John Younger
“The Real Thing”
We always talked quite freely,
so when my mother, reliving life
at nineteen, in that war to end wars, said
“Your grandma gave me bad advice”
it seemed to be of little consequence.
She’d begun as housemaid
to a wine merchant’s family,
soon reaching parlourmaid;
then, pretty and fetching
in her French farce uniform,
had caught the master’s middle-aged eye.
He’d become half-crazed, pressing gifts,
an allowance, a flat, promising care
for any child - whatever she might wish.
So, “Take all you can” had urged her mother.
As my adolescent disbelief
in the sexual life of parents
had just taken quite a knock,
I asked, needing to be sure,
“He wanted you as mistress then?”
She shrugged, “Dom was so handsome
dressed for dinner in black and white”
then smiled, remembering blue eyes
gleaming, bright with the wine
it had been her place to serve.
And deep down underneath those years
I heard desire welling up.
But just the same, she’d chosen
propriety and someone else,
so, thinking of the man
who might have fathered me,
I wondered had it been the real thing?
“Oh yes,” she said and quoted
from a still popular romance,
‘It was, my dear Fleur, the grand passion
and much good did it do me’
– then she paused and added, “or much good me”.
Page(s) 76-77
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