Author: Richard

Training company boss by day. Poet and a whole heap of other things by night. Plus the son of a mother who was killed in a care home while living with dementia.

Black Hole

Bloodless skin too tightly drawn for lips. 
White. Like supermarket chicken. 
A row of teeth along the bottom curve. 
None along the top. (You lost those long ago.)
And that moustache that grandmas get
And tickle when you kiss.

It’s four. 
Trying to remember that last conversation for company. 
Except we didn’t know it was going to be the last conversation. 
Not then.  The detail’s faded. 
And without that to cling on to we’re drowning. 
A black hole.
Pulling everything 

In and out

All this framed from your broken boxer’s nose to your chin
By The Mask of Sorrow (you liked that film, the one starring Douglas Fairbanks. Or was it Tyrone Powers?)
Held in place by a loop of lawn green elastic. Stretched. 
But not yet snapped. 

Out and in

To breaking point. What does a fractured skull look like? I’d take a picture with my phone and send you. 
The police officers standing at the head of your bed have. For “evidential purposes.” 
One in uniform. The other in plain clothes.  A detective. Made them feel sick. My italics. My mother. 
Smash all the mirrors. 
They have no use anymore. 
Let’s have some bloody dignity here. Yes bloody. 

In and out.

Contusion
That’s the word the doctor uses. That and depressed fractures of the orbit. Dr Murray. David. I like his trainers. Why do I notice them when he’s telling me your eyeball has dropped into the place where your cheek bone used to be?
Look up from the Nikes. 
Neanderthal. Yes that’s the look. And with the head bandage a touch of Mother Teresa. 
Confusion. 

And out

“You can talk to her. She can probably hear you.”

“Pick a fight with someone your own size next time Mum.” 
As bright as the fluorescents.
The nurse gives me a strange look. Pity or disdain. She knows what I’m thinking. I think. 
And I’d like to have her. 

In 

That was a performance. Privacy now. Blue curtains drawn. Neat pleats. You’d like them. Voices on the other side. 
On this side whispers. Through the orange neck brace to your blood-flaked ear. 
The roar of the ocean inside a seashell. 
Cromer beach. Drowning out the beeps. Can you hear it?
I want to cry. Like the last time I saw you crying. When dad died. 
But I can’t. Him telling me to be strong. 
So I tell you that you are loved and list your children and grandchildren one by one. Eight names. Living. Breathing. Without your spark none of this.
None of us. 

And out

Let me hold your hand. 
It’s warm under the giant bubble wrap blanket. 
Dying this way is a numbers game. 
I’m an expert at this now.
I’ve been here four hours. 
A screen. About the size of that telly you won from the competition on the back of the Kellogs Cornflakes box. But in colour 
Top row. Green.  Waves. Listen with mother. The shipping forecast. 
Tyne, Fisher, Dogger, Heart Rate. 105. falling slowly. 

In

Second row. Yellow. 100%. 
Gold star. Tollington School for Girls, East Finchley. Top of the class. 
Except the oxygen machine is doing your work now. Cheat. 
And there’s a picture with your exam results. 
An X-ray showing your lungs are half full of fluid. Or half empty.  Whichever way you look at it. 

And out

Bottom right hand corner. Smallest font. Two numbers. In red. Blood pressure. 
Shannon, Sole, Systolic, Diastolic 
45 millibars falling more slowly. 

And in

Numbers. 
You were breathing too quickly when they brought you in by ambulance 
Morphine 
Now we’re counting the seconds between the breaths. 
It’s up to four. 
We’re in Italy. (That holiday you wrote about in the diary we’ve just found. The first family holiday after dad died).
We’re on the quayside. 
There’s a gentle breeze off the land. Scented. Filling the sails of the night fishing boats. 
Such small boats. 
Such a huge ocean. 
Slip the mooring. 

And out

We watch until she’s safely over the horizon.

Poetry as therapy. This is a work in progress, still raw. It’s been thoughtfully and lightly edited by my poetry coach, Pele Cox, and her fellow poet Sally Read. Between them they have offered invaluable support and knocked off some of the rougher edges. I am indebted to them for this and I have no doubt we will do more work on it together in due course. But for now I thought it important to post the piece while the events that prompted it are still fresh.

Many of you already know the circumstances and have very kindly reached out to offer your support. But for those who don’t, it’s about my 88-year-old mother, Sheila, who in early October was beaten by another resident in her care home and died from her injuries in hospital a few hours later.

My mum, Sheila, with my dad, Brian, on their wedding day. Matinee idols the both of them!

