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

       Just a shack, really, was all it was, the old wooden house with the corrugated roof.   Walking in that stretch of woodland brought it all back.  We’d never visited there before.   Passed it a few times, seen the sign and promised ourselves one day, you know how it is.   Then this particular weekend, driving back from the egg farm, I turned in at the car park.

       Right up at the far end of the forest, all grown round and half buried by trees and undergrowth, this ruin of a place, next to a rough stone track that was edged with barbed wire to mark the end of the reserve.   Ruin? Well, hardly.   Not by my book, but at first glance it looked pretty well shot.  I reckoned a couple of weeks hard work, some new wood, nails, glass, creosote, that sort of thing.   New doors maybe - they were gone, front and back, shapeless.   Roof was good, walls fair.   Considering it must have been derelict a good thirty, forty years or more, judging by the size of the trees encroaching almost into the house, it wasn’t in too bad a state structurally.

       These days music is my life.   That’s what really brought it back, I guess, seeing the old smashed-up harmonium.   That was it.   No furniture,  nothing else but the remains of an ancient stove.   And the harmonium pieces, as if every trekker who had found their way in over the years tinkered with it.   Only some must have tinkered harder than others. 

       The place was just one big room, with windows down one side only, exactly like the little timber house way back0   I thought maybe it might have served  as a chapel once, it had that kind of feel, and then there was the harmonium. The kids took quite a fancy to it and I could see why.   It would have made someone a snug place with a bit of sweat and kindness.   They wanted me to look into the ownership, but I had enough on.  It was a tempting prospect, though.

       Yes, it would have been nice to see the old place put straight.   It seemed to belong there, almost as if it had grown up out of the soil, the squarest greenwood shrub you ever did see.   Square and straight as Nature herself could have made it.   And who was it said the old girl has no straight lines?  Must have been some real myope who’s never studied the minuscule geometry of a snowflake.   And what’s a curve anyway but a bent straight line? Nature draws straighter than anything we’re capable of.   Take the freehand efforts of the best draughtsmen, put them under the microscope and you’ll laugh at the corrugations.

       Just like that roof on the timber shack in the woods.   Just like the silver galvanised sheets on the old house where the genius lived.   Back then we hadn’t been in the village long and I was still getting used to the new school.   A gangling eleven years and taller than my older brother, Ray, I was pretty screwed up inside since my dad died from a stroke the year before. Ray seemed okay, had his head on, it was difficult to tell, but I couldn’t settle.   Maybe that’s why our mother moved us away from the town.   Country air and a longer view can heal a multitude of things.

       Ray and me sometimes turned down past the old wooden house on our way to or from school.   It was a mess even then, what with the picket fence all eaten up with wood rot and the front patch shoulder-high in brambles and weeds. There had been a lawn once, but even that was climbing up to say hello to the hogweed.   The corrugated roof seemed solid enough, a bit of rust here and there, but nothing a lick of paint wouldn’t have put right.  The broad wavy-edged wall boards, so dark they looked as if they had been treated with used engine oil, were sick and warped, twisting away from the house as if they were trying to escape.

       Out of me and Ray I had always been the bolder one, the madcap, the show-off, no spark then of the future musician.   So when one day on our way to school Ray egged me on to sneak up and take a look through the window of the old wooden shack, I didn’t need any double-daring.   Leaving Ray chewing his nails, which he did a lot, I climbed over the remains of the gate and, crouching low, pushed my way through the weeds and tall grass.   Closer to the house I went down commando-style.   Alongside the front door there was a little veranda going down half the length of the wall.  I pulled up onto this and edged towards the window.   It was thick with encrusted dirt and on the inside a shabby piece of red towelling formed a makeshift curtain.

      I peered in.  It was one big room, just like the shot cabin in the woods and almost as sparsely furnished. Along the length of one wall were masses of bookshelves laden with important-looking books.  But it was the grand piano that held my eye. How on earth, I wondered, had anyone managed to get a grand piano through the door and into a house that size?   But there it was.   I thought maybe the place had been built around the grand piano.

       It was with something of a jolt that I noticed the room was occupied.  An old man -  I could only see the back and side of his head, the unruly grey hair and the huddled shoulders - looked to be reading, for there was a book open on the table in front of him.   Some sort of cooking range skulked in the far corner, but I couldn’t see a sink or any taps and I was curious as to what he did for water.

       A strident, frightened whisper caught my ear and I turned to see Ray’s arm waving frantically above the bramble bushes.   Someone was coming up the lane.   I ducked off the veranda, crawled back through the grass and found Ray almost wetting himself at the gate.   A square-faced squat little woman came bustling towards us like she meant business.   She still had her housecoat on and was carrying a snuffly Pekinese under her arm.

      ‘What you boys at?   I seen you.   Not worrying old Mr Kendrick are you?’

       She stopped close in front of us, glancing from us to the old wooden house several times so quickly I thought for a moment she had some kind of twitch.   We shook our heads.

       ‘Best not.   He don’t take kindly to being meddled with, the old gentleman. Him’s a genius, that’s what, a proper musical genius.   Known better days I reckon.   Right respectable, but he don’t like to socialise’.   The Pekinese was slobbering excitedly, its pug face pushing closer to mine.

       ‘Now, you boys get along to school or you’ll be late’.   She scatted us with her free hand and we sped off down the lane, arriving well after the bell and consequently suffering Miss Feebry’s ruler across our knuckles for the second time in four days.

