Night, by Catherine Redfern

I fear the dark of the night
not as in my childhood -
then the forces were external,
witches, ghosts, for a long time
the Speckled Band - there was a high vent 
above my bed.

No: today, tonight,
it is my thoughts I fear.
As the moon rises
they multiply with the stars
they merge into a Milky Way
of echoing reproach:
you've failed, you've failed.

And can I at this late hour 
wake to a calm dawn
of quiet resolution?
Is there a healing path
leading to the sunlit uplands,
and I, inept, irresolute, rudderless,
can I find and follow it?

Day at the Seaside, by Catherine Redfern

Cold concrete piers
crowded beaches.

Spades spattering sand
frenetic manning of crumbling defences
as tide comes in.

An ice cream dropped.

Seagulls wheeling over cliffs.

Bored donkeys with heads bowed
child screaming as saddle slips sideways
shoulders getting red, and where's the suncream?

Granny's bulk folded into the deckchair
as she knits a cricker sweater for he son.

Water's edge cold.
First smattering of rain.

Flight, by Catherine Redfern

("Most of man's ills come from his inability to sit quietly in a room"  -  Blaise Pascal)

But, Blaise, your countrymen ignored you.
Look: look at the balloon.
That was the beginning:
man getting above himself

Balloon, bi-plane, channel hops,
aces high, slaughter figures rising.

And a second time: dog-fights, night raids,
the East End flattened, Dresden demolished;
but all quite neatly finished
in a distant land,
the quiet tea ceremony shattered
with some new equipment.

And still the restlessness.
How can a room 
contain this flight,
this longing for the stars,
this race to be the first?
The Moon was the glowing prize, 
now Mars is in his sights.

Blaise, you are quite alone
in that quiet room.
Man has been chasing other worlds,
but soon enough
- surely soon enough? -
he wil return.
This little Earth,
suffering and sickly,
needs his cherishing.

Time On Hold, by Catherine Redfern

The years are fleet of foot, but days are heavy-booted,
Childhood, marriage, the steel works - gone in a flash.
Three sons grown and flown. Good lads: they write,
Though less since Edith died.

Mornings dawdle: radio on, porridge, tea,
And out into the garden.
Maybe transplant the sweet-pea seedlings; fingers clumsy now;
Pick early radishes and the last few snowdrops -
She did love those each spring. Use the little fish-paste jar
Hoarded down the years.

The World at One, a look atthe paper - what a world!
Who are these people? Names change so fast.
We need another Churchill at the helm.
The foot lady this afternoon; a Mrs. Dyer;
It's come to something when you need the like -
And me, the Works left wing, flying down the field!

Change socks, polish shoes, a bit of housework needed,
Cobwebs on the ceiling: she'd have hated that.
Maybe on a chair .... but .... but I'm going ....
..........   ..........   ......   ....  ..  ..

It's no good shouting when there's no-one to hear. 

Flight, by Catherine Redfern

“Most of man’s ills come from his inability to sit quietly in a room.” Blaise Pascal.

But Blaise, your countrymen ignored you.
Look, look at the balloon.
That was the beginning,
man getting above himself.
Balloon, bi-plane,
Channel hops.
Aces high, slaughter figures rising.
And a second time, dog fights, night raids,
Dresden demolished, the East End flattened.
But all quite neatly finished
In a distant land,
the quiet tea ceremony shattered
with some new equipment.
And still the restlessness.
How can a room
contain this flight,
this longing for the stars?
Space, the moon. The moon?
He's on his way to Mars!
Blaise, you are alone
In that quiet room.
Man has been chasing other worlds,
but soon enough, surely soon enough?
He will return to Earth,
his neglected home -
It needs his cherishing..

The Gift at the Hospice, by Catherine Redfern

They are already assembled, this Monday group. Cars, mini-buses, an ambulance have gathered them. Now they sit, a few in wheelchairs, drinking their coffee. They chat quietly. Some call across the room. There is laughter.
   An introduction, and theyquieten. They smile encouragement. They don't see her fear, nor her doubt. Surely on the terrifying edge of life, their thoughts must be tunnelled down; narrowing, narrowing. How can they possibly be interested? Isn't all this irrelevant?
   
She opens they case, and they look. They exclaim at the rich mahogany varnish, at the gleaming keys, at the way all the sections fit together.
   She crows on the reed, and they laugh at the unmusical sound. But then all is assembled ....

