Going Back

GOING BACK It was not an endearing place, a storybook place With little cottages and Loaded fruit trees from which apples could be casually filched, Nor were there sparkling streams for pushing hot feet into in July, Or even grassy parks where the dog and the kids could romp And old men sit and smoke pipes. My childhood England was industrial, dark and dirty, And instead of the skirl of bagpipes or the weeping of a fiddle, There were the round-the-clock sirens and Whistle-changes of factory shifts And the clash of steel loads being trucked to the docks. It threatened to suffocate me, To imprison my mind between slabs of coal and pints of brown ale, And when I walked the streets in search of meaning I found nothing Except a weekly cycle of movies showing how real people lived. I emerged from it and never returned - And quickly forgot its worthless heritage of coal-dust, and Found real places and lived a real life far beyond the horizons Drawn by the schools of Gateshead. Now, however, in the silent moments of creeping age and grown children, The steep streets pitching down to the teeth of the Tyne Gnaw into my fattened mind and reach to the bones of my brain Where the smell of coaldust still lingers - And always will. And I feel again the empty places, the dark places, the places calling My name in a strange dialect I have long abandoned. Somehow they seem less cold and uninviting: Their song is not off-key; And the horizons drawn by my own hand Seem to merge together in that blackened townscape. God forbid I should ever end up there for good; But I hear its siren song and cannot shake its Foundation stones free of my structured life. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . NOTES Gateshead is an industrial city in northern England.... imagine Akron, Youngstown, Toledo, Essen, Chemnitz, or similar towns, and it will give an idea of Gateshead. River Tyne is the river on which Gateshead stands, now a pleasant waterway , then more like an open sewer.