AHEM

AHEM

AHEM

I saw the best suits of my parents’ generation
        destroyed by poor tailoring, synthetic fibres
        and hysterical lapels,
dragging their shopping down the high streets
        of Albion in Pacamacs with hairdos under
        hairnets and headscarves,
Brylcream-headed husbands burning pipe tobacco
        in walnut bowls and inhaling through
        the clenched teeth of repressed ardour,
who feared the wind rush in the negro streets
        of Victoriana blowing the sounds and smells
        that threaten the unfamiliar and didn’t
        even know Elvis Presley existed yet,
who got drunk on home-made egg-flip at Christmas
        and sang the old songs around the piano
        while their kids were happy with a tangerine
        and dinky toy,
who saved so that one day they might have
        a little car and be saluted by the AA man
        as they drove by,
who were all the time boiling vegetables to eat with
        Spam while listening to the radiogram valves
        singing hot with Family Favourites and after sprouts
       there was Much Binding in The Marsh until
       Billy Cotton cried out WAKEY WAKEY and
       Bandstand glowed out in the deathly grey
       of cathode rays,
who on Fridays went dancing up the club in sixpence
        a week Montague Burton suits and crammed into
        eighteen hour girdles and mail order dresses with
        their blue hair piled on top, but just too soon to have been teenagers,
who tripped out to Skegness Vimto-fuelled in charabancs
        to shine under Billy Butlin’s neon “our true intent is all
        for your delight” while being served brown ale by lasses
        from Doncaster in grass skirts under plastic palm trees
        in The Beachcomber Bar,
who never used the front room but kept it pure and the
        antimacassars pressed for visits by doctors or
        vicars or teachers for tinned salmon and tinned pears
        and tinned milk and polished their front steps
        and never ran out of string,
who knew their place and never thought the universities
        were for the likes of them but prayed for office jobs
        for their children and stood for God Save The Queen
        at the Empire and said how wonderful their policemen
        were and fought in the war for the likes of me,
who had more words for toilet than the Inuit have for snow
        and put their teeth in jars then slept in their vests
        under candlewick counterpanes in cold bedrooms
        with dreams of winning the pools and bungalows
        in Cheshire with inside loos and labour saving devices,
who at dawn trod into brown slippers onto cold brown
        linoleum and could only face the day through the
       sweet brown haze of a hundred cups of tea and
       twenty Capstan full strength.