Pam Ayres Doggedly Onward
A LIFE IN POEMS
Doggedly Onward
Also by Pam Ayres
I am Oliver the Otter I am Hattie the Hare
Who Are You Calling Vermin?
Pam Ayres on Animals
Up in the Attic
The Last Hedgehog With These Hands
You Made Me Late Again The Necessary Aptitude The Works Surgically Enhanced
Pam Ayres Doggedly Onward
A LIFE IN POEMS
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Copyright © Pam Ayres 2024
All illustrations © Susan Hellard except for the following: illustrations on pages 12, 35, 81, 231, 314, 317, 388–390 © Ellie Snowdon. Illustrations on pages 398, 413, 415, 421 © Joel Stewart.
The poems on pages 198–246 are reprinted by permission of Hodder and Stoughton. Originally published in Surgically Enhanced in 2006.
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To everyone who loves writing but fears they might not have what it takes.
INTRODUCTION
I did not set out to be a poet and have always felt faintly surprised to be described as one. I grew up longing to be a performer and believing I could be one if I could find the right things to say. But I couldn’t. Other people’s work didn’t feel comfortable. It was too posh, too scholarly, or too often thrashed like ‘The Lion and Albert’. None of it felt like me at all.
I wanted to say things that were entirely my own. I loved writing but it wasn’t until I was twenty years old that I considered writing those things for myself. I did and when people laughed, I was ecstatic. Later, when I plucked up the courage to perform more serious pieces, they cried as well. It was a marvellous revelation that the pairing worked. When for the first time after a performance somebody asked if they could buy a copy of one of my poems it was unforgettable, the best thing ever. My heart nearly exploded with joy, and I began to work in earnest on pieces I could perform in an entertaining way, pieces that matched my sense of humour and the combined blessing and curse of a rural Berkshire accent. I loved writing them; the process was a delight to me. I thought anybody could do it if they felt so inclined. It was only later that I realised that perhaps this wasn’t the case, and that I had been given a kind of knack.
I stress that the driving force was always to write material I could perform, not to be considered a poet. That never entered my
head. I knew nothing about poetry and did not feel drawn to it in any way. It was not touched on at our Secondary Modern School in Faringdon, and in the enlightened view of our large working-class family, it was dismissed as something daft spouted to each other by the upper classes. I feel kinder towards it now.
Certain things people say stay with you. A much-loved actor chatting to me recently said you didn’t become a performer because you wanted to, but because you had to. This struck such a chord with me. I’d never heard it said before but that was it, in a nutshell. For so much of my early life I had a strong but shapeless conviction that I was supposed to be a performer, but no map of how to get there.
An early manifestation of this was a great craving to be a ballerina. As I had never seen a ballet and our family didn’t have a television, I don’t know where the idea came from, but I dreamed of being on a vast stage, twirling on tiptoe in my tutu. The fact that I didn’t have one was problematic, until my sister Jean made me one out of the Sunday newspapers regularly devoured by our father. These were the People and the News of the World, which our mother resignedly referred to as ‘the news of the screws’ and which I was too young to understand, but not to wear. Sadly, a newspaper tutu cannot take much twirling and its inky beauty was short-lived. In time, as I became a little girl of marked chunkiness, the dream of being a ballerina faded and died a swan-like death.
However, the dream of performing did not die and I found the idea of being on stage irresistible. The first opportunity I had to galvanise an actual audience was at the age of about six in the creosoted wooden bulk of Stanford in the Vale Village Institute. This was a substantial, if unlovely, building divided into two, one half deeply masculine and set up with billiard tables, and the other having a stage with space for school use, dances and public entertainment. Meaningful and improving activities were offered. One
night Mum attended a Women’s Institute evening where they had to knit on matchsticks.
Our primary school put on a play and I was cast as The Queen. My husband was King Marmaduke and the script instructed that I look at him disdainfully through a lorgnette. Which nobody had ever heard of. Anyway, a demand for this pair of glasses on a stick was sent to the woodwork class and the boys fashioned one from balsa wood. It was owl-like and painted bright yellow. On the given cue I had to strut majestically round the stage, peering through my lorgnette and calling ‘Marmaduke? Marmaduke!’ in a regal voice. People laughed. A flame was lit.
I acted in various amateur groups through my teens and early twenties, choosing drama as one of my subjects at the Oxford College of Further Education, a grandly named collection of tarred shacks up the Cowley Road where I was sent, aged fifteen, on Day Release from the Civil Service. I played Mrs Dudgeon in George Bernard Shaw’s The Devil’s Disciple and received the Best Civil Service Student award. Acting was OK. It was all right, it got me on to a stage, but I was acutely aware that I was saying somebody else’s words, reflecting somebody else’s situation or sense of humour, and nothing about it felt like me. I couldn’t shine. My feelings were so muddled. I wanted to be on stage saying something, but I couldn’t tap into what it was.
Salvation came in Singapore in 1966. I voluntarily joined the WRAF in 1965 as a way of seeing the world free of charge, having seen my brothers dispatched to exotic locations during their compulsory National Service. Though I was a hapless, useless Plotter of Aerial Photography, my marvellous good fortune was to be posted to RAF Seletar, which had a theatre club with its own fully equipped and, to me, magical theatre. There I made friends with a man who had an irritating mannerism, in that his reply to everything you said began with, ‘This is the thing, you see …’
Every Friday there was a club night, where members would get up on the stage and perform any entertaining piece of their choice.
