He leads me through East London,
docks, pubs, among the stray dogs, the
River Thames lapping at low clouds.
We find the second-hand player in a street
where the shops are dusty holes under the arches
of viaducts and railway bridges,
Me carrying the portable Dancette record player
in its hard Bakelite box,
lifting it by its leatherette handle, and I,
small for my age
but wanting so much to lug it all the way home.
The plastic cuts my fingers,
sharp corners bark my shins.
Father talks of his life here, the blackouts
and bombs, rationing,
and the bloody Saturday night street fights.
He whistles tunes
from a songbook of dead crooners.
That evening sitting together, with Sinatra -
watching the dark blue Capitol label
spiral and blur,
hearing the unseen belt under the bobbing needle
as it chewed vinyl -
reliving the clunk-clunk of our boots
as we pushed back fog-muted miles.
Years later, finding that player again
in mother's attic, lifting the machine
feeling how light, it is,
willing to take another walk with him
yet not knowing how to catch up.
You hand me the bracelet without meeting my eyes -
A wordless expression that betrays the casualness between us.
It's a symbol, a sign
That you haven't forgotten.
My face burns with emotion and I quickly turn to face the sea
As decade-old feelings crash through my veins.
I open my palm to find a string of blood-red roses -
Ten bakelite buds that threaten to bloom.
The cold December wind suddenly reminds me of my present.
I know I'm breaking the rules by accepting this gift –
The red rose is an ancient symbol of intention,
Of love stronger than thorns.
But this is precisely why
I can't hand it back.
Courting the illicit, I place it on my wrist.
I am shackled.
Later that night, after you've gone,
I lie next to him in the dark and count the buds between my fingers,
Like rosary beads.
Each one a prayer to the past,
A commemoration of our communion.
A curly corded telephone rings in a distant room,
its black Bakelite bulk vibrates behind closed eyes.
An old-time fire-engine parks its flame and brass chassis
inside a cavernous skull, though no conflagration
sets the dark alight.
It is that shallow pit of night when faceless clocks
expose themselves to be landmines.
A far past is calling; disembodied tongues drum loud
above the rattle of a tin ear.
A cumbersome receiver tumbles off its cradle
an accumulated dust of misappropriated yesterday’s
softens its fall.
Nothing has grasped at nothing.
A line is dead and buried; there's no resurrection,
the call however lingers, as a voice dissolve's
deep within the combustible light
of another day.
The moon had got itself tangled up
in a glass telephone kiosk.
Tricks of light do not apply to moonlight,
for it is a ghost
haunting its face only through earthy reflections.
It looks to us to see it.
The city was strangely quiet,
motorcars grew distant,
Like shadows upon cobbled pathways,
the clip clop of horse's hooves
could be heard to be passing-by.
For a moment,
time had slipped, between the cracks of the pavement,
I was convinced that the moon
was trying to phone me.
Standing as still as any wind-swayed lamppost
I listened raptly,
eventually the dull roar of modern traffic came back.
The moon had broken free and had returned,
to the darkening sky.
In the empty telephone booth
an old fashioned, Bakelite receiver
dangled from its curled chord,
while the night eerily hummed on.
"At the Third Stroke.
It will be four, four, and 40 seconds, precisely."
"At the Third Stroke.
It will be four, four, and 55 seconds, precisely."
Old timers like me can remember
when time was voiced on the telephone when you dialed '1984'.
To get the 'Speaking Clock'!
or were told the time in tolls of local church bells.
or the number of gongs of town hall clocks like 'Big Ben',
chimes on the hour, half or quarter.
When you could ring up on 'me old telephone' at
some ungodly hour in day or night,
and hear the recorded time precisely there and then.
When your grandfather's job
was to chime the time in the hall.
When God told you the time
with church bell gongs and rings.
Can you remember when you lost track of the
time, when you lost track of the count of number
of the chimes or of tolls of bells?
Less important perhaps
at midnight than midday,
but this had you reaching
for the 'Bakelite'
black telephone to
hear the time precisely,
"At the third stroke".
Or you could wait for the 'pips' on the hour,
the six short sounds on the radio,
still going strong after 90 long years.
pip, pip, pip, pip, pip, pip!
There 'tis some ungodly hour precisely!
