William Ankers, a drayman out of Walton

battering cobbles, hoofing up sparks, cracking the whip:

steering iron-shod cartwheels, trundling hooped barrels

down-brew to quaysides, to bustling ships’ holds,

down past the workhouse his daughter scrubbed floors in,

its sour-faced clock, and lumbering into

the muddle of names that bedevils our kin.

This is the all-that-I-know-of-him from a grandparents’

marriage-lines, a curate's copperplate:

‘Name, Rank/ Profession’. Then, in brackets, ‘Deceased’.

But imagine a shire horse all dockroad jingle,

mane plaited, lugholes cockaded, hay bag swinging,

rounding in on gates where a helmet in a sentry box

is nodding acquaintance, with a ‘’Ow do then, Billy!’

and the great horse bulging past, barrels buffeting

over sleepers laid across train tracks,

into dock smells of oil and hessian, a ruction of gulls.

William Ankers is ‘deceased’ when his daughter's

made respectable in marriage – with my father, a bastard,

already rising three. It's the year of Dada,

the Easter Rising, Monet's Water Lilies, the Somme.

Imagine thirty years and more and there's me

a meddlesome three. Now it's Finnegans Wake,

Gone with the Wind, and another war breaking

down the streets.

How do we trust it? when some say William Ankers plumber,

man of lead and solder, no shire horse after all

but blowtorch, monkey wrench and oilrag. How come ‘deceased’

and early? – his widow, Mary Jane, salting herself away

in leafy West Derby. How they shifted, my kin, flitted

about the sandstone city! Walton, West Derby, Aigburth and Toxteth,

The Dingle, Bootle – and there's me imagining roots

tangled only in the last of them, men-folk poised at the sea's edge

for shipping out kitbagged when tides turned

and the always-insolent gulls were dumb.

Married in St Cleopas, Toxteth, by Curate Robert Barrow,

late in the day – but according, says here, to the rites

of the Established Church – Florence Ankers, Spinster,

George Simpson, Steward. But what is this ‘Steward’?

Pattled skeletons tell us ‘Coachman’, of a ‘big house

in Aigburth’. How can we trust it? She 28, he 31 –

in service once in the same ‘big house’, declaring the same

number now in Cockburn Street, where John Edgar Jones

takes in lodgers … where old Moses Carson lives, climbing

the same stairs, shifting his feet on the landing

when the bathroom was hogged.