I was desperate to contribute something so I wrote a ‘poem’ called ‘Like You Would’, inspired by my friend’s constantly repeated phrase, in which the narrator of the tale keeps repeating herself. Friday night came, I mounted the stage, delivered the deathless piece, and people laughed! I had written a daft poem and they laughed! It was sensational! I had found a way in!
I loved everything about writing: certainly the accoutrements – the pens, ink and nice paper – but most of all the sheer inventiveness, the soaring power to create people, stories and situations. I don’t know where this fascination came from, but perhaps it was inherited from my mother Phyllis, who also loved writing and was felt to have great potential, but there were five children in her family and their father had been killed on the railway. There was no chance of further education and she went into domestic service at the age of fourteen.
My first thin book was published in 1976 and remained in the Sunday Times bestseller list for forty-six weeks. People were calling me Pam Ayres the poet. It was an extraordinary time. I was twentynine years old and I bought a house! It cost £11,500. I bought the car of my utterly impossible dreams, an MGB GT, the wine-red colour of claret. It seemed so low-slung, I felt as if I was lying flat on my back on the road. I helped Mum and Dad to buy their council house, and Dad said the best day of his life was when the rent collector walked straight past the gate. I was able to help others. It was a staggering, life-changing time.
It was also a time when I stopped treating my poems as a joke. It was confusing to be called a poet. I knew so little about poetry but from the sales of my books I could see that many people liked my daft take on it. Of course, I knew it wasn’t poetry as most people thought of poetry. Mine had to be performed, and though it may have looked simple enough, it needed the right vocabulary, timing and subject. You had to find irresistible the endless tinkering with words. Which I did.
I resolved to write as well as I possibly could about everyday topics that ordinary people like me could recognise and identify with. I also felt determined to learn everything I was going to say to an audience. I didn’t want to put on a pair of glasses, stand at some lectern, take up a book and read to them because that meant losing the all-important connection, the eye-to-eye contact, the feeling of talking to people, and not reading at them. I always feel huge affection for my audience – the people who buy a ticket, arrange things at home, brave the forbidding concrete car park and trust me to make that effort worthwhile. I once worked with a comic who was tremendously aggressive towards the audience, and who, before I went on, would hiss at me to ‘Make ’em ’ave it!’.
When I look over the poems in this book, I can trace the course of my life. The various stages are all here: the young woman juggling various boyfriends, the wife adrift amid the joy and terror of new motherhood, and the astounded, adoring granny. Here is the cavalcade of much-loved, ill-bred dogs, the fascination with wildlife, the travel, mistakes, regrets, the heartbreaking leaving of the family home and the sober business of ageing. Here too are lovely new projects, the writing of lyrics for musical theatre and learning, at the dewy age of seventy-five, to play the piano.
Very few of these poems were meant to be read thoughtfully and alone in a leafy glade. They look a little sad and lifeless on the page to me, because they were written to be performed, inhabited, acted out with gusto and a sense of fun. True, they are tailored to me – to my voice, timing and sense of mischief – but you can perform them as well! But with one proviso: use your own natural voice. I have heard my poems read out in a variety of gurning, toe-curling, allegedly ‘Pam Ayres’ voices, but to get it spot on you needed to spend the first eighteen years of your life in one of the self-contained, beautiful and little-known villages of the Vale of the White Horse, originally in Berkshire, now in Oxfordshire. I love the work of Gloucestershire author Winifred Foley, who
wrote A Child in the Forest . She said such vocal imitations are ‘maddening to the native-born’ and that sums it up.
I never wanted to change my accent. How would I have seemed, what scorn would have been heaped upon me by my dearly loved brothers and sister, my parents, my granny and grampy if I turned up at home talking in some strangulated Received Pronunciation? I would have been laughed out of the house.
This is certainly my biggest book. It covers almost sixty years of my work from the jokey start to the present day. While a few poems like ‘Tippy Tappy Feet’ or ‘Pollen on the Wind’ tend to make people cry, I hope the majority of these poems do exactly the opposite and raise a smile. Writing them has given me some of my happiest times. Thank you so much as always, for liking them and for buying my books.
Once, when much younger, I told Mum that I wanted to be a writer and on stage. In our modest council house home, she listened thoughtfully to the grand aspirations of her youngest daughter, then said kindly: ‘You lives in a world of dreams, my gal.’
Recently, I read in The Bookseller magazine that after Ted Hughes I am the bestselling UK poet since records began. Long live people’s dreams.
Pam Ayres 2024
The Dolly on the Dustcart
I’m the dolly on the dustcart, I can see you’re not impressed, I’m fixed above the driver’s cab, With wire across me chest, The dustman see, he noticed me, Going in the grinder, And he fixed me on the lorry, I dunno if that was kinder.
This used to be a lovely dress, In pink and pretty shades, But it’s torn now, being on the cart, And black as the ace of spades, There’s dirt all round me face, And all across me rosy cheeks, I’ve had me head thrown back, But we ain’t had no rain for weeks.
