Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Miscellaneous Frontmatter
- Another Look
- A Great-Grandfather
- A Great-Grandmother
- Grandfathers
- Grandmothers
- Birthplace
- My Mother and her Two Brothers
- Their Wedding Photograph
- Sticks and Stones
- Hickory Dickory
- Jolson Sings
- First Day at the Grammar School
- Catching an Old Film on Television
- Days of TEFL
- Snap
- May 1997
- Emma at Seven Months
- Somewhere Down the Line
- No Joke
- For the Man I Used to Go Fishing With
- Fishing in the Grounds of a Therapeutic Community
- Not at his Best
- Dead of Winter
- ‘Committal’
- The Dovecote
- The Idea of Order at Hunts Cross
- Jupiter Optimus Maximus
- Squeezing a Poem out of Me
- Fragment
- Something for Gael Turnbull on his Seventieth Birthday
- Making an Arrangement
- An Invitation to Breakfast from Sydney Smith
- Hiroshima
- Sez I Sez I in Stephen's Green
- Seventh Heaven
- At Drumcliff in 1997
- Getting There
- Mnemósynon
- Moonlight on Leros
- Olives
- The Quality of Greek Light
- Scottish Waiter Bringing Squid
- Funerary Monuments, Aegina
- Taking the Hexameter a Walk
- Moonlight on Aegina
- Whalewatching – Vancouver Island
- Seventh-Storey Heaven
- Sarah Biffin
- Ancestors
- In the Dock Canteen
- On Tape at the Old People's Home
- Winter Solstice 2001
- A Long Way from Home
- Publisher's note
A Great-Grandfather
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Miscellaneous Frontmatter
- Another Look
- A Great-Grandfather
- A Great-Grandmother
- Grandfathers
- Grandmothers
- Birthplace
- My Mother and her Two Brothers
- Their Wedding Photograph
- Sticks and Stones
- Hickory Dickory
- Jolson Sings
- First Day at the Grammar School
- Catching an Old Film on Television
- Days of TEFL
- Snap
- May 1997
- Emma at Seven Months
- Somewhere Down the Line
- No Joke
- For the Man I Used to Go Fishing With
- Fishing in the Grounds of a Therapeutic Community
- Not at his Best
- Dead of Winter
- ‘Committal’
- The Dovecote
- The Idea of Order at Hunts Cross
- Jupiter Optimus Maximus
- Squeezing a Poem out of Me
- Fragment
- Something for Gael Turnbull on his Seventieth Birthday
- Making an Arrangement
- An Invitation to Breakfast from Sydney Smith
- Hiroshima
- Sez I Sez I in Stephen's Green
- Seventh Heaven
- At Drumcliff in 1997
- Getting There
- Mnemósynon
- Moonlight on Leros
- Olives
- The Quality of Greek Light
- Scottish Waiter Bringing Squid
- Funerary Monuments, Aegina
- Taking the Hexameter a Walk
- Moonlight on Aegina
- Whalewatching – Vancouver Island
- Seventh-Storey Heaven
- Sarah Biffin
- Ancestors
- In the Dock Canteen
- On Tape at the Old People's Home
- Winter Solstice 2001
- A Long Way from Home
- Publisher's note
Summary
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.
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- Getting There , pp. 2 - 5Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2001