Do Wah Diddy Diddy, Baby Love, Oh Pretty Woman
were in the Top Ten that month, October, and the Beatles
were everywhere else. I can give you the B-side
of the Supremes one. Hang on. Come See About Me?
I lived in a kind of fizzing hope. Gargling
with Vimto. The clever smell of my satchel. Convent
girls.
I pulled my hair forward with a steel comb that I blew
like Mick, my lips numb as a two-hour snog.

No snags. The Nile rises in April. Blue and white.
The humming-bird’s song is made by its wings, which
beat
so fast that they blur in flight. I knew the capitals,
the Kings and Queens, the dates. In class, the white
sleeve
of my shirt saluted again and again. Sir! … Correct.
Later, I whooped at the side of my bike, a cowboy,
mounted it running in one jump. I sped down Dyke
Hill,
no hands, famous, learning, dominus domine dominum.

Dave Dee Dozy … try me. Come on. My mother kept
my mascot Gonk
on the TV set for a year. And the photograph. I look
so brainy you’d think I’d just had a bath. The blazer.
The badge. The tie, the first chord of A Hard Day’s
Night
loud in my head. I ran to the Spinney in my prize shoes,
up Churchill Way, up Nelson Drive, over pink pavements
that girls chalked on, in a blue evening; and I stamped
the pawprints of badgers and skunks in the mud. My
country.
I want it back. The captain. The one with all the
answers. Bzz.
My name was in red on Lucille Green’s jotter. I smiled
as wide as a child who went missing on the way home
from school. The keeny. I say to my stale wife
Six hits by Dusty Springfield. I say to my boss A pint!
How can we know the dancer from the dance? Nobody.
My thick kids wince. Name the prime Minister of Rhodesia.
My country. How many florins in a pound?