I used to be a ‘Mama’ doll, Tipped forward, I’d say, ‘Mum’ But the rain got in me squeaker, And now I been struck dumb, I had two lovely blue eyes, But out in the wind and weather, One’s sunk back in me head like, And one’s gone altogether.
I’m not a soft, flesh coloured dolly, Modern children like so much, I’m one of those hard old dollies, That are very cold to touch,
Modern dolly’s underwear, Leaves me a bit nonplussed, I haven’t got a bra, But then I haven’t got a bust!
But I was happy in that doll’s house, I was happy as a Queen, I never knew that Tiny Tears, Was coming on the scene, I heard of dolls with hair that grew, And I was quite enthralled, Until I realised my head Was hard and pink … and bald.
So I travel with the rubbish, Out of fashion, out of style, Out of me environment, For mile after mile, No longer prized … dustbinised! Unfeminine, Untidy, I’m the dolly on the dustcart, And there’s no collection Friday.
Pam Ayres
The Dolly on the Dustcart
In 1975 I appeared on a television talent show called Opportunity Knocks, which I won. As a result, every aspect of my life changed, and I gave up my secretarial job on Friday 13 February 1976 to
THE DECLINE OF HEDGEHOGS
In the early 1970s, when I wrote ‘In Defence of Hedgehogs’, I was living at home in Stanford in the Vale. Every morning I drove dejectedly to work in my Morris 1000, which I resented because it did not match my aspirations in life. Quite the reverse. I was young, in my twenties, but this was the matronly car of a matronly old biddy; I had purchased it from my brother Allan for fifty quid. It clearly demonstrated how hard up I was, emitting vast, noxious clouds of smoke from the exhaust, and dismally failing to present the driver as a class act. Indeed, people doubled up laughing as I passed.
My route to work took me past the wood called Hatford Warren, where each morning at that early hour a fresh crop of squashed hedgehogs would lie on the road, having been run over the night before. I don’t know why they gathered on the road in such numbers instead of staying in the safety of the wood, but they did, and once there, they were run over and left around like black litter. I found this inestimably sad, which doesn’t come across in the poem. I don’t perform it much now, and indeed I feel a bit guilty about it. I’m delighted that people like it, but the jolly, jokey tone grates on me these days.
When I wrote it, the idea that hedgehogs would one day disappear was unthinkable, preposterous. They were everywhere. Today, British hedgehog numbers are so depleted that they are officially listed by the Mammal Society as vulnerable to extinction. In the 1950s the population was estimated to be fifty million, now the figure is one million if we’re lucky. How can this have happened?
Most of all, because of the disastrous loss of hedgerows and the rich habitat they provided. The big, impoverished fields that are sprayed out and insect-poor. Careless tossing of slug pellets, fenced-in gardens with no access for foraging hedgehogs, and the busy roads dividing up the countryside so that individuals that do survive cannot mix and cannot breed. The genetic pool of the hedgehog spins ever smaller.
I like hedgehogs. I like them a lot and am patron of our local wildlife hospital, where hundreds of late-born, skinny ones are nursed through the winters and fattened up ready for release in the spring. There has been a gratifying move to take in hedgehogs and repopulate big estates such as Woburn Abbey, Althorp House and Chatsworth, as well as outstanding efforts by farmers, gardeners and people with no land at all. The fight is on to preserve this, our only spiny mammal, and I hope we win.
Because I wrote these poems to perform myself, with my own timing and accent, this appears in a kind of half-baked dialect. It felt important to me to write it as I would have said it, with a sense of fun and plenty of bouncin’ and whistlin’ and hoverin’. It looks cumbersome to me now, but then, if I wrote the words correctly, they looked formal and wrong. They just didn’t sound like me.
In Defence of Hedgehogs
I am very fond of hedgehogs, Which makes me want to say, That I am struck with wonder, How there’s any left today, For each morning as I travel, And no short distance that, All I see are hedgehogs, Squashed. And dead. And flat.
Now, hedgehogs are not clever, No, hedgehogs are quite dim, And when he sees your headlamps, Well, it don’t occur to him, That the very wisest thing to do,
Is up and run away, No! he curls up in a stupid ball, And no doubt starts to pray.
Well, motor cars do travel, At a most alarming rate, And by the time you sees him, It is very much too late, And thus he gets a-squasho’d, Unrecorded but for me, With me pen and paper, Sittin’ in a tree.
It is statistically proven, In chapter and in verse, That in a car-and-hedgehog fight, The hedgehog comes off worse. When whistlin’ down your prop shaft, And bouncin’ off your diff, His coat of nice brown prickles, Is not effect-iff.
A hedgehog cannot make you laugh, Whistle, dance or sing, And he ain’t much to look at, And he don’t make anything, And in amongst his prickles, There’s fleas and bugs and that, But there ain’t no need to leave him, Squashed. And dead. And flat.
PAM AYRES
Oh, spare a thought for hedgehogs,
Spare a thought for me,
Spare a thought for hedgehogs, As you drink your cup of tea,
Spare a thought for hedgehogs, Hoverin’ on the brinkt,
Spare a thought for hedgehogs, Lest they become extinct.
