In Butlin's Domain, Circa 1965
That day when through the windows
of the bus to the camp we saw the stewards wheeling
luggage
and Mum said, ‘Christ, that one’s got
hair longer than Keith’s!’
(They’d thought mine
was bad enough.)
What welcome odours in the life-saving
restaurant
a whole flock of heads,
foreign waitresses living easy:
like blonde Birgit who made a ‘dead set’
and intimidated what there was
of my ‘masculinity’
but didn’t scare off me the pants.
A rich life then when the
Pirates were broadcasting
and Dylan and Donovan albums in the camp
shops were impossibly dear
(we’d just got a radiogram).
Well-salaried intelligent Redcoats
I saw as some sort of Establishment
while I sat in coffee lounges reading
Four Square paperbacks about John Clayton
and the Warlord of Barsoom.
By the briny I could wish
for my own estuary
into whose salt poured the sewer
from many a night-soiled Suffolk pipe
and on her pillow by gardens not far from
allotments we scrumped slept
the Suffolk lass in my dreams I’d have
taken to where stereo juke boxes
jangled in cosmopolitan
corners by the sea.
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