A Good Time

Gerard Benson

• Publisher: Smith|Doorstop Books
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781906613679
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

Gerard Benson was born in London and lives in Bradford, where he is the city's poet laureate. A Good Time is his fourth collection for grownups.

A Good Time

Gerard Benson

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to the editors of the following, in which some of these poems first appeared:
Acumen, In the Company of Poets, New Statesman, Pennine Platform, Poetry Wales, Smiths Knoll, Staple, The Friend, The Interpreter's House, The North, The Spectator, The Stony Thursday Book, TVTimes and 14 Magazine. Some have been published in the Beehive Poets anthologies: Praesepe, Swarm and Through, and to these editors also, grateful thanks. 'Lost Gloves' was written for and appeared in Michael Rosen's A-Z. Some of the poems appeared in the collections To Catch an Elephant and Omba Bolomba (Smith/Doorstop Books) 'In a Young Time' is recorded on the Barrow Poets LP Outpatients (ARGO).

Also by Gerard Benson:

Name Game (Oyster Press, 1971)
Gorgon (Paranomasia, 1984)
The Magnificent Callisto (Blackie/Puffin, 1992)>br /> Evidence of Elephants (Viking /Puffin, 1995)
In Wordsworth's Chair (Flambard Press, 1995)
Bradford & Beyond (Flambard Press, 1997)
Hlep! (Yellow Fox Press, 2000)
To Catch an Elephant (Smith/Doorstop, 2002)
Omba Bolomba (Smith/Doorstop, 2005).

Contents

Dedication
Acknowledgements
Contents

Beginning
Eileen
Alphabets
Ursula
February 5th 1940
Village Classroom
Lost Gloves
Ghosts
A Green Stink
Myrtle
A Haunting
Kitty
My Extravagant Aunt
Dannie Doyle, My Uncle
Sheets
Yes But Sometimes
Air Raids 1942
Cherne Spinney
The Clock
A Cup of Water
Lancaster Drive
In a Young Time
Bob Grady’s Apple
The Bomber
Reversible Haiku
The Artes Admynystratoure
Shakespeare and St George
If
A & E
Riddle
Skill
Mellifont
Between Anthems
Boathouses
But There’s This Other One
Gatecrasher
Life Class
Poet
So Snow
Moon
In Hospital
Muzzle
A Good Time
The Old Track
The Heath Madrigal
After Beethoven
Gallery
Bionic
Where the Heart Is
Like the Back of My Hand
Leaving the Orchard
Bar Sketches

1. The Player

2. The Artist

3. The Surgeon

4. The Photographer

5. The Traveller

Breathing
Capus
A Very Good Upholsterer
Checkmate

Biography

Beginning

At last, after an almost endless wait,

the call came, and I set out as I was.

I was well-prepared, and from

the drumming darkness I began to beat

a way through my soft tunnel to the sweet

bewildering universe beyond.

Believe me, I hadn't asked to be born,

but still I pressed head-first toward the light.

I shan't say much about the attendant nun.

Nothing distracted me. I knew what I had to do.

I eased my greasy shoulders through a narrow

almost impassable fissure. Adventure, sorrow,

puzzlement, delight were waiting. I pushed on through,

breathed air, then wailed - and so again began.

Eileen

Last night she went to see Josephine Baker.

But that was a long time ago, and she wrote

it up in her diary. Today she is knitting

little boots for me to wear - all duly recorded.

I remember nothing of this. My first trip to Paris

is obstinately hazy. Her eyes are blue.

She's bunking off her job, hiding in a foreign city,

hiding behind a musical laugh (she could laugh in French),

and eyes she could widen at will. Strap-over shoes,

a beret, red probably - you can't tell from the snaps.

She kept accounts: pommes-de-terre cinquante centimes, choux,

pencilled in a small notebook. Waiting for the earth to open.

But it didn't. And French law was tougher than the English

so she made the trip home - still carrying her secret -

to Irish London and the priests and her mother. The world turned.

She slowly became her portrait photograph,

black and white (no greys), framed, charming, remote.

Later the earth did open; a friend made her up in her coffin.

Alphabets

Next to the King there was a Lighthouse.

It was spring and I galloped over the playground,

a cowboy toting a two-fingered gun.

A Bell rang. We lined up and went in.

I rolled plasticine on a board with my palm

making sausages. I wore short trousers and braces

but I wanted a belt with a snake buckle;

for girls it was frocks with stripes or flowers

and there were flowers on the tables too, in jam jars.

Slates rattled in their wooden frames

and with a stick of yellow chalk I wrote Bs,

the big one was like a sideways Bum

but B was for Boat and Bat and Baby;

and the whole story began with Apple.

Ursula

A firework explodes and without warning

I'm crouching by an iron railing

with a tartan scarf over my nose, when a car

backfires, and a big boy whose name I've forgotten

slumps, sprawling, then sits up and gasps,

'They got me, pard,' and we can't stop laughing.

Today a girl with a strange name has joined;

her face a full moon. When we have to be birds

in the Hall in bare feet and our various underwear

Donald May and I are swifts, but she goes tiptoe

very slowly, waving graceful wings,

her fat bottom wobbling as she flies.

Somewhere in my contempt for such

soppy girly stuff is a stirred-up admiration;

I still remember Ursula, her swan (was it?)

and her name, the gravity of her imagination

and the flight of her heron or whatever it was,

wings wafting up and down while we zoomed past.

Then it was war and the world changed. School

was dark stone in a village street. No electricity.

No hall. Different children. Different teachers.

But today a loud firework went off

and a car backfired in Lionel Road, 1939,

and a boy fell dead and a girl danced.

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Table of contents

• A Good Time