THOUGHTS OF A LATE-NIGHT KNITTER
I knitted furiously all through my teens. Mum taught me how to do it when I was very small, and I can still remember the chant of ‘Needle in, wool round, slip it off’ repeated interminably as she was demonstrating. It was a good skill to have though, and as I got older it was a welcome means of providing myself with cheap new clothes. All the girls I knew did it, and we carried our knitting paraphernalia in conker-brown gondola baskets from Wantage market.
We bought our wool from the wool shop in Wantage, but a cheaper system was to send to the woollen mills for their samples. These came on long cards sprouting multi-coloured strands of wool, ranging from the dirt cheap and string-like, to more costly and luxuriant yarns, all priced at so much an ounce. Armed with whatever wool I could afford at the time, I produced innumerable jerseys and cardigans, some a lot more successful than others. Always mad keen to get my hands on the finished item, I tended to sacrifice care for speed so that my garments suffered from the ‘up at the back, down at the front’ syndrome. I would constantly have to correct the look by applying a good yank down at the rear.
Fashions came and went. Wool with coloured flecks, mohair, chunky knits, designs with dropped shoulders, raglan sleeves, shawl collars, I clicketty-clacked my way through them all and sported the resulting modes round Stanford-in-the-Vale.
The idea for this poem came to me years later in the more sumptuous setting of the London Palladium on the day I was appearing in The Silver Jubilee Royal Variety Show. It was a whole day of hanging about, while the vast cast rehearsed and practised their acts with the musicians. I had twelve minutes on my own in the show, with no music, so I was soon processed and left to my own devices for the day. I found myself in a deserted red-plush bar with the grilles down. I had this idea of telling a story interspersed with an unlikely commentary on something mundane and unrelated. At first, I was going to use a kind of dancing-
round-the-campfire chant and tell my story against that, but then I thought of a person relating a tale while knitting and working slowly or fast, as tragedy or indignation dictated. I liked this idea for two reasons: firstly, it used my vast and detailed knowledge of knitting and, secondly, I found it satisfyingly daft. *
I had a lovely boyfriend, Knit one, purl one.
Had him for a long time, Cast on for the back. Had him all the summer, Loved him, cuddled him, Push it up the knitting pin And gather up the slack.
Well he knew how much I liked him, Knit one, purl one.
I made him seven jerseys, Never did him any wrong, And he told me that he loved me, Knit one, purl one.
Told me that he loved me But he didn’t stop for long.
Well he never said he’d left me, Knit one, purl one. He never even told me
No, I found out on me own. I was going up the chip shop, Knit one, purl one.
And he walked out the pictures With that horrid Mar y Stone.
Well I didn’t know what hit me, Knit one, slip one.
After I’d looked after him
It wasn’t very nice, And they went off down the High Street, Laughin’, gigglin’, And left me on the corner
With me chips as cold as ice.
Well it isn’t that I miss him, Knit one, drop one.
I never even think of him
Good riddance … ta ta!
I’m very independent!
Snap one, tie one.
I’ve never been so cheerful, Ha ha … ha!
And I hear they’re getting married, Knit one, drop nine.
I wish them every happiness, It’s lovely staying in!
Well I don’t need romancing, Cuddlin’, dancin’.
Bundle up the knitting bag
And fling it in the bin.
Oh, I Wish I’d Looked After Me Teeth
Oh, I wish I’d looked after me teeth, And spotted the perils beneath All the toffees I chewed, And the sweet sticky food.
Oh, I wish I’d looked after me teeth.
I wish I’d been that much more willin’ When I had more tooth there than fillin’
To give up gobstoppers, From respect to me choppers, And to buy something else with me shillin’.
When I think of the lollies I licked And the liquorice allsorts I picked, Sherbet dabs, big and little, All that hard peanut brittle, My conscience gets horribly pricked.
My mother, she told me no end, ‘If you got a tooth, you got a friend.’ I was young then, and careless, My toothbrush was hairless, I never had much time to spend.
Oh I showed them the toothpaste all right, I flashed it about late at night, But up-and-down brushin’
And pokin’ and fussin’
Didn’t seem worth the time – I could bite!
If I’d known I was paving the way To cavities, caps and decay, The murder of fillin’s, Injections and drillin’s, I’d have thrown all me sherbet away.
So I lie in the old dentist’s chair, And I gaze up his nose in despair, And his drill it do whine In these molars of mine.
‘Two amalgam,’ he’ll say, ‘for in there.’
How I laughed at my mother’s false teeth, As they foamed in the waters beneath. But now comes the reckonin’ It’s me they are beckonin’ Oh, I wish I’d looked after me teeth.
I Am a Drystone Waller
I am a Drystone Waller. All day I Drystone Wall. Of all appalling callings, Drystone Walling’s Worst of all.
HENS AT HOME
I have mixed feelings about this poem ‘The Battery Hen’ now, a combination of gratitude for the process it set in motion and sheepishness about the flippant, mickey-taking tone.
When I wrote it in the early seventies, I knew that battery farms existed and I had glimpsed the louvred ventilators of those long sheds hidden behind tall hedges. I had heard talk about laying hens crammed into small cages, but I didn’t know any details about the boiling hot, stacked-high conditions inside those windowless buildings.
