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-Grandmother
- 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
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.
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- Information
- Getting There , pp. 6 - 7Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2001