My mother was a hanky queen
when hanky meant a thing of cloth,
not paper tissues bought in packs
from late-night garages and shops,
but things for waving out of trains
and mopping the corners of your grief:
when hankies were material
she’d have one, always, up her sleeve.

Tucked in the wrists of every cardi,
a mum’s embarrassment of lace
embroidered with a V for Viv,
spittled and scrubbed against my face.
And sometimes more than one fell out
as is she had a farm up there
where dried-up hankies fell in love
and mated, raising little squares.

She bought her own; I never did.
Hankies were presents from distant aunts
in boxed sets, with transparent covers
and script initials spelling ponce,
the naffest Christmas gift you’d get –
my brothers too, more often than not,
got male ones: serious, and grey,
and larger, like they had more snot.
It was hankie that closed department stores,
with headscarves, girdles, knitting wool
and trouser presses; homely props
you’d never find today in malls.
Hankies, which demanded irons,
and boiling to be purified
shuttered the doors of family stores
when those who used to buy them died.

And somehow, with the hanky’s loss,
greengrocer George with his dodgy foot
delivering veg from a Comma van
is history, and the friendly butcher
who’d slip and extra sausage in,
the fishmonger whose marble slab
of haddock smoked the colour of yolks
and parcelled rows of local crab

lay opposite the dancing school
where Mrs White, with painted talons,
taught us When You’re Smiling from a stumbling, out of tune piano:
step-together, step-together, step-together,
point! The Annual Talent Show
when every mother, fencing tears,
would whip a hanky from their sleeve
and smudge the rouge from little dears.
Nostalgia only makes me old.
The innocence I want my brood
to cling on to like ten-bob notes
was killed in TV’s lassitude.
And it was me that turned it on
to buy some time to write this poem
and eat bought biscuits I would bake
if I’d commit to being home.

There’s never a hanky up my sleeve.
I raised neglected-looking kids,
the kind whose noses strangers clean.
What awkwardness in me forbids
me to keep tissues in my bag
when handy packs are 50p?
I miss material handkerchiefs,
their soft and hidden history.

But it isn’t mine. I’ll let it go.
My mother too, eventually,
who died not leaving handkerchiefs
but tissues and uncertainty:
and she would say, should I complain
of the scratchy and disposable,
that this is your material
to do with, daughter, what you will.