Suez

The re-play always starts the same way
With me turning into the room from the window –
It was a French window. Had I been in the garden?
I know it was summer. A warm evening. Late summer 1956.
I’d just reached 7.

What made me turn was so shocking that it still startles me now.
My dad was sitting in his chair reading the paper.
The Daily Express.
But it wasn’t looking like it usually did.
It’s front page was filled with one huge bold and meaningless word:
SUEZ.
And my dad was thumping the arm of the Parker Knoll Cintique chair
With his clenched fist
And crying, crying real tears
And saying over and over with fearful despair
‘No, no, no!’

And thinking about it now
It’s disconcerting to realise the war that was never mentioned
Was only 10 years gone.
And if he had memories of what he’d had to do in Dresden
Of what he’d learned about Belsen
He never said.
But that can’t have stopped the lurking fear
That it all would start again.

And I think I only saw the tears repeated once
When his father was first diagnosed with cancer.
Never at his own health travails
Which clouded his last decade,
Sitting holding the back of his neck
And ‘feeling woozy’
In the re-covered Parker Knoll chair.

30 October 2013