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

MY MUM was six months old when she was left on the doorstep of Perth Infirmary with tuberculosis of the spine. The story of her early life is one of half-truth and legend, the gossamer curtain of reality flickering this way and then that. Some of her story appears fantastical - the facts don’t fit and the conclusion is far from elementary. Maybe it is in part the product of a childhood spent in institutions, with only a salutatory glimpse at the truth to hang her perceptions on.

   I would hazard there are several reasons why grown-ups don’t tell children the truth: to protect them, to control them, or because they lack the ability or courage to tell it like it is. In my family, there was a fourth reason - for fun. Our childlike innocence was a source of hilarity, particularly for my father, many of whose tales were not revealed as tall stories until long into my adulthood. Perhaps, in her early years, my Mum fell prey to all of these ruses, and sometimes perhaps she willingly fooled herself.

   I don’t want to know about my birth family. They left me there, that’s all I need to know.

   This strange baby was, briefly, a national sensation. Scottish newspapers urged her parents to come forward, but today’s news is tomorrow’s chip wrapper. If her parents had spotted their baby’s image staring up at them through a steaming poke of chips, they were never driven to act. My Mum grew up in hospitals, and the nurses became her shifting, uniformed family who fed and taught and washed her.

   They call me Miriam, the nurses, after the story in The Bible about the baby found in the rushes. My real name is Elizabeth. They say I am from gypsy stock. They say if I don’t behave the gypsies will come and get me.

   She was transferred from Perth Infirmary, as a toddler, to the Princess Margaret Rose Hospital for Crippled Children. It was Edinburgh’s foremost charity, with several wards for children with tuberculosis who were treated in accord with contemporary post-war practice.

   The ward is very cold. They say we need lots of fresh air, so one end of the ward is open to the elements. They put screens up to stop the snow coming in, but sometimes a flurry of powdery white snowflakes will drift in and settle on our protective bed covers. Sometimes I wake up and think I am in Heaven. We are wrapped in blankets and woollen clothes. They bring us hot water bottles and scalding drinks.

   I learn quickly. I can read a newspaper at three. I don’t like dumplings. They make me eat dumplings.

   I have to lie flat all the time, so the nurses have fixed me a mirror above my bed which I can angle to see whoever comes into the room. I am part oracle, part town crier. “Sadie! It’s yer granny!” I cry, and “Morag! It’s yer aunty!” All sorts visit us here, wealthy and famous patrons and idols. “Duck!” I cry as a movie star homes in on my unsuspecting neighbour. “They’re going to kiss you!” Forewarned, he gratefully feints to the side before they plant their benevolent smacker. One day I wake up and Coco the Clown is looking down at me. With his painted smile and fan of red hair he looks like a big sad flower. The brass band let us try out their instruments. I blow into the trumpet and it makes a sound like a crabby elephant.

   Every day the children deemed most needy of fresh air, which always includes me, are wheeled outside to lie on the veranda in their beds. There is a huge swathe of dark green canvas that flaps noisily in the wind. I throw my ball high up in the air and catch it. “Go on Miriam!” the other children shout. “Throw it higher!” I throw it higher and higher, until one day I throw the ball with all my might and a pair of child’s hands come out of the clouds and catch it. The hands disappear, and the ball never comes back to earth. All the children see it.

   There is a fire in the hospital, in another ward. We are far enough away to stay safely where we are, but we hear a huge crash, and see the sky turn red. I have a recurring nightmare that the nurses come and take me to another room. There is a girl lying there next to me and she has horrible, lumpy skin. They roll my skin off and give it to her, and they roll her bumpy skin onto me.

   The ward had about twenty-five beds. The beds were arranged in strict rows according to the child’s age. One day a much younger girl with polio had her bed wheeled next to my Mum’s. She was called Vivien. When Vivien’s mother came to see her, the Ward Sister explained that an unknown force had driven her to behave in this irregular fashion. Vivien’s family were Spiritualists, so they shrugged this off as normal. They believed in an after-life in which people did not die but ‘passed’ to a Spirit realm, from which they could comfort and guide the living. They believed that those with the gift could channel Spirit, and heal the sick.

   Aunty Edith comes with Vivien’s parents. She isn’t really Vivien’s aunty. When she puts her hands on me I see blue sparks come off her fingertips. The doctors say I’ve had a miraculous recovery, that the bones have simply knitted together. Nature has a way, they say, and they declare I’m fit to leave, and isn’t modern medicine a wonderful thing.

   When Vivien’s parents take her home, they take me, too. I go to live in a big sandstone house in Newport-on-Tay with Vivien’s little sister Pamela and all the aunties and grannies. I watch as one granny pours steaming porridge into a drawer lined with greaseproof paper and when it has hardened, slice it up for biscuits.

   I am twelve. I have never felt rain. When the heavens open I stand in the garden with my arms aloft and mouth open wide until I am told to come in. I never knew that toast came from bread. I thought toast just came that way, crunchy and browned. I stand at the toaster, toasting slice after slice of bread. I like my toast burnt, without too much butter.

   I have not seen cars, not crossed roads, never been to an Italian chip shop for a poke of chips. One morning I run for the school bus, not knowing I still have my pyjama trousers on. I’m not used to all this. Me and Vivien take baby Pamela for a walk. We let go of the pram by the cliff and that is nearly the end of Pamela. I get dangled over the stairs by my ankles as punishment. I push Vivien’s wheelchair around school. The other children demand a penny for their help, so I do it. The lady who does our laundry has a glass eye. When she leaves the room, she takes out her eye and puts it on the table, telling us “I’m watching you!”. We sit fixed to our bench, staring at the glass orb.

   I am eighteen and I am going to see the world. I am leaving Scotland behind.

