WENDY COPE
Anecdotal Evidence
To Adèle and Sophie
Acknowledgements
Areté, Dark Horse, Eborakon, Eildon Tree, Festschrift for Fleur Adcock, Footnotes, The Guardian, Jubilee Lines (Faber), Mail on Sunday, New Statesman, On Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Bloomsbury), Poetry Ireland, Say Cheese (Rockhurst Press), The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust website, The Spectator, The Telegraph, Times Literary Supplement, 101 Poems to See You Through (Ebury Press).
The Shakespeare poems (except for ‘On Sonnet 22’) were commissioned by The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. They have been published by Celandine Press in a limited edition booklet. ‘A Wreath for George Herbert’ was commissioned by Shakespeare’s Globe. ‘Lantern Carol’ was commissioned by the Ely Choral Society and has been set to music by Andrew Parnell. ‘A Vow’ has been set to music by Jools Holland.
Some of these poems were written during a month as poet in residence to the Stratford-on-Avon Poetry Festival. My thanks to Paul Edmondson of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust for arranging the residency and to Sarah Hosking of the Hosking Houses Trust for providing accommodation in the Trust’s cottage outside Stratford.
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Evidence
The Damage to the Piano
Baggage
Orb
1952
Bags
Upheavals
Absent Friends
Reunion
An Afternoon
1972
Memorial
A Vow
To My Husband
Calculations
One Day
The Tree
Here We Are
Ely
March 2013
Haiku: Willows
Naga-Uta
By the River
Shakespeare at School
The Marriage
On Sonnet 18
The Worst Row
My Father’s Shakespeare
At New Place
Young Love
If It Be Now
In Memory of Max Adrian 1903–1973
On Sonnet 22
A Wreath for George Herbert
A Poem about Jesus
Little Donkey
Lantern Carol
Christmas Cards
In Memory of Dennis O’Driscoll
In Memory of a Psychoanalyst
A Little Tribute to John Cage
A Statue
Cento
Where’s a Pied Piper When You Need One?
On a Photograph of the Archbishop of Canterbury
Men Talking
At 70
Health Advice
New Year
Tallis’s Canon
Que Sera
Every
About the Author
By the Same Author
Copyright
ANECDOTAL EVIDENCE
Evidence
‘A great deal of anecdotal evidence suggests that we respond positively to birdsong.’
– scientific researcher, Daily Telegraph, 8 February 2012
Centuries of English verse
Suggest the selfsame thing:
A negative response is rare
When birds are heard to sing.
What’s the use of poetry?
You ask. Well, here’s a start:
It’s anecdotal evidence
About the human heart.
The Damage to the Piano
You can barely see
the damage to the piano
where the new bookcase knocked it,
but all hell would break loose
if my mother were here.
I sit for several minutes,
pondering the silence
where I am cast adrift
with all this furniture
and no-one to tell me off.
Baggage
Two smart porters carry luggage on
The label from the Nacional, Madrid.
The one from the hotel in Carcassonne
Features the fortress. That’s stuck on the lid.
Some are partly missing. This one here
Some scraps remain mysterious as to where
My father travelled all those years ago.
His sturdy leather suitcase, left too long
In our damp garage, still looks glamorous
To me. It calls to mind the handsome, young
And happy man I’d like to think he was.
The child of his old age, I close my eyes
And join him under sunny foreign skies.
Orb
An illuminated orb
against a black background –
the colour of flesh, with faint
red lines that could be rivers.
Not a planet in the night sky:
my eyeball
on the optician’s screen.
It’s beautiful. Just one small feature
of a mysterious universe
I’ll never explore, packed neatly
in this soft container.
We know so little of ourselves,
and of each other – the working parts
we carry everywhere,
the darkness we scan
like astronomers, seeking
the half-forgotten stories of our lives.
1952
Sometimes, instead of a farthing,
shops give you safety pins.
Can that be right? I’m sure
it’s what the teacher said.
I know it was 1952
because the same teacher, a nun,
announced one morning
that the King had died.
We were encouraged to go
to the chapel, to pray for his soul.
A Catholic friend showed me
what you do with the holy water.
It was lovely in there –
white, gold, pastels –
as pretty as the scenery
for the last act of a pantomime.
It may have been the same day
that I upset my mother
by asking for a rosary.
Soon after that,
as we sat down in a theatre,
where I couldn’t make a fuss,
she told me it had been decided:
boarding school, next term.
Bags
After all these years
I’ve begun using it again –
the laundry bag embroidered
by Nanna: W. M. COPE LINEN
in large, neat red letters.
There’s another bag somewhere,
a smaller one, with
W. M. COPE SHOES
embroidered in purple.
I’ve been trying to find it
to carry my shoes in
while snow is on the ground.
I have other fabric bags –
dozens of cotton ones
from libraries and festivals –
but I want the one Nanna made,
the one that hung in a cold
cloakroom until it was time
to pull on wellingtons
and trudge up the path to lessons.
I see that little girl
on an icy morning, with her shoe bag,
and I think of the grandmother
who couldn’t prevent her
from being sent away
but spent hours making
things she could take with her
when she went to a place
where she didn’t know anyone
and nobody knew her name.
Upheavals
&nb
sp; When I was home in the holidays
I dreaded going back to school.
On the last day my mother and I
usually doubled our unhappiness
by having a row about the packing.
Once I had settled down at school,
I was fine. I didn’t long for home
or for my parents until,
on a couple of Saturdays every term,
they came to take me out.
Sometimes we went to Lympne Airport
on to planes. The nose opened
and they went in from the front,
like something being swallowed by a whale –
a whale that could lift itself
and its heavy load into the air
for the short journey to France.
