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

     I stood on the dilapidated platform and watched the train slowly recede as the track curved away down-valley. A starling flew straight at the station-house wall then suddenly flipped upwards to its nest under the eaves. The guard who punched my ticket looked at me without interest. I was the only passenger to alight from the ten-thirty that day. I picked up my bags, trudging out of the station and into the street, walking past disused sidings which the road followed into the village. It had changed almost beyond recognition. The rows of terraced houses still stood along the main street, but a fierce rash of red-brick bungalows had spread into the fields where I had played as a child. The pit-head with its dead-locked wheel had been pulled down and the empty signal boxes along the track demolished. I passed faces in the street that seemed familiar but they returned my own half-curious look without remark. I had come home.

     At the house my parents were waiting for me. They had grown doddery in the way elderly people have of suddenly surprising you with their frailty. Their lives had been hard and joyless. Now the village was being overtaken by a new ugliness from fields beyond the village. After a couple of weeks I bought a small car with my savings and was able to take my parents out on the odd shopping spree or into the countryside. Then I began to look round for a job. I suppose I had begun to think of work as a distraction from the sadness which overcame me. When I speak of work you must understand that I mean temporary work. I had worked abroad for several years and was waiting for my company to send me to my next assignment. I had always worked away and had never set up home on my own account. The company had seen to my comfort and I had wanted for nothing. During previous visits I had been able to shrug off the sense of increasing age, the wastage that time makes of our past. On this occasion I knew that my visit could not be fleeting: I’d begun to crave work as the blind man must crave light.

     Days of fruitless enquiry followed until I came across a newspaper advertisment. I won’t mention the name of the newspaper, except to say that it was a local evening one. The advertisment ran as follows:

Collector requires assistant to work three days a week
Apply Mr A.P. Taylor

There were no details of the type of work involved. The address was printed beneath where I had somehow expected to find a box number. Astonishingly, it was that of a house in the terrace next to ours, only a hundred yards from where I sat in the back parlour with the newspaper. The job sounded like an ideal stop-gap and would help to check the drain on my resources.

     I decided to go round and see Mr Taylor that night, without in appointment. First, I began to make enquiries about him. His house stood next to the disused railway sidings at the end of the next row of houses. Neither of my parents had heard of him or of any collector living in the area. I made further enquiries about him in the local shop and pub, but no one seemed to have heard of him. I decided to apply for the job anyway. This collector had obviously moved into the area quite recently, hence the advertisment. That sort of man would never have been popular in our neighbourhood. It had always been somewhat narrow-minded about education or culture of any sort. I felt confident that Mr Taylor and myself had these things in common: we would soon come to an understanding.

     At nine o’clock, just as it was beginning to get dark, I knocked on the door of number fifty-two Stainton Terrace; not the real address, but a reference-point for those reading this account. The person who answered my knock took me immediately by surprise. He was a small, thin man, with a curiously lined face like soft leather. His hair was white, combed across his skull in fine, cobwebby strands. His mouth was continually pursed, his Adam’s apple prominent in a scrawny neck. His head seemed to wobble slightly, like a ball coming to rest at some fine point of balance. He was dressed quite shabbily in an old brown suit and a tartan tie and could easily have been taken for a retired collier. Mr Taylor shuffled his feet, stepping towards me across the threshold, fixing me with one of the most remarkable pairs of eyes that I have ever seen. They were big, almost too large for his emaciated face, and of a very deep and mournful brown. They seemed to tremble, like the surface of a liquid in an overfilled beaker. Despite the man’s air of starvation, of eccentricity, there was something familiar about him. It was as if we had already met. as if I had known him all my life. We grow up in the presence of the old and take them for granted.

     Mr Taylor looked at me steadily through the half-open door, pushing it wider, unblinking, waiting for me to speak first. I move a pace nearer and began nervously

     ‘Mr Taylor’ he looked st

     He looked startled for a second, as if his name was strange to him. I continued

     ‘I saw sour advertisment in the newspaper asking for an assistant to help with your collection. He continuedt

     He continued to stare at me disconcertingly the great brown eyes focussed inscrutably on some point below my own

     ‘I thought I might be able to help you, with your work

     I tailed off rather feebly and could have sworn the phantom of a smile flickered across his face. Suddenly he spoke, lifting his eves to mine

     ‘Good, good! Come with me please’

     The sound of the little man’s voice made me start in astonishment. It was a full, rich baritone, rising up from that caved-in chest with some hidden life-force I must have shown my astonishment for the brief smile went across his face again as he came towards me pulling the house door shut behind him

     As I think I said before Mr Taylor’s house stands at the end of the terrace, next to the old railway’ sidings. I followed his small, trudging figure round the end of the house and entered what must have been the gate of the back yard. It seemed suddenly to have grown much darker. I found it hard to see, but he seemed to find his way easily, by instinct or sheer familiarity with his surroundings. As I made my way up the sloping yard I put out a hand to steady myself. It found what felt like bails of hay or straw. Groping around in the darkness it seemed that almost the whole yard was stacked with it. It struck me at the time that Mr Taylor must have used it for packing items in his collection, which was presumably of some value. Even at this stage I imagined a collection of china or rare books.

     Mr Taylor had gone on ahead of me and was unlocking the back door. I caught up with him just as he was pushing it open. He put a hand through the black slit and turned on an electric bulb of low wattage through the black slit and turned on an electric bulb of low wattage which hung naked from a cord in the middle of the ceiling. I peered in amazement a the size of the room revealed: a chamber that could not he confined to Mr Taylor’s house. The baritone voice began

     ‘This is my collection.’

