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Jan Dean

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Returning From Radium Treatment, 1957

Three times I went to look, but nothing stirred;
The night engrossed with filthy air,
The hedge as swollen as a goitre,
No space that wasn’t clotted with great oily gouts;
The streetlamp only fuzzed the dark
With a pale sting.
All Manchester was drowned in fog
As yellow—black as dreams in anaesthetic
Where figures in white masks drift silently.
‘They’re late,’ my father said
And the smell of decay seeped under the door.

It was ten when they arrived,
I should have been in bed.
My mother’s face was dough — too tired for sleep —
She cleared the way
Then men in uniforms brought Grandma in.
‘She screamed at every rut,’ my mother told us,
‘At every jolt. Four hours it’s taken us.
At times I thought the road was shell holes.’

I saw my mother’s tears as thick as glycerine,
Saw her turn towards her mother in the downstairs bed.
Outside fog flowed in heavy rivers through the streets.
‘It’s over now,’ my father said,
Knowing, as we went to bed, that it was not.

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