   She plays, and they listen. They listen to folk songs, to Mancini, to "Land of My Fathers" (one man sings along in Welsh), to Gershwin's "Summertime", to "When I'm 64" ("Make that 74!" "84 for me!", to "Where e're You Walk" (again, a rich barione joins in, and others hum along), and finally Sarastro's aria from "The Magic Flute"; her own favourite melody. It's a prayer really, and a good last piece.
   They fire questions: som many. What is the wood? Where is it made? How heavy is it? Is it very expensive? Do you need a lot of puff? All those keys: are they difficult to remember? Do you have to use a new reed every time? They haven't seen one, nor heard one, nor, for some, heard of one. She is amazed and humbled by this group: yes, by this life-affirming group.

Their thanks are warm and generous. One man stands and says, "I wasn't sure: I didn't think I'd be interested in a bassoon; but I was. I'm an engineer, so I can appreciate the skill needed to make a complex instrument like that. And that last piece you played - did you say Mozart? - well, I found there were tears in my eyes. That's never happened to me before".

She packs up, warmed by this gift he has given her. She knows that music - that sound alone - can move the listener deeply; but she had not understood that here, far from being irrelevant, its power may be all the more intensely felt.
   Goodbye. Thank you. Will you come again? She heads for her car. In the office, a date has been set. Yes; it is goodbye. The date is six months away.

The Scattering of Ashes, by Catherine Redfern,

You will drop down from the cottage,
past the barn, pink-fringed with foxgloves,
down through the fields, the Welsh Blacks unaware,
Cader across the Maddach rising from its bed of clouds.

On down, towards the grey-hazed oaks,
hearing the mew of buzzards mobbed by crows.

Down, down to the cool woods; bluebells
and bracken fronds brushing your legs with dew,
past old walls mottled with soft-hued lichens,
parts fallen now in drifts of willow-herb.

A sudden stomp and bound of solitary sheep.

This is the place. Go, my love, and leave me to its peace.

Haikus, by Catherine Redfern

1. red and yellow leaves
    thick-layered
    on the art gallery steps

2. black scribbled
    on the horizon
    winter oaks

3. April morning
    his laughter entangled
    with the scent of hyacinths

4. these loved peoms
    the pages knw
    where to turn

5. birthday candles
    the memory of her twin
    flickering

A Present From Milton Keynes, by Catherine Redfern

He got on at Milton Keynes

and took the window seat

I thought of Mohammed Sabat, of Khomeni

and Bin Laden.

Yes; the headgear and the robe.

And the fidgeting began.

At first I thught: He's not comfortable

next to a woman with no burqa.

But another thought intruded:

Why this recklessness? Why this

constant checking of his watch?

And there was the phone call

on his mobile. In Arabic, of course.

But, even so .....

And the bag at his feet. Every now and then

he bent down to it. Checking a mechanism, perhaps?

Where? When would he strike? Nearly

at New Street now. Of course!

Maximum damage would be there!

I was glad I was right next to him,

not further down the carriage.

The end would be quick: over in a moment.

Should I phone my family? Last-minute messages

like at 9-11?

Better he shouldn't hear. But I could text them.

As we walked up the platform,

the train twenty minutes late,

I could see him hurrying ahead.

Hurrying to his waiting wife and children.

They all looked happy as he held up

the bag:

Baklavas made by his sister.

All the warm sweetness of the Lebanon

tempering this sad foreign land:

A present from Milton Keynes.

Put up your hands, by Catherine Redfern

Put up your hands

All you Old Girls of convent schools.

Put up your hands

If, in pastel-paged autograph books,

You have these lines.

            Be Lady-like, be Mary-like,

            Be Mary-like, be Lady-like.

Yes.  Hands down.

Here was the life training

Of a Child of Mary.

Be meek, be humble,

Be obedient, submissive, uncomplaining.

To demand is unseemly in a woman.

The Blessed Virgin is watching.

Be worthy of her, be pure,

Let her be your model.

But, what of…?  What of sex?

Ssh!  A brazen word, a sinful word.

Oh, let us pray.

Or, let us not.

Now I fantasize, of course,

You can all see that.

Let’s rip off these blue-ribboned  medals.

Let’s crowd round the boys from St Joseph’s

Here  for our Corpus Christi procession

Let us roar:

“What do we want?”   “We want sex.”

“When do we want it?”  “We want it now!”

Well, we hardly manage that,

But we hover and we look.

Bold Brigid O’Flynn even passes a note.

But who glides here, black-robed and beaded?

“Girls, hand back your medals.

You have defiled them

You have shamed Our Blessed Lady. 