     As he spoke I became aware for the first time of living creatures that had retreated into the shadows at our approach. The ill-ventilated room was foul with the stench of amonia from their urine. Mr Taylor stood silently beside me. My eyes accustomed themselves to the poor light and I began to make out the details of the room. Set up high on the outside wall was a rusted iron grill which allowed in a thin supply of air. Arrround the walls were several long wooden benches, like church pews. The floor had a thick layer of trampled straw With a sickening lurch in my stomach I realised that the creatures in the room were human figures There were nine or ten of them, sitting on the benches or listlessly sprawled in the straw. They were human dwarves, all so malformed and ugh that it was difficult to distinguish age or sex, and they were dressed in the most degraded rags imaginable. Their faces carried expressions of the utmost misery or indifference. The voice beside me came again this time a little stronger, tinged with shy pride.

     ‘My collection!’

     For some time I stood numbly surveying the room, quite unable to reply At our entry the dwarves had shrunk back into the shadows. afraid of us or perhaps dazzled by the pitiful light. Now they began to come closer, hobbling on spindly legs, hunchbacked, half-crippled. gathering around us in a circle. The stench of their unwashed bodies was almost unbearable to me, but Mr Taylor didn’t seem to notice. He drew one of the dwarves close to his side. She was a tiny, crook-backed thing with glittering black eyes and hair that hung in ragged tangles to her waist. He pulled her tenderly towards him and began to stroke her head, as a child might caress a doll. The girl nuzzled up to him, though whether out of fear or affection I could not tell. For two whole minutes he stood with her, totally absorbed. Then he seemed to become aware of my existence again. He released the girl and turned to me, smiling fully for the first time, his mournful eyes brimming with light.

     ‘This is Tina, my latest acquisition! Isn’t she beautiful?’

     The dwarf turned her glinting eyes on me and I managed to stammer out something complimentary, desperate not to cause her further humiliation.

     ‘I always give the room an airing about this time of night, but I’m afraid the cleaning and feeding is getting to be a burden to me at my age. That will be your job, Richard.’

     The unexpected use of my name jolted me. Had I introduced myself with it earlier? I couldn’t remember. How could he be sure that I would take a job that was so different from what I’d expected? Was he a stranger to the neighbourhood or had he lived so unobtrusively that none of us had noticed his presence? He gestured round the room and spoke again.

     ‘As you see, there is much to be done. My people need looking after and it s getting beyond me now. They’re looking rather neglected, not at all at their best I can assure you.’

     I looked round at ‘his people’ as he called them: they were walking about more freely now, gathering in a huddle around the door to catch a draught of the night air. There was something inexpressibly’ moving in the way they gathered to savour a few moments of freedom. The smallest of them could not have been more than three feet in height, a little old man with a grinning, gargoyle face. There was an air of deep resignation surrounding them all, the same air that I had noticed about Mr Taylor when he had first opened his door to me. But this had vanished now as he moved animatedly through the group, patting a misshapen back there, stroking a bowed head there. His thin face carried an expression of rapture impossible to describe. To my amazement his people tolerated him without complaint and even showed signs of affection at his approach.

     Question after question came to my lips, but Mr Taylor brushed them all aside with one remark.

     ‘Don’t be unduly concerened, Richard. There can be no more additions to the group. These people solely will be your concern.’

     The dwarves were dribbling back, one by one, into the recesses of the room as if the air was too rich a diet for them or as if they knew that the door was about to be closed. They retired disconsolately to their benches or to nests hollowed out in the urine-soaked straw. I wanted to cry out at the injustice of their plight, to show them that I had come with the best of intentions and was in no way responsible for their misery’. I turned on Taylor, my rage at last finding voice.

     ‘How could you do this! How could you treat these people so inhumanly!’

     The little man pretended to be surprised at this; his Adam’s apple bobbed like a valve.

     ‘Inhumanely? But surely you know the precepts of the company as well as I do. You must understand that this is not a private collection.’

     I stared at him in utter astonishment, trying to understand what he was saying. One of the dwarves broke into a cackle of 1aughter and was joined by the others in a random fusilade of derision. The sound filled me with anger and despair. I became determined to end their plight, to sweep away whatever cruelty and corruption had led to their imprisonment and to expose Taylor to the gaze of the outside world. I turned on him furiously.

     ‘I’ll report all this to the police, all of it!’

     He bowed the cobwebbed dome of his head ironically, the mocking edge still persisting in his voice.

     ‘As you wish, Richard, as you wish. But you must remember that we have been established here for many years. Whatever your personal feelings are, someone must see the job through!’

     At this I broke from the room, blundering down the steep hack yard to the gate, knocking against bales of straw as I went. As I passed the front door of the house it gazed impassively at me.

     Looking back on those events now my reactions seem understandable enough. Yes, I took the job; in the end there were too many coincidences to ignore. I don’t pretend to understand all the circumstances of my work yet - that would be presumptious - but I do know that I misjudged my employer who is really a very kind man operating under difficult circumstances. The poor condition of the collection was by no means his entire responsibility. His people have now become my people. Though I say it myself, I have worked wonders in cleaning and re-arranging their living quarters. In the circumstances they enjoy every comfort possible. My feelings for my old village and neighbourhood are changing too, beginning to take on a more positive aspect. After my years of absence people have started to recognise me. The puzzled faces that I used to pass stop to chat and I have already renewed several old acquaintances. Sometimes I have the impulse to tell them about my work, but something always restrains me at the last moment. Perhaps it is the feeling that they would not want to hear, that they would hurry away and leave me with my confession only half uttered.