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Boat Lane, 1967
Painting the lane at the back of his house is like painting in the dark to the artist who records the scene in order to escape it. He is still young and does not know what it means to take hold of a few houses with the crowns of summer trees above their roofs and make an arrangement of grey, white and brown. He thinks that to paint one must see as a camera sees and he is afraid to lie. What he doesn't know is that his hand obeys the dreamer inside him who chooses the scene with its lonely lamppost, the upturned bathtub in the yard at the back of the open gate, the rubber tire that is in the picture because nobody has taken it away and the dreamer sees everything. There is just enough shadow to give form to the walls. Light can only be hinted at in the city where the artist lives but when he finds the picture again more than thirty years later he becomes the dreamer at last. Are the houses still standing? Does the lane still lead to a river? How silently the bricks lay on top of each other. As if they were beautiful.
Match Day
With factory chimneys rising above the roofline against a backdrop of haze and each brick row of houses reflected on the pools of brown water in the street it would be easy to believe the man who stands with his sandwich board to face an oncoming crowd calling out Turn back before it is too late; the end, the fateful end is nigh. No crowd has ever turned for him, not even when lightning flashes between his words or thunder rises from beneath his place on the bridge where the trains run laden with coal for the furnaces in which he says our souls will melt. We stream past him in our thousands wearing the colours of the team. Our voices reduce him to a mime. We are a chorus united in vulgarity, happy for a day to stand together in a weekly rite. Every Saturday we test him, and he is steadfast. We pass, not caring what follows on Sunday as long as our side wins. And what once was earth spreads around us all exhaling smoke that blocks the view to Heaven for us who believe only what we see.
Oldham
Smoke rises through tapering brick chimneys to meet the rain that washes it back down to the rows of terraced housing, the railway sidings and the industrial monuments pushing the valley deeper into the ground. Sketched on the haze, towers that echo gothic float among factories whose faith is all in money. Men with faces grey as the slate on their roofs walk slowly to their shifts with hands in their pockets unconsciously counting small change. The hills no longer know they are hills. Only on the one overlooking the valley does a tree survive, as if an arm could reach above the furnaces and grinding wheels with its hand open, never knowing it could have been a fist.
Cowboys and Englishmen
America is the land across the street, hidden among red brick outhouses where Indians wait in ambush and we must go to claim the land of the sun for the whiteskins. Nobody wants to be the enemy so we settle for the Apaches we imagine. Chimney smoke indicates their camps, our houses are canyon walls, and two fingers held together are guns. We canter down the alleys, crouch behind dustbins in our cobblestone desert, taking over the West. We incur wounds that do not bleed and kill the already dead. Over and over we kill them every day until our mothers call us to dinner and ask if we won. After listening to our fathers tell us how they won their war, we choose our battles carefully. We watch them come home from work with faces pale and wonder what the peace is doing to them, then reload and go back out until the sun sets.
Sunday Dinner
A lukewarm shaft of sunlight slants through the window where lace curtains part and lands on the table smelling of freshly administered polish, as does the sideboard with a mirror sheen and see-through door behind which the dinner plates are stacked and waiting for the special guest, white with floral ornaments, smooth at the centre and rippled at the porcelain's edge, six deep with bowls on top of them and dishes in the bowls. Two mismatched chairs, one still, one that rocks, flank the hearth. Shape of an artist's palette, a coffee table stands equidistant from them with bottles of sauce and ketchup artlessly placed next to the salt and pepper pots anticipating the main course. Actors act the war. On the television screen the image and the message are both in black and white. There'll never be another war, says Father as he shakes the bottle before pouring a layer of sauce over his meal. Aren't you going to taste it first? asks Mother. He says he doesn't have to. Her people were on the other side when sauce was a luxury. Its over now, he says, we eat whatever we like.
Assembly
Our father, we begin, who art. In Heaven? Our fathers never pray. They go out, come home, kneel only to tie their shoes and then go out again. The mortar board the headmaster wears is like a square halo and his black cape flows judiciously behind him as he stands through assembly and watches the Jewish boys file into the hall when their own prayers are over. Who would true valour see, the school hymn is not for them and not for those of us who move our lips but never sing, will be a pilgrim. Divided we stand, day after day, and divided we walk back to class to learn how Dr. Livingstone was lost in Africa preaching to the natives.
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