My Mother and the Chair-O-Plane

David Gill

Nine-tenths rational, my mother. She kept her feet on the ground
and trod the worn grass circle of her days
without complaint. With her, precision and love
were one. Like the clothes she spilled from her sewing machine.
She loved us severally with a warm intelligence.
She believed in calculating little pleasures.
Give her a map, no matter how threadbare or smudged,
and she would predict from thumbprint contours and symbols
the happy valleys, the quiet spinneys, and all
the finest views to drink with thermos tea.
She was Thomas Cook’s best apprentice at planning visits.
She revelled in time-tables. She could co-ordinate
arrivals and departures in the smallest print.
Her family was her private Welfare State.
We were her planned economy.

But on Bank Holidays when the fair came round,
she almost ran, her handbag stuffed with shillings,
to be with the swinging boats and dodg’em cars
and ride the whiff of sausages at dusk.
And always we would trail her to the heart
of all the fun and find the chair-o-plane.
And there with beating hearts we watched her mount
and hang aloft in chains, intent, remote,
before the music reared and round she swept
and passing us, passing us by till we stood like orphans.
At last the organ died, and she drifted round
to inherit us once again, her smile still warm
from a wild and private journey.

The Vanishing Trick

(Written when the diagnosis of dementia was confirmed.)

David Gill

Don’t take me for permanent.
Don’t think I’m a monument
accreting grey lichen.
Don’t think I’m a totem
with creosoted root.

Don’t think I’m a stayer.
I’m more of a Friday afternoon
a smile on a moped
at knocking-off time.
I’m the last day of September.
I’m the instinct that ranges
swallows on phone wires.
I’m the mellow sunset
for every muster,
an evasive mister,
an easy-going fellow
fleeing over stubble fields
in my own evening light
to the western ferries.

When I greet you these days,
my faithful, my on-going friends,
my eyes are saying goodbye.
When you take me for the man
I was yesterday,
you’re mistaken.
I’m half that man,
and running out fast.

You’ve little idea
how much of me’s gone
with the autumn flights
to other lands.
My thoughts are already abroad
In foreign railway compartments:
already they wear the rags
of foreign words.

I’m the ring-stain
where the glass was,
a cat-smile, no more
above the garden wall,
a fading shape in an archway,
a raised arm on a distant quayside

Back to July 2021 Newsletter Main Page

Forty-Three Newsletter • Number 507 • July 2021
Oxford Friends Meeting
43 St Giles, Oxford OX1 3LW

newsletter@oxfordquakers.org