Watch Where You Tread
Open House – Charlie Bray’s first novel. Click on image for more info…
My last post called for a rebellion against the snobbery of certain readers, a snobbery which derides any form of humour. ‘They’ believe it to be substandard and bereft of any quality and positively discourage anyone from enjoying such frivolity.
I first suffered at the hands of such a person sixty years ago, when my headmaster refused to award me a book of my choice for a prize I had won. I wanted an anthology of humorous poetry. He, in the manner of Captain Mainwaring, of Dad’s Army fame, responded with the admonishment, “Stupid Boy!”
Was I tainted for life, did he destroy my blossoming self-confidence, did I relegate the humour genre to the bottom echelons of my reading wish list?
No. I loved it then and I still love it now, and I hope the following poem will go some way to explain why.
Showhome by Liz Atkin
She went on a Tuesday afternoon
to the new estate, built on the
once glorious cowslip meadows
and entered the pristine sanctity
of one of many family showhomes
each with a pretentious name,
she put on the blue plastic overshoes
like elongated shower caps, provided
to prevent her dirt walking in.
A single, middle aged nullipara
who had never gone upstairs to bed
in a life of rented rooms and flats
now shuffles around bedrooms one to four
all double glazed and white painted wood,
looks down upon the garden turf square
with standard cherry tree, whose
fallen blossom the new occupants
will be sure to call pink snow,
then, thumbs hooking down under
skirt she squats in the middle
of fitted oatmeal carpet and evacuates
her bowels of three substantial meals
in a warm stinking pile, tapered off
with a triumphant trumpeting note.
This wonderful poem would make a fitting epitaph to my old headmaster, who deprived me of a book full of such wonders.
