Sunday 2 August 2020

A Present from Betelgeuse

My next (and probably last) novel, which most likely won't be called "A Present from Betelgeuse", as that would suggest Sci-Fi, and it isn't, may well be published next year!   My publisher, Fantastic Books, has just sent me an audio they have made of the first chapter for the next Fantasticon.  And this is even though I haven't yet finished and got approval for the final edit.  So I have to be hopeful.

I am also being asked to do a reading from my previous publications and I think I will read a couple of poems from the small family anthology "Old Playgrounds" that started my career... well, I say career... at any rate, I am published.  And I am very grateful for it too.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Old-Playgrounds-anthology-edited-Knight/dp/1470139774

This is the poem, not by me, that inspired the collection.  When me and my siblings were children back in the 1950s, we used to play in the rubble and bombsites of WW2, which turned into building sites as the post-war world got going. A gigantic hospital was built at the end of our road - it took so long to demolish, clear, build, improve, repair, etc, that the first discernible words of my parents' oldest grandchild were "big crane" ("BIG cwane").

Penny has written a lyrical poem about the way some places are haunted by memories of childhood.

Old Playgrounds (Sheffield)

Penny Grubb

A place to go. Remember where?
With cold, stone floor and dark, damp air.
Remember? It wasn't always there.

Perched up on the rafters high.
A breath! Dust billows, thick and dry.
The view's not walking feet, but sky.

Childhood's jungles all around.
Disused quarry's eerie sound.
Thistle sentries stand their ground.

The Rose-Bay higher than we knew.
Nettles, brambles, old and new.
And always poppies - just a few.

The juice ran thick and sweet and red
From berries wild as the kids they fed.
Garden's owners - long since dead.

Only the blue delphiniums show
That these were gardens, long ago.
Now mainly weeds. A place we know.

Through tangled growth, a shelter bare.
Relic of war - Like poppies there?
We didn't know, so didn't care.

Were there ghosts deep down below?
The men who had made the gardens grow?
There was no one there we knew, I know.

Now the attic's gone, the shelter's lost
The price of progress, or the cost?
Who thought about delphiniums tossed

Against the bricks of a brand new wall
A monster seventeen storeys tall
Where and when did the flowers fall?

Strangers walk the cold, stone floor
And where there was an old trapdoor.
Fill the space that was ours before

And though it's new, it's said maybe
That there's a ghost that people see.

I daren't go back. It might be me.



They were not all bomb sites - whole areas of lovely old stone houses with their flourishing gardens were demolished to make way for the brave new world that planners were, sincerely, hoping to build.  And we played in those old gardens for years.  And of course, nearly all gardens then had a crumbling old air raid shelter. Once I remember we found and nurtured a cabbage - only to find on picking day that another group of roaming children had been nurturing it too.  I don't know what happened. Hopefully we shared it. 

Sunday, is the third of the 6 sessions of our virtual Convention. If you wish to join us, here is the link. We are attending the Saturday morning session today.
https://www.jw.org/en/library/videos/#en/categories/2020Convention



1 comment:

  1. Thank you for featuring my poem. It brought back a host of memories. It was a good period in which to grow up. I think we were luckier than the current generation in many ways.

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