I was born in 1947, two years after the end of WWII. At that frugal time, every family I knew kept laying hens in a run at the bottom of the garden. This practice was part of the desperate need for food self-sufficiency during and immediately after the war, and it was applauded as a way of avoiding waste.
We kept chickens in the garden of our council house in Stanford in the Vale for as long as I can remember and, looking back, they were the ultimate eco-friendly waste disposal system. Any food scraps were flung over the wire netting to the birds, and at bedtime Mum would wedge a great blackened saucepan brimming with the day’s vegetable peelings and small ‘pig taters’ into the dying embers of the fire, to boil up and soften overnight. In the morning, the resulting mush was strained, mashed with layers’ meal from the village grain merchants, enriched with a shake of fiery pepper which was supposed to crank up the workings of the laying hen, bludgeoned with a thick stick and fed hot, steaming and fragrant to the waiting hens. One of my four brothers was sent off to the chicken run to give them their breakfast. I can see him now, staggering up the frost-white grass path, wreathed in clouds of steam from the black saucepan. My mother would watch him go with satisfaction. ‘That’ll warm ’em,’ she’d say.
Over time their enclosure would become lifeless, sour, denuded of grass, so Dad would fork it over to expose fresh earth. The
ecstatic birds would circle the run at a frantic pace, earthworms dangling from their beaks. Dad would also throw over any spent plants from the allotment and these were welcomed with delight, scratched over, scrutinised for insects and, if they were brassicas, devoured. It was a fair exchange. We regarded them fondly, they were part of the family and certainly the eggs formed an essential part of our daily fare. Our mother used to say, ‘You got an egg, you got a meal!’
So that was my experience of laying hens. Big warm eggs and happy birds fluffing up their feathers in dusty dips. I had no real notion of battery hens and their short wretched lives. This changed later when I became involved with the good work of the British Hen Welfare Trust.
I can’t remember what prompted me to write ‘The Battery Hen’. I think it just came to me and I wrote it down as a bit of fun because I liked poultry and loved writing. Personally, it is a hugely significant piece because it was the first thing I ever read on the radio. Stiff with fear, sometime in 1972 or 3, I went into the recently established BBC Radio Oxford and recited this poem for their poetry spot. When I finished reading it, the producer, Andy Wright, said something to me that I never forgot, words which really did change my life completely.
He said: ‘If you’ve got any more like that, we’ll have them.’
BBC Radio Oxford offered me a contract to come up with more humorous poems. I told Andy I was terrified of deadlines because I had no idea if I could write to order. He suggested a period of six months, which I felt comforted by, and I went away incredulous, speechless with joy that something I had written was considered valuable by the BBC! And they wanted more! It was one of the happiest days of my life.
The poem was aired, and immediately noticed and featured on the weekly farming programme. Next, an excited voice from BBC Radio Oxford rang to say it had been chosen for BBC Radio 4’s
Pick of the Week! Pick of the Week! A roundup of the best parts of the whole week’s programmes! Incredibly, it was then picked up by the Canadian Broadcasting Company and aired across Canada! Letters poured through the door of my home in High Street, Witney, asking for copies. It was staggering. So, this simple poem was the beginning, the key that enabled me to spend the next fifty years of my life writing for my living, doing the thing I love best.
The Battery Hen
Oh, I am a battery hen, On me back there’s not a germ, I never scratched a farmyard, And I never pecked a worm. I never had the sunshine, To warm me feathers through. Eggs I lay. Every day. For the likes of you.
Now. When you has them scrambled, And piled up on your plate, It’s me what you should thank for that, I never lays them late, I always lays them reg’lar, I always lays them right, I never lays them brown, I always lays them white.
But it’s no life for a battery hen, In me box I’m sat, A funnel stuck out from the side, Me pellets comes down that,
I gets a squirt of water, Every half a day, Watchin’ with me beady eye, Me eggs roll away.
I lays them in a funnel, Strategically placed, So that I don’t kick ’em, And let them go to waste. They rolls off down the tubing, And up the gangway quick, Sometimes I gets to thinkin’, ‘That could have been a chick!’
I might have been a farmyard hen, Scratchin’ in the sun, There might have been a crowd of chicks, After me to run, There might have been a cockerel fine, To pay us his respects, Instead of sittin’ here, Till someone comes and wrings our necks.
I see the Time and Motion clock, Is sayin’ nearly noon. I ’spect me squirt of water, Will come flyin’ at me soon, And then me spray of pellets, Will nearly break me leg, And I’ll bite the wire nettin’, And lay one more bloody egg.
WASPISHNESS
I wrote this at a time, decades ago, when I was under pressure to ‘Get the next book out for Christmas’ and I was beginning to realise that writing, which had always been so joyful to me, could under the wrong circumstances be turned into a deadline-driven chore. That was before I learned to resist bullying, before I had the lovely supportive, encouraging gang around me that I have now.