       One week later I was coming home past the wooden house with Jeanie Ryland. Measured in the tors and troughs that make up the corrugations of our lives, Jeanie merited a hill all her own.   I liked her a lot, but I knew she was soft on Ginger Watts.   Ginger was always getting into fights and never seemed happier than when he was thumping the living daylights out of some over-spunky tenderfoot, or giving his latest rival a bloody nose.   Already he had a cauliflower ear and I couldn’t understand what Jeanie saw in him.

       As we came by the old wooden house Jeanie pointed to it and said, ‘That’s where the genius lives’.

       ‘I know’, I said.

       ‘You do?’

       ‘Someone told me’.  I wanted to elaborate but decided my ignorance might give me away.   Besides, here was an opportunity for me to improve myself.   ‘What’s a genius?’ I asked.

       Jeanie gave me that funny lop-sided grin of hers that I found so captivating.   ‘Someone who crams, stupid.   They say the old man studies all the time, day and night, never stops, except to play his music.  They say he knows everything.   Mustn’t it be useful to be like that?   I’ve never ever seen him though’.

       A spark went off inside my head.   I told Jeanie of my escapade a week earlier.   ‘Gosh!’ she said, and I knew she was impressed.

       ‘I bet Ginger Watts wouldn’t have done that’, I said, and Jeanie just giggled, as she so often did.   Then I asked her if she would like to see the genius with her own eyes.   Slightly unnerved at the prospect, nevertheless a few minutes later Jeanie was crawling breathlessly beside me through the overgrown front patch.  We made the veranda and I eased myself up onto my knees, hauling Jeanie up after me.   At the window I whispered,  ‘There, see’.  The old man was sitting almost exactly as before, a book spread out in front of him.   A thin blue plume of smoke curled up from the pipe in his left hand and a big tabby cat posed like a statue on the arm of his chair.

       Jeanie’s bright eyes were wide with excitement, and looking at her I felt another kind of excitement stirring within me.   The little flowery dress, her honey-coloured hair, the secret smell of her.

       ‘Gosh!  A real live genius!’

       A bicycle came rattling down the unmade lane and we dived back into the cover of the long grass.   Jeanie was so close I could count the freckles around the top of her nose.   I wondered if it was safe to grab a kiss. There would never be a better time.   But then I had a sudden vision of Ginger Watts and his cauliflower ear.  If she really did have the hots for him - well!

       As if reading my mind Jeanie said, ‘I think Ginger Watts is stupid. He’s always fighting someone.   Besides, I know he’s never seen the genius’.  For some reason we both laughed out loud.   It was then that I decided.

       Lunging forward I took a stab at Jeanie’s mouth, almost knocking her over, and planted a kiss full on her lips.  I felt a quick rush of that pre-pubescent ecstasy which, in terms of sexual stepping- stones, is consummately more perfect than the ultimate reality.  Just as the dream debases the real thing. I wasn’t sure if you sucked or blew or what, so I just sort of left my lips hanging there for a few seconds.   Then Jeanie drew back and said, ‘You know, you’re supposed to close your eyes when you kiss’.   ‘Oh!’  I said, and I kissed her again, this time with my eyes shut. I could feel the deliciously intense heat of the afternoon sun beating down on my neck through the long grass, as memory buried Jeanie and me, together with the fossil of that first innocent kiss, forever in the rank luxuriance of the genius’s front garden.

       Next day, at school, Jeanie fussed around me so much in the playground that it was only due to the intervention of the dinner lady that I escaped a thumping from Ginger Watts.

       Another week passed.   It was Saturday.   Ray, me and Jimmy Hurrell from the next village were out on our bikes.   Coming back up the lane we stopped, as if by silent agreement, outside the old timber house.

       ‘This where he lives then?’ Jimmy asked, scratching himself, which was something he did a lot.   ‘Thought a genius would live in a mansion at least’.

       Irked by his lack of enthusiasm Ray said, ‘What’d you know?   Ain’t no geniuses in your village’.   I dropped my bike down on the grass verge and, echoing my brother’s irritated tone, said, ‘Listen, do you want to see him or not?’

       ‘Course I do’, Jimmy said meekly enough.   ‘Just thought, that’s all’.

       Soon we were bellying our way through the high hogweed, Jimmy cussing about being stung and bitten and scratching himself again.  Then we stopped abruptly.   Floating across the sunlit space between us and the old house was the most wonderful sound I had ever heard.   It was piano music, but quite unlike anything of our very limited experience.   Ray was listening hard too, and even Jimmy had stopped scratching long enough to pay attention.  For me, at any rate, it was the music of angels.

       We must have stayed lying there for twenty or more minutes, just listening, saying nothing, letting the gentle waves of the glorious music wash over our young, untutored minds.   At last the music stopped and I was left with a disturbing impression of some wonderful mystery, yet to be unravelled and fully understood.

       I knew then I didn’t want to make it to the veranda a third time, didn’t want to share the old man with Jimmy Hurrell. The associations, the discoveries, were all too precious now, too personal, to be tarnished by the curious eyes and ears of the infidel.

       ‘Let’s go’, I said;  then I moled my way back through the thick grass and rank hogweed, back to the broken gate, deaf to the hissed protests behind me.   On my bicycle again I looked back to where the sun was glancing off the corrugations like light reflecting off a jewel.   I wished with all my heart that our own house had a silver tin roof, through which healing music rose.   Just like the little wooden house where the genius lived.