Join your hands, cast down your eyes

Mary, our refuge and our strength,

Pray for us  that, shunning all temptation,

We ever seek the virtuous path.        

Brigid O’Flynn,

You will report to Reverend Mother

 Immediately after Benediction".

A Sort of Wisdom, by Catherine Redfern

  

It was not until this April afternoon as she was driving home from the second visit to the specialist that Anna realised old age could be completely sidestepped.  As casually as she pulled down the sun visor to shut out the bright glare, death was leaning forward into the present and was about to shutter out the rest of her life.

She'd arrived home and done the usual things: kicked off her shoes, made a cup of coffee, hesitated at the stereo. She chose Bach and the taut control of Glen Gould.  She sat with her favourite chair tilted back and watched the swaying branches of the mulberry tree.  The tree was one of the reasons they had bought this little Victorian Gothic house, had gone well beyond what they had worked out was the maximum they could afford.  Each autumn, as they squelched their way to the arched front door, Bob would say: “You realise we are treading on ten thousand pounds worth of fruit that we don’t even use.”    Like cantering horses at the circus that appear to move to the rhythm of the music, the green branches drifted and danced, interweaving with the counterpoint of Bach’s fugue.

Of course she was numbed.  That must be so or how could she be sitting here so calmly.  Or was it that, far from being numbed, her mind was racing, cunningly refusing to focus, and thus allowing her time. She even flicked through the evening paper.  There was a last minute ad for the coach trip to Brussels that Molly and she had talked of going on. After looking in her diary Molly had had to back out:” Wouldn’t you know!  There’s the school “Hamlet”.  Tommy’s the father’s ghost. Damn! Damn!  All mothers go to heaven, Anna, - even I will.”   Anna had no doubt of it, if there were a heaven.

   Not now.  This was not the moment to consider an after life, continuance in some form.  If she hadn’t been able to contemplate it for Bob, she was surely not now going to demand it for herself.  They had talked of it in his last weeks, and she had been fastidiously honest saying that she felt we live on only in the memories of those that had loved us.  Bob had smiled “A good place to live on, Anna.  If the memories are happy ones”

     “Do you doubt it?”

     “No, but perhaps they could be richer.” He had taken her hand:” Opportunities missed, things not said…”  His hand so thin, skin sunken between the bones.

     “The memories are rich, Bob.  How could they not be?  And perhaps there is more that memory.  What you’ve given me - tolerance, music, a way of looking at life – what I’ve become: a grafting of some sort.”

Later, when the leukaemia had  triumphed, and the hospital had ceased giving transfusions, Bob had said: “Memories won't be enough, Anna.  You must marry again.  Someone else should know the love that you have given me.”  Anna had held his weak body and they had wept quietly together.

She had not married again.  There had been one or two encounters, brief, tentative.  She accepted that the flesh is strong, but loneliness of body was more easily assuaged than loneliness of heart. At forty-five she felt no more than a shell, hollow, faded, full of the echoes of what had been.  How could she take when she had nothing to give?  And lately the niggling pain had started, becoming more intrusive, until she had made the appointment to see her doctor.

The phone rang.  It was Molly. “How did it go, Anna?”

     “Okay.  I have to go back in a fortnight.”  It would be Molly that she would turn to.  But not yet.  For Molly’s sake and her own she must absorb it herself first.

    “How are things with you, Molly?”

      “Don’t ask!  We could have bumped into each other at the General.  I’ve spent most of the day in A and E with Tommy.  He’s broken his ankle in a rugby match!”

  “Oh, poor boy! I’m sorry!  Oh dear!  What about Hamlet?

    “Alright, I think. The ghost is supposed to thump about isn’t it? Tommy says he’s just got one of the props ahead of time. So, you see, if we’d gone ahead with the Brussels plan I would have had to pull out.  I’ll be ferrying Tommy everywhere for weeks.”

   “I see there are still seats.”

   “Don’t tempt me.  You could still go though, Anna.  Why don’t you? In celebration of no bad news.  You were worried, weren’t you?”

And half an hour later it was settled. She had rung the coach company, a small local firm,

 given her Visa details, and was told to be at the Market Square next morning at 11.30.  It was flight of course, a false escape, an unreadiness to sit quietly and face facts, make plans.  She knew that, but she sensed too that to succumb to these few days of evasion could be a sort of wisdom

The coach left on time.  Anna sat behind Jack, the driver, who was eating wine gums, sometimes pressing in three at a time.  Wine Gum Jack.  He was keen, anxious, that they should all enjoy themselves.  Already, down the M1, lurching nonchalantly between lanes, he was laying before them the pleasures to come.

