CONTINUOUS

Tony Harrison

Rex Collings 1981

ISBN 086036 159 4

50 Sonnets from The School of Eloquence

'In 1799 special legislation was introduced "utterly suppressing and prohibiting" by name the London Corresponding Society and the United Englishmen. Even the indefatigable conspirator, John Binns, felt that further national organisation was hopeless . . . When arrested he was found in possession of a ticket which was perhaps one of the last "covers" for the old L.C.S.:

Admit for the Season to the School of Eloquence. '

e. p. thompson, The Making of the English Working Class
 

Turns

I thought it made me look more 'working class'
(as if a bit of chequered cloth could bridge that gap!)
I did a turn in it before the glass.
My mother said: It suits you, your dad's cap.
(She preferred me to wear suits and part my hair:
You're every bit as good as that lot are!}

All the pension queue came out to stare.
Dad was sprawled beside the postbox (still VR),
his cap turned inside up beside his head,
smudged H A H in purple Indian ink
and Brylcreem slicks displayed so folk might think
he wanted charity for dropping dead.

He never begged. For nowt! Death's reticence
crowns his life's, and me, I'm opening my trap
to busk the class that broke him for the pence
that splash like brackish tears into our cap.

Cremation

So when she hears him clearing his throat 
every few seconds she's aware what he's raking
's death off his mind; the next attack. The threat 
of his dying has her own hands shaking.

The mangle brought it on. Taking it to bits. 
She didn't need it now he'd done with pits.

A grip from behind that seems to mean don't go 
tightens through bicep till the fingers touch. 
His, his dad's and his dad's lifetime down below 
crammed into one huge nightshift. and too much.

He keeps back death the way he keeps back phlegm 
in company, curled on his tongue. Once left alone 
with the last coal fire in the smokeless zone, 
he hawks his cold gobful at the brightest flame, 
too practised, too contemptuous to miss.

Behind the door she hears the hot coals hiss.

Continuous

James Cagney was the one up both our streets. 
His was the only art we ever shared. 
A gangster film and choc ice were the treats 
that showed about as much love as he dared.

He'd be my own age now in '49! 
The hand that glinted with the ring he wore, 
his father's, tipped the cold bar into mine 
just as the organist dropped through the floor.

He's on the platform lowered out of sight 
to organ music, this time on looped tape, 
into a furnace with a blinding light 
where only his father's ring will keep its shape.

I wear it now to Cagneys on my own
and sense my father's hands cupped round my treat-

they feel as though they've been chilled to the bone 
from holding my ice cream all through White Heat.

Illuminations

I

The two machines on Blackpool's Central Pier. 
The Long Drop and The Haunted House gave me 
my thrills the holiday that post-war year 
but my father watched me spend impatiently:

Another tanner's worth, but then no more!

But I sneaked back the moment that you napped.
50 weeks of ovens, and 6 years of war
made you want sleep and ozone, and you snapped:

Bugger the machines! Breathe God's fresh air!

I sulked all week, and wouldn't hold your hand. 
I'd never heard you mention God, or swear, 
and it took me until now to understand.

I see now all the piled old pence turned green.
enough to hang the murderer all year
and stare at millions of ghosts in the machine—

The penny dropped in time! Wish you were here!

II

We built and bombed Boche stalags on the sands, 
or hunted for beached starfish on the rocks 
and some days ended up all holding hands 
gripping the pier machine that gave you shocks. 
The current would connect. We'd feel the buzz 
ravel our loosening ties to one tense grip, 
the family circle, one continuous US! 
That was the first year on my scholarship 
and I'd be the one who'd make that circuit short. 
I lectured them on neutrons and Ohm's Law 
and other half-baked Physics I'd been taught. 
I'm sure my father felt I was a bore!

Two dead, but current still flows through us three 
though the circle takes for ever to complete— 
eternity, annihilation, me, 
that small bright charge of life where they both meet.

III

The family didn't always feel together. 
Those silent teas with all of us apart 
when no-one spoke except about the weather 
and not about his football or my art.

And in those silences the grating sound
of father's celery, the clock's loud tick,
the mine subsidence from deep underground.
mi mam's loose bottom teeth's relentless click.

And when, I'm told, St. James's came to fetch her, 
My teeth! were the final words my mother said. 
Being without them, even on a stretcher, 
was more undignified than being dead.

Ay! I might have said, and put her in her box 
dressed in that long gown she bought to wear, 
not to be outclassed by those posh frocks, 
at her son's next New York premiere!