its walls and into the Greyhound.

     At first glance in the stroking dampness of the interior, the customers have the aptness and clarisma of woodlice. At close quarters, personalities come into focus.

     Tommy Dodd. You could write a story about him, his lower lip fruited by a sepsis which is both acute and chronic.

     Dai Cuckoo. Blind and insane. One day, his sight returned, lasted for a moment, and disappeared again for ever.

     Newcastle Geordie. His eyes are sucked gob-stoppers on a scrotum. He keeps up an unintelligible half-audible gabble which most clients claim to find insulting, so that he never lasts long in any one pub, with an average drink-up expectancy of less than five minutes.

     Ken Hitchin. Lame, leaning on a cane made from a brush handle. He appears amiable until he smiles and you see the teeth. He is in fact amiable, but he’s got a mouth like a maldive shark. This is odd, but there it is. He seems amiable until he smiles.

     They’re all characters to a greater or lesser degree, and not one without his affliction.

     From that point of view, Solomon stands out as a complete man. His limbs are straight, his eyes in focus, but he does not take long to convince you that he is one of the most anguished spirits ever to be crucified in the vicinity. He is obviously something of an outcast in the bar, and in me he immediately seems to recognise a sympathetic listener. A small man, pushing forty or thereabouts, he is finely featured, but owing to some subtle deficiency, the effect is one of ugliness, and added to this is a long-suffering hangdog attitude that tends to invite opprobrium and mockery. The others jeer at him quite openly as he talks. Not only does society reject him; he is also rejected by the very ticks and tapeworms of society. He has been arrested repeatedly for trifling offences, and recently did time in Swansea for throwing a bag of chips at the statue of Seymour Berry.

     The police beat him up on that occasion and tore his only clothes. He expected to be fitted out with a new suit on release, but there was no new suit forthcoming, and the injustice of it still embitters him. He shows me the wounds in his hands. He has been working on the council for a couple of days.

     "They day council workers are always leaning on the shovel".

     His palms are scarred and blistered.

     "See that? Is that leaning on the shovel?'!

     He rolls a crooked cigarette. I notice how small his head is, not exactly microcephalic but abnormally small.

     "I come home from work tonight", he says, "and I am very tired, and I ask my wife what is for tea, and she says, 'I have packed your bag. Get out.'

     He looks at me with sharp damp little eyes. His glass is empty. After a tale like that, I have to buy him a half, even though it means a grape off my own cider bunch. But he grips my hand intensely.

     "Give me the fourpence halfpenny instead", he pleads.

     Alright. When he's finished whining his benedictions, I prepare to take my leave. But still he holds my arm.

     "I'm a Catholic you know", he says. "I got married in church, and I was in mass on Palm Sunday. And I am now asking God to lay down his blessing upon you',.

     "That's o.k.", I say rather foolishly. "That's o.k."

     "Right", he says fiercely. "Right!"

     I rush out and make for the Angel with an uneven hurried step.

     A week or perhaps two weeks later, a drunken soldier came out of a dance in the Drill Hall, balanced on the parapet of the Iron Bridge, fell into the darkness and disappeared.

     Next day, they were dragging the river. A dragging always induces a festive mood like a public hanging. If it's long drawn out, so much the better, and every false scent, every old tyre, mattress, oil drum, or whatever, is an emotional bonus for the waiting mania. A picnic mood is apt to ripen, however unidyllic the setting, with bottles popping, and a scattering of bread and papers. Babies are brought in prams and push-chairs. Dogs yap and toddlers paddle at the edge of the crowd.

     I'm crossing the Iron Bridge with three library books under my arm. Leaning on the parapet, I study the carnival beyond and below me. I've seen its like before, on the mountain when ponds were being dragged.

     A great door seems to be anchored, forming a raft in the middle of the stream. It looks like a garage gate and it is wedged between several rocks.

     And now, crawling onto it and finally standing with some dignity, I recognise Solomon. He is barefoot and wearing nothing but a shirt which reaches to his knees.

     A roar goes up from the crowd.

     Solomon is making the Sign of the Cross. Deliberate and priestlike, he walks to the four sides of the raft. A second cry rises from the crowd, and amid insult and derision, Solomon is blessing the water.

     The soldier’s body was-found three days later, one mile down the river from the Iron Bridge. At roughly the same time, Solomon was arrested on suspicion of stealing lead.

     He resisted arrest in Victoria Street and the frogmarching and truncheoning caused a minor public demonstration on the part of bus-queuers and shoppers, surprised by the visual effect of a small man being beaten on such a sunny afternoon.