Read also…

The Patron Saint of Paint

Shaving

Cloud lines

We live on the lower slopes of Titterstone Clee Hill in South Shropshire. Our house straddles the ever-shifting boundary (sometimes less than a vegetable patch wide) between what is shrouded in mist or cloud and what is clear. Between the seen and the unseen. Between what is perfectly rendered by the eye and imperfectly remembered by the mind’s eye. This is the space that many of my poems spring from.

Kite

The Hill: you, me, and dad
wearing the green jumper 
that still smells of him. 

The kite: an orange lozenge 
of ripstop nylon
skin tight on a wooden cross.

Me: running fast
enough to take off
but bound by string
to earth.

Your laugh sticks in my throat.
I cough to clear it
but it’s in my head.
The kite lifts a little 

Then nosedives through its arc
and lands 
with that whipcrack you hear 
out of sync like
summer lighting. One spark and

This whole dark scene 
Silvers for a second
And is gone
Blacker than before
The thunder. 

Learning by rote

I hadn’t learned anything by rote – apart from my bank PIN number – since playing Friedrich Von Trapp in the Parkfields School production of The Sound of Music. And that was back in 1972. So when my poetry coach, Pele Cox, asked me to commit to memory Fern Hill by Dylan Thomas I wasn’t even sure I could do it. Running to 467 words over 54 lines and six verses, it was certainly longer than the script for my stage debut (and, as it turned out, finale). Plus, a 61-year-old mind was surely going to be less malleable than that of an 11-year-old used to reciting his times tables to teachers armed with knuckle-rapping rulers?

But it turns out I needn’t have worried. It took time – nearly two months in all (although I reckon I could have done it much quicker if I’d been able to commit to it full time like, say, an actor doing it for a living). And it took discipline – reading each line again and again and again… Probably more than 100 times in all.

That repetition was instrumental in cementing the words in my memory. But to give those words voice and to imbue them with something more than their narrow semantic meaning required me to occupy the poem and, therefore, by extension, the poet’s head. This, of course, sounds like pretentious twaddle! So let me explain…

I don’t mean that I read the poem in a Welsh accent (although I did) or that, like Thomas, I occasionally combined my task with alcohol (although I did). I mean that I strutted around my own garden from “under the apple bough” to the “lilting house” listening to the “tunes from the chimneys” and watching my farming neighbours in their “hay fields as high as the house.” Each time I walked by the brook that flows “all the sun long” at the bottom of the lane I declared (to any passerby who cared to listen) that “the Sabbath rang slowly in the pebbles of the holy streams.” Every swallow swoop was a reminder of the “loft by the shadow of my hand.”

Being inside the poem in this way helped me both to learn it and to feel it. If at any point a word or line was lost I could, in a very real sense at least initially, look for it. Not in Fern Hill in South Wales but in my half-real, half-imagined recreation of that landscape in South Shropshire. I am “blessed among stables” and realise this process might have been more difficult had I been living in South London.

So what have I learned from the exercise – apart from the obvious – and was it worthwhile?

That my brain isn’t as knackered as I feared it might be.

That poems – or certainly good ones – are like onions and can be peeled back layer by layer to reveal things you miss in a single, cursory reading. Forgive the crass metaphor but for me it’s not unlike the difference between a one-night-stand and a lasting relationship. The superficial may be gratifying – beautiful even. But intimacy – spending longer with a person, poem or poet – is revelatory and ultimately so much more rewarding.

One such reward revealed to me by spending days on end with Fern Hill is that eventually you can move beyond the words (like a couple of old lovers sitting in silence) and hear in that quietness the “breathing” – the rhythm, tone and cadence – of the poem. That musicality is one of Thomas’s many gifts.

But I guess the biggest lesson is that to achieve anything remotely close to the mastery of language demonstrated by Thomas I must spend as much time living and breathing my own poems. Anything less will make them superficial.

Being a newsreader is boring

Let me start with a confession: I wasn’t a very good newsreader. And I didn’t do it for very long. But I did it for long enough to learn that (a) sitting around all day reading somebody else’s words from an autocue isn’t a proper job and that (b) despite appearances, the news doesn’t change very much – it’s essentially the same old stories being told and retold over and over and over again. Ad nauseum.

So I jumped at the chance to write and perform my own skit on The Big Live Breakfast Burrito – quite possibly the weirdest LinkedIn Live show you’ll ever see.

Here I am playing the role of an end-of-the-pier fortune teller – a worryingly camp cross cross between Gypsy Rose Lee and Jack Sparrow. You can be the judge of whether I’m as lousy at script-writing and acting as news reading. But I don’t think you can deny I enjoyed myself!

Thank you to Mrs Uridge for her lipstick (clearly she didn’t apply it) and for the blouse and bling which I have, of course, returned.

