for George Szirtes

Sarah Jane labours a squeaky mangle, squeezing sheets,

till flannel yields its greyness and, like compacted slush,

burns white. Above her, a clothes-rack tilts and sags,

pulleys yearn with the weight of children's things.

She wobbles the wheel as if to croak out tunes.

‘Where did you get that hat? Where did you get that hat?’

Sarah Jane doesn't know today will bring home agony.

Not yet. Has no thought what part she plays in history,

how out there in the big wide world

they're finding things to change us all – x-rays, wireless

telegraphy, the cinematograph. Today is dolly-tub

and Reckitt's Blue, slap-slap of shirt on washboard; her routine.

She's thinking of my great-aunts – Florrie, Sally, Bella,

Rubina – and slows the creaking rollers up to listen out for them.

They have been told! They have been told!

Where are George and Jimmy? Watching men play pitch-and-toss

against a wall or gazing down the headlong brew

at the great business of the river, its clutter of masts?

Today (not yet, not yet) is history spilling blood

on cobblestones.

I'm imagining things I know are tight in fact. Truth is these girls,

despite mother's orders, pushed out Rubina in her pram –

Florrie 8, Sally 4, Bella 3 – Rubina Emily just 14 months –

a pram clattering out of control down Everton Brow. This,

with other things, explains the tight-lipped family I grew up in,

a great-grandmother, Sarah Jane, red-raw with suds, distraught

at her door, a mustachioed policeman, and three great-aunts

shaking like skeletons in a cupboard underneath the stairs.