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

     I don’t think she realised at the time how large and cold the room was.  It was only later, having once more lived in a room that size, that she came to think of the childhood room as cavernously large.  The space that she occupied must have been very small.  One memory always led to another, her mother telling her to stay in the warm by the fire and the contrasting chill over by the large bay window where the dining table stood.  The child had gentle memories of that fireplace, it must have been large with a proper mantelpiece or was that just later, the adult room?  The best thing about the childhood fireplace had been the tiles each side of the grate, coloured with green and blues, iridescent:  she thought with stalks and leaves growing up them and duller orange, bronze or red flower heads at the top.  Her mother’s chair was beside the fireplace, there should have been a corresponding chair on the other side, but here the memory was blurred.  If I think hard about it now, I do see a much smaller chair than my mother’s, not really my father’s - just his on the rare occasions when he sat in that room.

     The girl-child sat in her mother’s armchair by the fireplace.  Something had happened earlier, something that she didn’t understand:  there was a feeling of more things about to happen, a feeling of dread, of bad things, shouting and silences.  Looking back I can’t remember what it was that I was supposed to be doing:  was it a Sunday?  It must have been.  There were only the two of them in the house that evening;  her father was at work, night-shift it was called.  Her mother was at Benediction, worshipping God and finding out from the priest what her brother had done.  The girl knew it was something to do with church, a crime that would bring down upon her brother’s head the combined wrath of both their mother and God.  A God who existed, as far as she could tell, in an uneasy alliance with her mother competing for the highest authority in a harsh rule.  Looking back, this still seems as unfair to me now as it did then.  I would have liked one of them to be on my side, interceding for me and giving me some measure of protection from the sternness of the other.

     The sitting room door opened and her brother stood there in the opening, not coming into the room.  In the normal way, whatever that was, would he have been there with me?  Perhaps even then, at fifteen, he didn’t seek my company.  He stood there looking all wrong so that she knew it was still happening;  he asked her if she had any writing paper.  Such an odd request but she knew why.  Did I really know that?  Or have I now known it for so long, that the earlier ignorance is lost?  For whatever reason she refused, knowing that this rebuttal  alone couldn’t prevent him from doing whatever he had decided to do.  But hoping that for the lack of something so simple the course of events could be altered, so that some sort of resolution might occur that wouldn’t harm the fragile edifice they all worked hard to make real.

     I can still see the expression on his face.  I was lying of course, writing paper was a suitable present for a girl and he knew that I must still have some, left over from the interminable, stilted thank you letters that either God or my mother, I wasn’t always sure which, required me to write.  She had let him down, he had been right not to want this sister.  He had made it clear that his limited acceptance of her was dependent upon her compliance with the wishes of his older brother authority, and now, when it was important and he had enough to worry about already, she was letting him down.  I know that he never wanted me, because my mother had told me so, repeating his childish remarks that reassured her of his great love for her, a love that didn’t want to share her with me the intruder.  The proper love of a son for his Mother.

     The look of scorn and disgust he gave me etched itself clearly on her mind’s eye, so that even now as she wrote this story, forty years later, she could recall it with perfect clarity.  And it was all in vain;  she could have given him the wretched paper and won his approval, refusing had made no difference.  She sat there quietly in the almost empty house, listening intently, and soon she heard the expected sound.  The front door at the bottom of the stairs banged as he closed it behind him on his way out.  She left the room, knowing what she would find and there it was, at the top of the banisters, the letter.  Typical of its kind, stating the sorrow at leaving, the desire for forgiveness, the assurance of love and the realisation that all would be better without him.  Irrevocably connected in my mind with the letter that I received from my own son, many years later, saying almost the same things.  Perhaps, in extreme distress, all we ever have left are the clichés.

     The child knew that she must fetch help or perhaps I just felt a reluctance to stay in the house on my own.  Would she be blamed?  Would it somehow be my fault?  Was there something she could have done to prevent him going?  Better to meet her mother in a public place, where there might be other people, than to be alone with her when she received the news.  She hadn’t as yet learned about the messenger being shot, but the concept was one that she could have understood.  I see that child now, upstairs in the bedroom that she shared with her mother, opening the drawer and taking out a woolly hat and gloves.  It was dark outside and cold and she knew that it was right to dress herself as her mother would have done.  Strange, it was the element of choice - which hat, which gloves? - that made this part memorable.  Autonomy made this dressing different.  She knew the way, but she had never been out in the dark on her own before.  She hurried along, expecting at any moment to see her mother coming towards her.  The church was in sight now, but the doors were closed, had she made a mistake?  She couldn’t have missed her mother on the road, there was no other route she could take, was her mother already somehow at home, discovering the double absence?  If so, she would be in trouble, she knew that, for worrying her mother, and God didn’t love children who worried their mothers.  But it was all right, reaching the heavy doors, she pulled one a few inches ajar, and she could hear the murmur and see the lights and smell the incense.  She wasn’t late, she was early.  Waiting on the steps outside, she felt conspicuous and had stirrings of unease;  the congregation coming out would all see her there and wonder why she was waiting in the dark for her mother.  They would surely guess that something was wrong, might ask her or her mother questions, her mother might not want other people to know.  She knew that their family life was private, and vaguely understood, from visiting schoolfriends’ homes, why this must be so.

     The doors of the church were opened and fastened back.  The light streamed out with the hurrying congregation silhouetted against it.  She need not have worried;  no one seemed to see her in their hurry to return to their own homes, rejoicing in the pleasant afterglow of duty done.  She was frightened of missing her mother, of her mother not being there for some reason, so I can remember the enormous sense of relief I felt when my mother at last appeared.  It seemed strange to the child that her mother looked so normal - talking to someone - was she laughing at something they were saying?  So different from the angry, tight-faced woman she had last seen at home.  The child moved away from the wall and caught at her mother’s sleeve.  ‘Mum’ she said, and told her news.

     There is a gap now.  Other people took over.  I told my mother what had happened.  She told the parish priest.  We went home together, I was no longer alone.  Perhaps this is why the memory disappears.  The last thing I remember is the priest saying, back in our sitting room, ‘Cheer up - it’s not the end of the world’.  The crying child thought that this was such a silly thing to say that she paused, and then said scornfully, ‘Not for you perhaps, but it is for me’.  Looking back, I find no reason to disagree.