   Mum worked as a nanny in Texas with a Senator’s children. They say the Senator had a reputation for great probity at the time, though he was later involved in several lurid scandals.

   One afternoon Mum discovered a tarantula in the nursery, and the children backed into a corner. She saw no recourse but to stab it with a sharp stick. I don’t think she ever liked spiders. Later she worked for a Viennese Princess with whom she repeatedly argued about the true ingredients of Welsh Rarebit. My Mum would rarely admit when she was wrong.

   “Make the children Welsh Rarebit!” shouts Princess Windischgraetz.

   “I have!” I reply at equal volume.

   “No, no, there are other things!” she demands.

   “It’s just cheese on toast!” I tell her again, but she won’t have it.

   “I want Welsh Rarebit!”

   I imagine my Mum like Maria in The Sound of Music, an orphan who becomes a nanny for a wealthy Viennese family. Mum had the same capacity for getting into trouble, fostered by a ready appetite for mischief as well as an uncontrollable urge to blurt out the truth. And she liked to sing. Later she worked for the US Airbase in Madrid, embraced a lifestyle of late meals and carousing, early starts and afternoon siestas.

   I arrive at my apartment building after my first night out. The front gate is locked and I can’t get in. I rattle the gate but no-one comes. I start to cry.

   I am in a strange city and I can’t get into my new home. Some locals come along and produce a whistle from nowhere, give a couple of shrill blasts, and a small man runs out with a bunch of keys. He unlocks the gate and we go up the stairs to my apartment so that he can let me in. Suddenly the lights go out. He has bad intentions, this small man in this strange city. I scream and scream, my cries echoing up and down the stairwell. He is shouting agitatedly in Spanish, and by the way I can hear his keys jangling, I know he is waving his arms around animatedly. My new neighbours hurry to their doors. I hear someone punch the wall and the lights come back on. Someone explains in patient English that the lights are on a time switch. “Sí, sí!” cries the man, wearily.

   From Mum’s stories of Madrid’s quirky traditions, the city began to hold a special magic for me, so I took myself off to Madrid and stayed on Calle Espoz y Mina, near Puerta del Sol, with a man named for a Spanish king. He had impeccable English and a demure Afghan hound who cruised the barrio with him. At night they would glide past us in Espoz y Mina like ghosts, showing no glimmer of recognition, as if we only existed within the confines of the hostal. In the city most people are strangers, and I loved the bustle of Madrid, its anonymity. I tentatively explored bar tapas, washing queso and bouquerones down with cuba libre, or got jittery from too many café solos, returning late and buzzing to the faded elegance of the Hostal Valencia with it’s antique furniture, terracotta tiled floor and warm orange-yellow flaking paint.

   In the supermarket I watched a teenage boy wrap my cheese like an artist; on the Metro I saw a Romany guitarist sing a gentle Spanish ballad as people sighed into their seats contentedly; I met an old lady on a train wearing a dress patterned with a thousand tiny roses. She chatted delightedly to me for several stops. I thought she told me her mother used to be a florist, but I couldn’t be sure. I am certain however that she laughed, “You don’t understand a word I said, do you?” and blew me a jaunty kiss goodbye. A man selling lighters in a bar handed me a small card which read: “It is beautiful to live in a world of sounds. I have no it.” I marvelled at Picasso’s Guernica in the Museo Nacional, thrilled by the painting’s size, noise and brutality. I felt alive, wired, human. In my sketchbook I noted Maupassant’s words: “We must feel, that is everything. We must feel as a brute beast, filled with nerves, feels, and knows that it has felt, and knows that each feeling shakes it like an earthquake.”

   It was humid, 34°. A storm began as I ran the bath, and the sounds of rain, thunder, traffic and laughter echoed up to the balcony. When the storm had broken, I took a stroll and made a call.

   Bec rings from Madrid: “Guess where I am?” I can hear tooting horns and people hailing each other in Spanish. She is at Puerta del Sol. “Tres!” I cry. “I lived at Número Tres, Puerta del Sol!” Bec says she can see my old place and there’s now a tourist shop beneath it. She describes several windows with shutters and balconies. “It was the middle window, second floor, I think.” It was thirty years ago. We talk until her money runs out.

   I had unknowingly chosen a hostal a few hundred yards from Mum’s old apartment. I almost expected to see her open the shutters of número tres, lean over the balcony, and breath in the balmy, afterstorm air. That night I slept with the shutters closed. The room was dark like a crypt. I dreamed of loss and woke up late, threw back the shutters, and winced like a vampire at a shaft of brilliant sunlight.

   I went for churros y chocolate in Chocolatería San Ginés. Mum had always spoken of this place as a post-club haunt, but that day it was starkly empty. I was out too early, revealed myself a tourist. I’d been shopping and bought a rosary for Mum from the bustling tourist shop below her old apartment. Its padded box bore the address: 3, Puerta del Sol, and next to it on the tiled table, a candy-striped bag of powdered chocolate bearing an image of churros y chocolate. Gingerly taking the rosary from its box, I let it dangle between my fingertips. Its metal loops winked in the light and the rough wooden beads released a scent of roses.

   The chocolate was unctuous and sweet, almost too much, the churros light and doughnut-like. I sat alone, feeling melancholy, haunted by the Chinese whispers of memory. I thought of Mum and her journey from the doorstep of Perth Infirmary to Madrid. I thought of the wheelchair she needed later in life, how she had it sprayed neon pink – if they want to stare, let them stare – and of the broad Scottish accent she retained after three decades among the Sassenachs. But most of all I thought of how Mum was glad to be an outsider in the end, willing to embrace difference. I remembered her instruction to dip the churros in the chocolate and
diligently obeyed. It was good.