It was interesting enough to lift
my spirits a little. And there was tea.
But I remember those Saturdays
as heavy with the knowledge
that they would soon be over,
with the thought of parting
and homesickness and tears.
As I launched myself once more
into school life with friends
and teachers, the burden grew lighter.
I was all right. I wished
my parents would leave me alone.
Absent Friends
‘The ones we remember are those linked
with things we do all the time’
– Katharine Whitehorn
Roz
My school friend Roz, who died twenty years ago,
pulled her cardigan down at the back
every time she stood up and crossed a room.
Whenever I glance in a mirror
and see that my cardigan has ridden up
I remember Roz.
She was my rival in English.
The teachers were so impressed
by her passion for Tolkien
that I didn’t read The Lord of the Rings
until I was fifty-five.
Julia
1
Julia, dear Julia,
taught me, one afternoon
in a shop in Chislehurst,
how to choose a card.
‘That one is vulgar.
This one is too sweet.’
She’s dead now
but her taste lives on.
I never buy a birthday or
a Christmas card
without asking myself
if she would approve.
2
She rang me in the holidays
and told me she was doing
a chapter of Caesar every day.
I followed her example
and passed the exam.
The last time I saw her
she was dying, bravely,
of motor neurone disease.
She couldn’t speak. She wrote notes
that made us laugh.
That’s an example
I may need to follow one day –
harder than translating Caesar,
but, if I think of Julia,
perhaps I’ll pass the test.
Reunion
Fifty years have passed since we first met,
And forty-seven since we said goodbye,
Embarking on our adult lives – and yet
You are the same, it seems to me. Am I?
Five decades of life, of ups and downs,
Of love and marriage, work and motherhood,
And here we are, back in the world of gowns
And college food and essays – and it’s good,
It’s very good, my lovely, clever friends,
To travel to the past and find you here,
To share just one more evening meal that ends
In someone’s room – before we disappear
Into a future, where I’m sad to know
It’s over. It was over long ago.
An Afternoon
The two of them are sitting on the bed
In my small student room. My second year.
My parents are both feeling very sad
After a funeral not far from here:
My mother’s closest girlhood friend, who died
Of cancer in her forties. They agree
They can’t face driving home just yet, decide
To come and spend an hour or two with me.
And I, for once, am genuinely pleased
To see them. I’m depressed. I haven’t said.
I hope the hugs and smiles I gave them eased
Their grief. Years later, when they’re dead,
I will remember and be moved to say
I never loved them more than on that day.
1972
It was the year
of the hippy librarians from Islington.
My flatmate met hers first
and I got off with his friend.
They had beards. They smoked dope.
They were very alternative.
Mine gave me a copy
of Vedanta for the Western World.
I wore long Indian dresses
and tried to like the smell of joss sticks.
In August we sat in bed
and watched the Olympics, stoned.
Late that year I went into analysis.
Freud didn’t get along
with the hippy boyfriend.
We drifted apart.
It was fun, some of the time,
while it lasted. You could say that,
I suppose, about most years,
about most lives.
Memorial
When I got home from Aunty Bob’s funeral
I began to write a poem about her
but the man I was in love with phoned
and asked me out. I abandoned the poem
and never went back to it.
Miss Tucker. That was what they called her
in the shop. She was in charge
of haberdashery. Customers noticed
that she got on well with Mr Cartwright
of men’s outfitting. A match, perhaps?
They had been married to each other
for years. He was Uncle Maurice,
a veteran of World War I, who never
mentioned it except to tell us, with a laugh,
that they all said ‘Wipers’ instead of ‘Ypres’.
They laughed a lot, those two.
He recited comic monologues
as a party turn – ‘Yon Lion’s et Albert’ –
and taught my sister to play pontoon.
Mummy wasn’t happy about that.
They loved me and were always kind.
I loved them too. So, here’s a small
memorial, three decades overdue.
The man who phoned? That didn’t work out.
I wrote a dozen poems about him.
A Vow
I cannot promise never to be angry;
I cannot promise always to be kind.
You know what you are taking on, my darling –
It’s only at the start that love is blind.
And yet I’m still the one you want to be with
And you’re the one for me – of that I’m sure.
You are my closest friend, my favourite person,
The lover and the home I’ve waited for.
I cannot promise that I will deserve you
From this day on. I hope to pass that test.
I love you and I want to make you happy.
I promise I will do my very best.
To My Husband
If we were never going to die, I might
Not hug you quite as often or as tight,
Or say goodbye to you as carefully
If I were certain you’d come back to me.
Perhaps I wouldn’t value every day,
Every act of kindness, every laugh
As much, if I knew you and I could stay
For ever a
s each other’s other half.
We may not have too many years before
One disappears to the eternal yonder
And I can’t hug or touch you any more.
Yes, of course that knowledge makes us fonder.
Would I want to change things, if I could,
And make us both immortal? Love, I would.
Calculations
I have been a non-smoker, now, for longer
than I was a smoker.
I have been a published poet almost as long
as I wasn’t.
For more than half my adult years, I have earned a living
without having a job.
I have been fatherless for nearly two-thirds of my life.
In the run-up to our wedding I reflect that I will not be
a married woman for half as long as I was single.
But, if we are both alive when I am 96, I will have had
as many years with you as without you –
nearly a third of my life so far.
With luck, the fraction will grow, like evening sunlight
spreading across a field,
so the view at the end of the day is brighter and more beautiful
than I could have foreseen in the long, dark hours of the morning.
One Day
One day, my love, the good times will be over,