I am also embarrassed by the lack of knowledge shown here. Throughout the piece I refer to wasps as ‘him’ but of course worker wasps are all females. I also realise now, which I didn’t before, that in many ways wasps are a tremendous force for good. They collect countless caterpillars to feed the larvae in their nests and these larvae, by way of a thank you, exude small, sugar-rich droplets of liquid, which feed the wasps. This exchange works a treat until the end of summer, when the number of larvae decreases and the wasps, no longer able to enjoy this sweet liquid, start to pester picnickers. For most of the year they do really good work, so I was wrong to write about them so unkindly. I should also compliment them on their nests, which are curvaceous and exquisitely made.
The blue bag mentioned at the end was a strange, universally employed aid used by our mothers on washing day. It was a round block of synthetic French Ultramarine tied tightly in muslin, the idea being that it imparted a blue tint, which by counteracting yellowing made the whites look brighter. Curiously, it was also the first thing reached for, wetted and slapped on in the event of a wasp or bee sting; the alkalinity was believed to ease the pain.
The Wasp He Is a Nasty One
The wasp he is a nasty one, he scavenges and thrives, Unlike the honest honey bee, he doesn’t care for hives, He builds his waxy nest then brings his mates from near and far, To sneak into your house when you have left the door ajar.
Then sniffing round for jam he goes in every pot and packet, Buzzing round the kitchen in his black and yellow jacket, If with a rolled-up paper, he should spot you creeping near, He’ll do a backward somersault and sting you on the ear!
You never know with wasps, you can’t relax, not for a minute, Whatever you pick up – look out! A wasp might still be in it!
You never even know if there’s a wasp against your chest, For wasps are very fond of getting folded in your vest.
He always comes in summer, in the wintertime he’s gone, When you never go on picnics and you’ve put a jersey on, What other single comment causes panic and despair, Like someone saying, ‘Keep still, there’s a wasp caught in your hair!’
But in a speeding car he finds his favourite abode, He likes poor Dad to swat like mad, and veer across the road, He likes to watch Dad’s face as all the kids begin to shout: ‘Dad! I don’t like wasps! Oh where’s he gone Dad? Get him out!’
I’d like to make a reference to all the men who say, ‘Don’t antagonise it and the wasp will go away,’ I’ve done a little survey, to see if it will or won’t, And they sting you if you hit them, and they sting you if you don’t.
As we step into the sunshine through the summers and the springs, Carrying our cardigans and nursing all our stings, I often wonder, reaching for the blue bag just once more, If all things have a purpose… what on Earth can wasps be for?
The Flit Gun
My mother had a Flit Gun, It was not devoid of charm, A bit of Flit, Shot out of it, The rest shot up her arm.
How I Loved You, Ethel Preedy, with Your Neck So Long and Slender
How I loved you, Ethel Preedy, With your neck so long and slender. At the Tennis Dance What magic charm did you engender! Our eyes met in the crowd, Your fingers tightened on the racquet, But when I tore my gaze away Some swine had pinched me jacket.
LITTLE NIGEL GNASHER
I know all about biting your nails. I bit mine from the age of six and have found it almost impossible to control. Over the years I have coated them with every horrible product on the market and enviously watched women in the check-out queue as they probed their purses with exquisite pink, almond-shaped nails.
I would have liked healthy, wholesome-looking ones. I never craved long blood-red talons, a French manicure where they laboriously whiten the underside of the tip, or a ‘full set’ of those thick acrylic jobs that glitter on top while your natural nails gasp below. Just ordinary nice nails.
I don’t know why I bite them – it would be handy to have some gut-wrenching trauma in my infancy to blame, but I can’t think of one. Bitten nails look so ghastly. I once sat opposite a crackinglooking young woman on a train during a long journey, and she chewed her fingernails throughout. It was awful to see: the nibbling, the angling of the head, the constant working at it hour after hour. I’d like to say, ‘I never did it again after that,’ but I did.
I had a shock, recently, on finding a friendly website called How Can I Stop Biting My Nails? There was a photograph intended to galvanise and mortify. The caption read ‘Fingernails of an Extreme Nail Biter’, but they were better than mine! I was bolstered by reading the supportive comments and tips of so many other nibblers, though, and have finally managed to grow a decent set. I don’t know how long I’ll be able to keep hem, but they feel lovely. I gesture languidly with my hands all the time and look affected. This website might even have helped poor, beleaguered Nigel Gnasher but, alas, the internet was a bit before his time.
Little Nigel Gnasher was his name, He bit his nails.
When other boys were having fights Or finding slugs and snails, You always knew that Nigel Would be at his normal station, By the rails he bit his nails
Eyes shut for concentration.
His mother tried to stop him
But young Nigel’s ears were shut. She wrapped his hands in woolly gloves, But Nigel Gnasher cut Straight through the flimsy fabric
With his sharp and practised teeth
And bit the helpless fingernails
That sheltered underneath.
Mrs Gnasher took him
To the Doctor one fine day.
The Doctor looked at Nigel’s nails
And quickly looked away, Said, ‘Calcium deficiency
Has laid these nails to waste.’
And gave the lad a bag of chalk
But he didn’t like the taste.
Oh he bit them on the landing
And he bit them on the stair.
Nigel Gnasher bit his nails
Till there was nothing there.
Nigel Gnasher bit them
Till he couldn’t stand the pain
Then he’d summon up his courage And bite them all again.
When other people rested Hands outstretched on the settee, Nigel sat upon his hands So people wouldn’t see. He plastered them with Dettol, Savlon, Germolene and more, He’d have it done by half past one And bite it off by four.