       “The trip to the battlefield is on Wednesday, folks.” This “folks” surprised Anna at first, but between announcements the menace of silence was staved off by his Country and Western tapes.

Molly and she had not planned to go on the various trips that were part of this package holiday.  It was still a bargain to be taken door to door and stay in a good hotel in the centre of the city. They had planned to wander about, window shop, visit some of the museums and art galleries, sit in cafes and eat calorie-laden cakes

          “And then, on Thursday  …” He seemed aware of the dichotomy of inviting his flock to enjoy their holiday while visiting scenes of carnage.  He stressed that it is all in the past - terrible, of course, we must never forget. No, we must never forget.

            His voice kept breaking in,, interrupting Anna’s thoughts, but feeding them too. As events recede into the past they are less painful.  It was this that Anna had resented:  Time, the great healer, muffling intensity with its scar tissue.  Well, Time was about to veer to its other pole: Time, the implacable destroyer.

And now the ferry.  A quiet crossing.  The sea was still; so calm that fog drifted over it. Engines quietened and speed slackened. The grey-white sea was segmented by three white rails and a seagull drifted by, a grey-white echo that slipped into the mist.  Muted, silent colours.  It seemed strange that calm can generate danger.  In this fog someone could slip into the leaden water unseen.  Perhaps a head might be turned a moment in idle enquiry at the sound.  Nothing more.  Anna thought of Auden’s lines on the Bruegel painting:

                                        “how everything turns away
                          Quite leisurely from disaster"

                      

She had always liked this poem, written in the contemplation of art, the poet acknowledging the voice of the painter.

                        “About suffering they were never wrong,

                          The Old Masters:  how well they understood

                           It’s human position: how it takes place

                           While someone else is eating, or opening a window or just
                          Walking dully along"
                         

  She would go and see “The Fall of  Icarus” while she was in Brussels. It might help her to accept this truth of the human condition: that suffering takes place while other lives go on. It must be so: the world cannot take on the burden of everyone’s pain.  It is universal, and it is solitary.

                            

     Anna went down below and sat at the  bar sipping her Chardonnay, thinking back.  Had she, had Bob, been uncaring in the face of human suffering?  Unexpectedly, inconveniently, the memory of a quarrel that they'd had came into her mind.  Serious in that they  had gone to bed in anger, something they had vowed never to do. And yet the quarrel's origin was so trivial.  They'd been watching the 10 o'clock news waiting for the Monty Python that was to follow.  An earthquake in Sarawak.  800 dead, more tremors expected.  She had ridiculed Bob for asking where Sarawak was. Was it in India he'd asked. “That school of yours!  They should have brought you in from the playing fields occasionally”.  He'd got his own back,  asking which way the Pyrenees ran,  Delighted that she'd said “North , south” he shouted in triumph: “Ha, smarty -pants They run east, west.  I just heard a boy of twelve get that right  so you can stop ramming your A Level Geography down my throat”.   The Monty Python was switched off.  With an attempt at casual dignity Anna had said “I don't think I'm in the mood for comedy.”

   A double bed is an  unwilling accomplice to a quarrel. .  They lay turned away from each other , fighting the pull of gravity that the centre of the bed exerted.  The brush of a foot was intrusive, the touch of a thigh, unbearable.   Anna couldn't bring herself to give the caress, or utter the words needed.  Generous, not given to holding grudges, Bob would have pulled her to him  with some murmured nonsense.  But the silence , pregnant at first, lasted too long. It  became drained of possibilities, a void. Bob slipped into sleep and Anna lay alone.

And Sarawak? The images of destruction, the rushing ambulances, the dazed, grief-stricken women rocking back and forth by the rubble of their homes.  As they lay unmoving neither Anna nor Bob gave a thought to the earthquake continuing its destruction..  Auden  was right.  We choose not to see;

     

                             “everything turned away

                   Quite leisurely from disaster:  the ploughman may

                   Have heard the splash,the forsaken cry,

                    But for him it was not an important failure.”

 

And for them the 800 dead was not an important failure. It was the events in their own lives that mattered. Anna sat motionless, absorbed by her flickering thoughts, although aware of the lurching shudder of the ship docking and of passengers moving towards the stair-wells.  Perhaps our humanity is frail, a small candle glow which reaches only those nearest us.  Was that achievement enough?

  Some-one touched her arm.  It was Wine-Gum Jack.  “Are you alright, love? Time to get back in the saddle again.”