The Poetry Society

These are towns you might hear about

Once, on a regional station

While driving home late in midweek, sweaty

And scared from committing adultery, Trevor.

I see you remember it now.

Towns where a chemical lorry

Has entered the lives of a greengrocer's family

Via the front room bay window

(Somewhere preserved, through the first

Million aeons, for grandparents' corpses).

Just think, if you'd thought, you'd have known

That the place would be everywhere next

On account of the murders, but you?

Well, Trevor, you were just too busy shagging.

Your honour, I must now refer to those

Small bitter towns at the heart of the fifties

Where unmarried daughters are nursing their parents

To death, and then snatching an hour

With Margery Allingham, Dorothy Sayers, Miss Silver,

Inspector Alleyn, and perhaps, with a flush

Half-discontent and half disgust, Miss Blandish.

See them, the fortyish daughters of Albion,

Put on their sensible shoes,

Their conscientious hats, their commendable gloves

And set out on their level-headed bikes

(Unknown to themselves, in formation)

To do good in their towns of curmudgeons.

Nuneaton, Hinckley, Ferrybridge, Drax -

The spinsters go cycling religiously

Out past fields of cooling towers

(They lend one another perspective),

Cross by the footbridge on clackety here-I-am heels

Between trains, in the railways' enforceable hush,

And enter the laurel-and-shadow stuffed grounds

Of the hospital. Each may reflect that

When I was a girl...When I was a girl

The entire damned place was exactly the same.

And on they go with brave self-loathing past that Nissen hut

Unaware of the occupants strapped to their camp beds

To die of a leak from the place in the woods.

And still our ladies love

Their awful town, its canal full of cats,

And its vicar, his knob in the mangle.