One day a local millionaire Was driving round about. He spotted Nigel Gnasher And impulsively leaned out
Crying, ‘Here’s a present, sonny, From eccentric Jeffrey Krupp,’ And a tenner hit the ground, But Nigel couldn’t pick it up!
And then the local bully, Carver Clay, he came along And though his head was short, His fingernails were very long. He pushed aside poor Nigel Who lay clawing at the ground And ran off with the tenner
Shouting, ‘Look what I have found!’
So the moral of this story, Little Gnashers far and wide, Is, don’t bite them up the middle
And don’t bite them down the side, Don’t bite them front or sideways, Spare your poor nails from the habit, Then if someone throws a tenner They will be on hand to grab it!
Oh No, I Got a Cold
I am sitting on the sofa
By the fire and staying in, Me head is free of comfort
And me nose is free of skin. Me friends have run for cover, They have left me pale and sick With me pockets full of tissues
And me nostrils full of Vick.
That bloke in the telly adverts, He’s supposed to have a cold. He has a swig of whatnot
And he drops off, good as gold, His face like snowing harvest Slips into sweet repose.
Well, I bet this tortured breathing Never whistled down his nose.
I burnt me bit of dinner
’Cause I’ve lost me sense of smell, But then, I couldn’t taste it, So that worked out very well.
I’d buy some, down the café
But I know that at the till
A voice from work will softly say, ‘I thought that you were ill.’
So I’m wrapped up in a blanket With me feet upon a stool, I’ve watched the telly programmes And the kids come home from school. But what I haven’t watched for Is any sympathy,
’Cause all you ever get is: ‘Oh no, keep away from me!’
Medicinal discovery, It moves in mighty leaps, It leapt straight past the common cold And gave it us for keeps.
I’m not a fussy woman, There’s no malice in me eye, But I wish that they could cure The common cold. That’s all. Goodbye.
Pam Ayres
Oh No, I Got a Cold
I am sitting on the sofa By the fire and staying in, Me head is free of comfort And me nose is free of skin.
I’M A STARLING … ME DARLING
Our mother was a very kind person who always encouraged us to respect and care for animals. We especially enjoyed feeding wild birds, and from her commentary I effortlessly learned all their names. My Uncle Sam worked on the railways and made us a bird table out of railway sleepers. It was sturdy. It would not have flinched if a pterodactyl had flapped down and roosted on it.
You couldn’t buy designated bird food then, so we offered anything we thought they might like: half a coconut won at the fair, peanuts in their shells threaded on to strings, tied-up bundles of bacon rind, crumbled bread, cake or dollops of dripping. Having laid out the feast, we would rush indoors and wait behind the curtain to see what came. We hoped to see the beautiful native birds – the blackbird with his golden beak, a marvellous speckled thrush, dear little blue tits, shy wrens with their sticking-up tails, pink chaffinches or a vibrant, red-breasted robin. And see them we did, in a wondrous parade as we watched, stock-still and holding our breath, behind the curtain. It was magical but short lived.
Soon one starling would arrive and swagger round the banquet. Then another. To groans from the spectators, the sky turned black. A vast multitude of starlings would descend on the food like a plague of locusts and scoff the lot. Our bird table was picked clean. The birdwatching was declared over, it was time to find something else to do. We all trudged dejectedly off.
Nobody liked starlings then. There were so many of them, great voracious mobs, confident and greedy. None of us thought for a moment that those enormous flocks that filled the evening sky would diminish in the way they have, or that they would ever be on the red list of endangered species as they are today.
We’re starlings, the missis, meself and the boys, We don’t go round hoppin’, we walks, We don’t go in for this singing all day, And twittering about, we just squawks.
We don’t go in for these fashionable clothes, Like old Mistle Thrush and his spots, Me breast isn’t red, there’s no crest on me head, We’ve got sort of, hardwearing … dots.
We starlings, the missis, meself and the boys, We’ll eat anything that’s about, Well, anything but that old half coconut, I can’t hold it still. I falls out.
What we’d rather do is wait here for you, To put out some bread for the tits, And then when we’re certain, you’re there by the curtain, We flocks down and tears it to bits.
But we starlings, the missis, meself and the boys, We reckon that we’re being got at, You think for two minutes, them finches and linnets, You never sees them being shot at.
So the next time you comes out, to sprinkle the crumbs out, And there’s starlings there, making a noise, Don’t you be so quick, to heave half a brick, It’s the missis, meself and the boys!
THE HEGG
It wasn’t until 1967 that the contraceptive pill became readily available to all. Previously it had only been prescribed to married women. I wrote this at a time when pregnancy outside marriage was still seriously shameful, and the dubious skills of backstreet abortionists were still being sought.
It’s quite a jolly jape, but the underlying theme wasn’t so funny.
A thrush, disconsolate, with no sign of a mate, Sat morbidly perched in a tree, Saying, ‘I tell the tale, Of a flighty young male, Who have done the dirty on me.
‘I’m Hexpecting a Hegg, a Hillicit Hegg, A Hegg lyeth here, in my breast, While the trees were bright-leaved, I rashly conceived, A Hegg, Houtside of the Nest.
