FebulousFebruary 2025: Lost and Found

THE HAPPIEST DAYS OF YOUR LIFE?

Yesterday,

Reluctantly participating

In post committal chatter

(out of sight, out of mind)

I was assailed:

“You don’t remember me do you?”

bubbled a jowl-faced woman,

who held a ghost of familiarity

upon her provincial and so workaday face.

The assault continued:

“Remember Bidgood?” (Bomber)” “Bloxham” (Beak) 

How could I forget?

Fascists to a man they were, we realise now….

And so we reminisced

 upon their put-downs, breakdowns, mood swings

The torrents of such physical and verbal blows

That now, in legal terms, would constitute assault.

And then…

“That poem… ooh you read so well”

“was it …..Yours?” 

And there, I suspect, her sentiment and surprise were really quite authentic;

“I never knew old Kingham (English)

Taught us so well” she bubbled on.

“He didn’t! “I smiled

Yet stepping back

I saw within that quip

There lay a world-sized grain of truth. 

That red brick building, constituting school,

Whose architectural ugliness

Gave me…

:Misery, fear, and the daily milk of mocking humiliation;

: Also gifted, a Golding-like contempt

for the brutality in adolescence that constitutes my sex.

The all (that ALL that is now me) 

The sensibility and the sense of one, 

THAT

came much later,

Through taking a different path in life.

And them? Those fellow mourners?

I stared back at this crowd of careless school mates?

Whom I knew not then and never will know now,

And saw the linear lines that stretched back to their youth, 

-A continuity that I myself quite lack. 

And so, whilst passing through the gravestones,

Treading my way back to an eager yet reluctant state of one,

I glanced right back,

Back down the hollow tunnel of my past

 And saw a person that was barely me.

I seemed more like a story that I’d read

In time gone by, concerning someone else.

  - A tiny terror of a child 

That hardly mirrors me at all

However, all in all, I was quite reassured that,

In those forming years of life

For all the misery that ensued,

They were, without a shadow of a doubt

THE UNHAPPIEST DAYS OF MY LIFE.

I.M.                                                    July 05 (rev 22)

Wales