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

     October the twenty-first is Trafalgar Day and the birthday of one of my grandfathers; the one that died before I was born. Our times never crossed and so, in a way, he is as fictional to me as Sherlock Holmes or David Copperfield. All I have of him are clues. I have this gold signet ring and his gold pocket watch. His box of draghtsmans’ instruments, brass legs and steel points laying in shallow velvet graves. His intricate puzzles beautifully fashioned in brass and polished wood. His sharp, clean technical drawings and his fresh pencilled landscapes. His small, fat scrap book stuffed with newspaper cuttings defined in his own handwriting as ‘Items of interest and useful information not generally known’. A report on the the, ‘bold scheme’ for a tower to be built in Blackpool. A description of the largest gun yet manufactured in Krupp’s works at Essen. A reporter’s active account of visiting the construction of the NEW RAILWAY from Waterloo to Baker Street, under the Thames. How to care for your umbrella. What causes the tides. Page upon page of pieces which took his fancy, all neatly dated in ink from 1898 to 1919.

     And now I am looking at his photograph. Only three survive. First a small head and shoulders on thick card with a gold edge. It shows a man of about thirty with good features and a big moustache. He wears a light coloured suit with a waistcoat and a patterned tie held by a pin through the knot. Although he isn’t smiling there is nothing sombre about him like so many other portraits of the period.

     In the second photograph he is younger, perhaps twenty-three or four. He is holding a violin under his arm, the bow hanging casually from his fingers. He is in the centre of fourteen other musicians who stand self-consciously on a path in front of a weird, iron bandstand. I can see several other violins, one or two clarinets, a bassoon and a concertina. There is nothing to say who they were or what they played. My grandfather is taller than the others.

     The last picture is a mystery. It shows him sitting on a bench flanked by two other men and with three more standing behind them. My grandfather is wearing a cap and smoking a pipe. He is at least thirty years younger than the others, three of whom wear their jackets fastened only by the top button so that their ample waistcoats protrude from underneath. They appear to be posing in an allotment, the foreground is full of plants on canes and behind them is the angular end of a wooden greenhouse. Was gardening yet another of his many interests? I don’t know. I know I’m sorry I missed him.

     I have just remembered the tie-pin that he is wearing in the portrait. I have that here too, a garnet set at the head of a straight gold pin. This is the last of the few things of his that have travelled over into my time. I can see it at his throat in the photograph and I can pick it up here and twist it under the light of my desk lamp so that it flashes across an unthinkable distance. Stars shine long after they have burnt out.