‘For my deed I am shunned, and left moribund, And by all I am left on a limb, I would give my right wing, To be rid of this thing, And for my great girth to be slim.’
Just then a black crow, with his black eyes a-glow, Boldly down to the thrush flew, Said, ‘The grapevine, I’ve heard, Tells of a distressed bird, Which I’ve reason to think may be you.’
He stood on one leg, said, ‘You’re having an Egg, And the other birds feel you are bad, But if with me you came, You’d be free of the shame, Of having an Egg with no dad.
‘For a nominal fee, I will take you to see, My friend, who lives up the back doubles, If you swear not to fail, To pay on the nail, He will duff up the source of your troubles!’
So the thrush, unafraid, assented and paid, And went under cover of night, To see an old Bustard, With gin and with mustard, And to be relieved of her plight.
She was made to sit in a bathful of gin, And she was obliging and meek, She was made to consume, Some soap and a prune, And her feathers fell out for a week.
Outside on the bough, she said, ‘Look at me now, Of my Hegg I am freed, but I’m Hill, And if Hagain I stray, Without naming the day, Then first I shall go on the Pill.’
Puddings – a Slice of Nostalgia
Don’t open no more tins of Irish Stew, Alice, You know it makes me pace the bedroom floor, You gave me Irish Stew a week last Sunday, And I never got to sleep till half past four, You open up another tin of spam, Alice, Or them frankfurter sausages in brine, And we’ll stab them, sitting opposite each other, And you can dream your dreams, and I’ll dream mine.
I’ll dream about me apple cheeked old mother, Her smiling face above a pot of broth, She used to cook us every sort of pudding, Proper puddings … in a pudding cloth! When we came home from school all cold and hungry, One look along the clothes line was enough, And if the pudding cloth was there a-flapping, We all knew what it meant – a suet duff!
A suet duff would set your cheeks a-glowing, Suet duff and custard, in a mound, And even if you’d run about all morning, A suet duff would stick you to the ground, Or else there’d be a lovely batter pudding, With all the edges burnt so hard and black, That if your teeth had grown a bit too long like, Well, that would be the stuff to grind them back.
She used to make us lovely apple puddings, She’d boil them all the morning on the stove, If you bit on something hard that wasn’t apple, The chances were, you’d bitten on a clove, Or else there’d be a great jam roly poly, We’d watch it going underneath the knife, And if you took a bite a bit too early, The red hot jam would scar your mouth for life.
Oh bring back the roly poly pudding, Bread and butter pudding … Spotted Dick! Great big jugs filled up with yellow custard, That’s the sort of pudding I would pick, But here’s the tube of artificial cream, Alice, I’ve cleaned the nozzle out, the hole’s so fine, And we’ll squirt it on our little pots of yoghurt, And you can dream your dreams, and I’ll dream mine.
The
Bunny Poem
I am a bunny rabbit Sitting in me hutch. I like to sit up this end, I don’t care for that end much. I’m glad tomorrow’s Thursday, ’Cause with a bit of luck, As far as I remember That’s the day they pass the buck.
LIKE YOU WOULD
This was one of my very early efforts inspired, if that is the word, by a friend I liked very much. He and I went out a few times – a trip to the cinema, a pleasant drink in the sunshine. However, he had an irritating mannerism. Regardless of what you said to him, he would begin his reply by saying, ‘This is the thing, you see …’ It never varied, and it drove me nuts. I found I was steeling myself, waiting for him to say it. He probably didn’t realise how automatic it had become. You could say, ‘My, what a pleasant spring day it is!’ or ‘I have contracted bubonic plague in both legs,’ and back would come the mindless retort, ‘This is the thing, you see …’ Now I would make some light-hearted joke about it, try to wean him away from it, but then I didn’t have the confidence. The romance stumbled and foundered.
Like it would.
Well, I got up in the morning, Like you would.
And I cooked a bit of breakfast, Like you would.
But at the door I stopped, For a message had been dropped, And I picked it up, and read it, Like you would.
‘Oh, Blimey!’ I said, Like you would.
‘Have a read of this, This is good!’
It said: ‘I live across the way,
And admire you every day, And my heart, it breaks without you.’ Well, it would.
It said: ‘I’d buy you furs and jewels, If I could.’
And I go along with that, I think he should. It said: ‘Meet me in the park, When it’s good and dark, And so me wife won’t see, I’ll wear a hood.’
Oh, I blushed with shame and horror, Like you would.
That a man would ask me that, As if I could!
So I wrote him back a letter, Saying, ‘No, I think it’s better If I meet you in the Rose and Crown, Like we did last Thursday.’
Love Is Like a Curry
Love is like a curry and I’ll explain to you, That love comes in three temperatures, cold, hot and vindaloo.
Of course it’s like a curry, it cannot be denied, For both are full of spice and both have dishes on the side.
The Curlers Poem
A set of heated rollers Is every maid’s delight. It stops you wearing curlers In the middle of the night. It keeps you looking spick and span, When all the rest are not, And though your hands are freezing cold, Your head is nice and hot.
I Am a Witney Blanket
I am a Witney Blanket, Original and Best. You’ll never get cold feet With me across your chest.