I've been wanting to call you,
but the rolodex was trashed decades ago,
and the laptops got Alzheimer's.
I need a Bakelite dial phone
one heavy enough
to withstand some heavy breathing.
When the living and the dead communicate
they need the right tools.
Love never dies they say,
yet an I-phone has a microchip
that has everything, but a heart.
My Bakelite Moonglow Clock
David J Walker
My Bakelite Moonglow Clock
Circa 1946
Is not just an antique
It is Unique
Exclusively made to offer
The time at a glance
At night spreading a soft glow of
Moonlight perchance you need to
Know the hour
It does not listen
It does not speak
It does not photograph or
Store pictures forever in a cloud
It is not loud and
It does not read your mind
Or emails
it does not connect you to
The virtual world online
It only offers the time
Priceless
They are under the hedge, the elderly,
the silver whiskered. Threadbare possums,
frail chipmunks. The feeble,
squeezed into narrow parts of the day.
Her apartment is hedged in.
Her telephone is black, silent and Bakelite.
A groundhog comes out to gaze at the sunset,
some myopic sniffing, then shuffles back
with that stout rolling gait of his.
She forages in her living space.
From a window she blinks at the moon,
only yesterday it slipped from her purse.
Once she bought tickets, visited the young.
Once relatives parked new automobiles
under her sparkling windows.
They are settled, tucked into socks and pockets
seeking foods
unprepared for the present.
Paws hang soft.
Pills pend under bedroom lamps.
Some of them are under the hedgerow,
some unsnarl the threads of bundled quilts,
together they gum at a nub-end of twilight.
They will stay here knitting hours together
until the long forgetting finds them.
It rings in a
cavernous hammock.
No location,
only a prodding
to respond to the dark.
It is my parents calling
from a Bakelite planet;
I imagine retracing a long flex
to a whirling dial.
I hold the heavy handset to my ear:
'hello mum, hi dad' -
the phone is an electronic
hiss of dead air.
I sense they want to speak,
but they're too far away.
Words fizz in my skull.
Whatever they have to say
belongs to a yesterday
I can no longer relate to.
We need better plastics,
To hell with the bakelite saints
That stand silent inside,
The great wheels,
of the grand vehicle.
Forever sleeping behind visqueen,
Covered plexiglass,
hiding themselves
From the eyes of prophets,
And cruel November.
We need better plastics,
The Christ that guards
The scorpion forever persevered
In lucite;has become,
frail from the sunlight
And cracks, with each
Touch,slowly deteriorating
With each passing December.
Our first TV, a Mullard, maybe Murphy, black and white
five minutes for it to warm up, and it smelt of Bakelite,
the back was made of hardboard punched with rows of tiny slots
which cast a reddish glow when all the valves were getting hot.
The space left at the back was there, since I was five years old
to squeeze behind and then adjust the horizontal hold.
The vertical one was a pain as Mum sat with a frown
as I twiddled the knob and watched her head move up and down.
The reward for all my efforts when I got the jumping stopped
was fifteen minutes watching 'Bill and Ben' or 'Woodentops'.
Today it's auto tuning, LCD and big flat screen
with symbols on the bottom edge, still don't know what they mean.
No local man to fix it should the thing pack up and die,
it's Mishti on the phone from a call centre in Mumbai.
The reason there's no picture and the sound quality's poor?
The thing's so light, the Cat has gone and knocked it on the floor.
The bakelite disc revolved at seventy-eight
To end up in shards shattered, an inevitable fate
Heavy and brittle and full of opera
Was replaced with a vinyl at thirty-three
With covers a delight to see
Light and supple full of she loves you, yeah
And then came the cassette from nowhere
And pretty soon the Walkman walked
And less and less and less teens talked
But nodded heads as they made their beds
As Billy-Jean was not their lover
They were soon to discover
Shiny discs of digital delight
And very soon car tape decks were out of sight
But oh so quick the mp3 stick
And iPod player with iTunes click
Took over the world
And we were lost
As the pace of progress counted the cost
And the Bakelite discs became collector’s items
And the vinyl’s came back as the nightclub dims
And eight track stereo was attracted to rims
And yet we are not done, as no-one has won
But we all seem to have lost
The times that we had
When it was still turning
At thirty three
And seventy eight