Who were you?
Were you the house proud
Aspirational housewife?
The manners obsessed social climber?
Soup supped from the side of the spoon
Kind of a girl?
Waterford crystal, Belleek china from Fermanagh
Sherry glasses, and Swarovski ornaments
In a glass cabinets displayed
Fox stole and dress gloves,
A semi in Finchley,
Come on Peggy, you’ve made the grade.
Appearances were everything
To this Tipperary girl made good
There was a memory of beatings, and brutality
From a father who toiled on the land
And a job at thirteen years of age
From an employer, who’d use the back of his hand.
Blacking the fire places, sweeping the ash
Pouring the Guinness, and saving your cash
The chance to escape, from this life of a slave
To her arrival in Euston, and to embrace the new wave.
“You’re not trotting the bogs now Nurse Ryan”
Pronounced the matron with haughty disdain
“No patient here will sleep in that bed
Strip it off, and start all over again.”
One day a week she had to herself
A concept she found hard to digest
24 hours off with pay
So this is a day of rest.
You walked barefoot to school
So I was told
Nine brothers and sisters
Sharing one bed
Limited food, except butter, potatoes, soda bread.
Mass every Sunday
The rosary at night,
Pray the Virgin Mary will somehow
See you right.
You laid roots, in the land of the enemy
Protestant England wasn’t so bad
Presbyterians, Methodists, Salvationists
It didn’t seem to matter
Everybody on the tube platforms
Together.
Too busy for bigotry
Just make a few bob and move on
Sharing tea in air raid shelters
Somehow everyone got along
All this is hearsay, and cobbled together
Because you see, I never knew you.
Had you lived on, we could have talked
Shared nice meals, exotic holidays
I would have taken you for drives out perhaps
I’d have been the son you wanted
Not that sixteen year old
With eyes aglow, with his own ignorance.
Old heads on young shoulders
I never knew what it meant
I know now.
This composition is published as part of our Refugee: Poems of Courage collection, presented in collaboration with Poems Not Bombs, part of the Forest Poets collective.
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