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

     It was the end of the line, and the trains came slinking into the platforms, long green reptiles with snub faces, and eased up to the buffers.  People started coming, first in ones and twos, then in a flood, and finally again in odd ones or twos.  They banked behind the ticket barrier and were let through like little bursts of air out of a balloon.

     He watched hard.  He was searching for a tall, slightly stooping figure, for a face he couldn’t quite get clear in his mind but which he was sure he would recognise as soon as he saw it.

     His father had never come back at the end of the war.  There were other fathers, of course, who didn’t come back, but a lot more did.  He knew that there were two ‘ends’ to the war, one early and one late in that summer.  The first was when the Germans surrendered;  that was when the pictures were in the papers of the generals round a table, in what looked like some kind of tent, signing things.  It was an ‘unconditional’ surrender, whatever that meant;  words like that stuck in your head.  The second was following all the pictures of the mushroom cloud from the atom bomb.  Its swelling feathery shape was especially spectacular on the cinema newsreel.  Then, the Japanese surrendered too.

     Before the first, you had already been allowed to go on the beach again.  He could hardly remember the summers before the beaches were closed, but now the mines had been cleared, and he and other children ran across the sands on their way home from school.  One afternoon, out on the horizon, trails of brown smoke rose above the sea.  People were looking;  somebody said that ships must be firing flares.  And somebody else shouted, ‘The war must be over!’  The news hopped along among the little bunches of people on the sands.  Soon, sure enough, a man had just heard it on the wireless, ‘The war is over!’

     The tide was a long way out and the sun gleamed on expanses of wet sand.  Near where the sea broke in miniature waves, the sand was formed into a network of perfect ripples.  He liked putting his bare foot across the little sand-ridges, so that he could watch the print it left, pale and dry-looking for the first second or two, then slowly going dark and watery.

     The months went by and his father made no appearance.  Not that anything was different, because his father hadn’t been there for a long time anyway.

     Sometimes he was sent to Sunday school.  The children were told stories by a lady who seemed to want to be nice but couldn’t quite manage it.  He hated the bits about hammering in the nails, and couldn’t bear to look at the carving in the church with the blood trickling all over Jesus’s hands and feet and forehead and gushing out of his side, but he listened carefully to what was said about Jesus coming again.

     Somebody said to him once, was his father ‘missing’?  He said he didn’t know, and when he went home asked his mother.  No, she said, his father wasn’t missing, but he wasn’t actually coming back.  She seemed a bit cross, and started talking about something else.

     Then one day she put on his best clothes, the ones he usually went to church in, and took him to the railway station.  She took him to a place just by the bookstall, and told him to stand there.  Don’t move on any account, she said.  And she disappeared.  He saw her for a moment going towards the big glass doors leading to the booking office, but then she was gone.  He stood as he’d been told. After a couple of minutes the tall stooping man with the face he knew appeared in front of him.  They had a very nice day, though it was sometimes a bit strange;  his father didn’t quite know what to do with him.  But he was very nice all the same, and they spent a long time in the toyshop.  When it was time to go home, after the ice creams and the toyshop, he was taken back to the station bookstall and told again not to move on any account.  His father disappeared through the barrier on to the platform.  Then after a few minutes he saw his mother returning from the direction of the booking office.

     This happened twice.  Nobody explained.  His mother muttered something about his father not wanting to see her any more.  This was strange.  There was a time, he could remember it exactly, when his mother and father used to see each other every day.  They even used to see each other without any clothes.  But now they wouldn’t see each other at all, even with their clothes on.

     What was clear, though, what one had to realise about his father, was that he could come and go, appear and disappear, at any time.  Even  his mother didn’t seem to grasp this.  But he was sure to turn up again at the station sooner or later.  So when you got a bit bigger, big enough to go out that far by yourself, that was the place you had to go and wait for him.  You watched the long green trains sidling into the platforms, the doors swinging open, some before the train had stopped, people shooting out and rushing towards the barrier in a terrific hurry, others slowly climbing down on to the platform with loaded suitcases.

     It was true that you had to do a lot of waiting.  But then it wasn’t boring, there was always something going on at the station, and anyway there was a lot of time, from one summer holiday to another, from one Christmas to the next.

     These were immense tracts of time through which his small life progressed along its fixed track with barely perceptible motion, but he was quite sure that one day his father would come again.