Fern Hill

by Dylan Thomas

My poetry coach, the wonderful Pele Cox, has asked me to commit this poem to memory. It’s proving to be a tough gig. Not least because the last time I learned lines was probably as Friedrich von Trapp in the Parkfields School production of the Sound of Music back in the early 1970s. I had to dress in lederhosen for that role. For this one I’m not sure what I’ll wear. Something Welsh maybe?!

It’s a beautiful poem by the way. I’ve reproduced it below from my copy of Dylan Thomas Selected Works.* I’m not at all sure I’ll be able to do it justice. I’ll keep you posted on this pilgrim’s progress. 

Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs
About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,
     The night above the dingle starry,
          Time let me hail and climb
     Golden in the heydays of his eyes,
And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns
And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves
          Trail with daisies and barley
     Down the rivers of the windfall light.

And as I was green and carefree, famous among the barns
About the happy yard and singing as the farm was home,
     In the sun that is young once only,
          Time let me play and be
     Golden in the mercy of his means,
And green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman, the calves
Sang to my horn, the foxes on the hills barked clear and cold,
          And the sabbath rang slowly
     In the pebbles of the holy streams.

All the sun long it was running, it was lovely, the hay
Fields high as the house, the tunes from the chimneys, it was air
     And playing, lovely and watery
          And fire green as grass.
     And nightly under the simple stars
As I rode to sleep the owls were bearing the farm away,
All the moon long I heard, blessed among stables, the nightjars
     Flying with the ricks, and the horses
          Flashing into the dark.

And then to awake, and the farm, like a wanderer white
With the dew, come back, the cock on his shoulder: it was all
     Shining, it was Adam and maiden,
          The sky gathered again
     And the sun grew round that very day.
So it must have been after the birth of the simple light
In the first, spinning place, the spellbound horses walking warm
     Out of the whinnying green stable
          On to the fields of praise.

And honoured among foxes and pheasants by the gay house
Under the new made clouds and happy as the heart was long,
     In the sun born over and over,
          I ran my heedless ways,
     My wishes raced through the house high hay
And nothing I cared, at my sky blue trades, that time allows
In all his tuneful turning so few and such morning songs
     Before the children green and golden
          Follow him out of grace,

Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would take me
Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,
     In the moon that is always rising,
          Nor that riding to sleep
     I should hear him fly with the high fields
And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.
Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
          Time held me green and dying
     Though I sang in my chains like the sea.
  • Published in 1976 by Book Club Associates with the permission of the Trustees of the copyrights of the late Dylan Thomas.

Lost in the woods – a Catholic shrine

This is a story that resonates with what is happening today. It was first broadcast on BBC Radio Norfolk and features an interview with my good friend and former BBC colleague Conal O’Donnell.

It’s the extraordinary story of Paul Hoda’c who fled to the UK during World War Two after his native Czechoslovakia was overrun by the Nazis. He settled here and as reminder of both his faith and the forests of his native country he built a Roman Catholic shrine near Dereham in Norfolk.

Here Conal explains how his own family is connected to the strange story of the shrine in the woods.

Matthew Gudgin of BBC Radio Norfolk interviews Conal O’Donnell
Two Roman Catholic wartime SOE survivors, Conal O’Donnell (left) and Paul Hoda’c (right) at the chapel in Spread Oak Wood, Norfolk, which Mr Hoda’c built in his spare time as a thanksgiving for his deliverance from Nazi Germany. Mr Hoda’c, a car worker in the Midlands, for many years  travelled the 300 mile round trip from his home in Leamington Spa to Norfolk, gradually completing the chapel which has now sadly fallen into disrepair.

So Sunflowers Grow

Of all the tear-jerking images of war on the edges of Europe, one or two have stayed with me: birds shocked from their treetop roosts by the deep boom of artillery fire; a woman handing out sunflower seeds to occupying Russian forces.

Ukraine sunflowers. Woman offers Russian soldiers sunflower seeds so they grow where they die.
Courtesy Guardian News and Media

This poem has grown from these images. Like In Flanders Fields (from which it borrows heavily and compares badly), it’s a rondeau. Sadly, John McCrae had first hand experience of war to inform his work. Glady, I have none. So please forgive any unintended insensitivity. It is, necessarily, a work of imagination.

So Sunflowers Grow

So sunflowers grow where you die
She said with hate-and-hope-pierced eye
Then handed the soldier a seed
It will grow when Ukraine is freed
Rooted in your blood, in your lie.

Air sucked from a bird-shrapneled sky
Lungs emptied before the reply
No thanks heard. Silent, unstaunched bleed
So sunflowers grow.

Shot once they said: sniped; head too high.
Crumpled camo, no time to lie
Unregimented – pulled up weed
Withered. Lifeless. Yet in that deed
Of decomposting spirits fly
So sunflowers grow.