Dear Mr Asquith

Nina Boyd

• Publisher: The Poetry Business
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781906613211
• eBook ISBN: 9781906613686
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

Overall winner of the 2009 Poetry Business Book & Pamphlet Competition, chosen by Andrew Motion.

"These are fulfilled poems, written with a depth of feeling and lack of ostentation. The first part of the book holds many poems about family and friends seen through a child's cool eye. Lives are summed up by single details that illuminate not just a person but a generation of men and women tarnished by war, poverty and ignorance. The second half of the book reaches new heights. The poems trawl historical records to tell hidden stories of ordinary, often hesitant, women who performed brave, dangerous and tragic acts in the name of Votes for Women. Already a prizewinning collection, Dear Mr Asquith deserves every accolade going. A necessary read." - Janet Fisher

Dear Mr Asquith

Nina Boyd

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to the following publications in which some of these poems first appeared:

Cake, The Cannon's Mouth, Dreamcatcher, The Interpreter's House, Iota, The North, Poetry Nottingham, The Ragged Ravem Press Anthology, The Rialto and South. 'Dear Mr Asquith' won 2nd prize in the Buxton Poetry Competition 2009. 'Needlewomen' was commended in the English Association Fellows Prize and 'Property' was a runner-up in the 2009 Troubadour Competition.

Contents

Dedication
Acknowledgements
Contents

The Dead Lie Underground
Pipes
Fruit
Uncle Tony
How to Forget
German Lessons
Thelma
Miriam
Miss Ross
Sunny Dog
The Big Boys’ Bumper Annual
Last Supper
Protanopia
First duty
Night duty
Medical history
Desert
When the boy ran into her
They Batter My Heart
All Saints
Property
Finding a Friend
My Mother’s Kitchen
Cat in the Hearth
The Window Cleaner
Iris
Camping at Whitby
The Man in the Next Tent
Diagnosis
Station Announcer
Going to the Shops
With Fly
Lanterns
Pardoned
'All I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying’
Eggs
Pompeii
Going out with Mother

Votes for Women!

Dear Mr Asquith
Needlewomen
The King’s Jockey
Postal Votes
The Rokeby Venus
Ethel Smyth
The View from Linthwaite
The March of a Thousand Women
Census Night 1911
Self-denial Week
Park-spouters
Rational Dress
Fire-raising
Resistance
The Cat and Mouse Act
Hats off for the Prime Minister!
Leaving Home
‘Baby Suffragette’

Biography

The Dead Lie Underground

Books nobody read were kept in a basement

thick with Jeyes fluid and dust. Learned journals

stretched back to a time when vicars studied

philology and archaeology; collected birds-eggs,

beetles, butterflies, an abundance of dead things.

The student of Indo-European languages, silent

on the marble steps, hoped to find others struggling

with Grimm's Law and the Great Vowel Shift;

but there was only The Creep in his ex-army trousers

and Make Tea Not War t-shirt, leaning up against

Neuphilologische Mitteilungen as if he could read

her mind. His rodent eyes ran over her.

She knew he lived down there, nested under

hot pipes among mouse-traps and cockroach boxes.

Nobody believed her: until they missed her,

searched for her, found her trussed, dust-dry,

tucked under a shelf of dead languages.

Pipes

Granny's knickers, vast and pink as the Colonies,

reached down to her knees. She'd been in service;

now she sat spread-legged close to her own hearth

where a kettle simmered on a trivet.

Pipes spent his days with his tobacco jar

and memories of dying boys in France.

Each year on her birthday he gave her

a ten shilling note to buy herself a cardigan.

Each morning she emptied his chamberpot.

She died. Pipes moved in with us. He brought

the chamber pot. Mother held it over the bannisters,

but she couldn't let go. He was silent at our table:

things were different; they didn't suit.

When he went home, she took him casseroles.

Smoke lingered in our house for weeks.

Fruit

Our father prised open the box, drew two-inch nails

from rough-cut wood. Exotic fruits glowed

under layers of straw: all the way from Jo'burg

where we pictured our white-haired cousins

picking crystallised plums from the trees.

Mother stockpiled tangerines and dates

to cheer up the apples stored in our attic,

each wrapped in a single sheet of the Daily Mail.

These were meant for Christmas, too;

but we couldn't wait. We knelt

on the sugar-frosted rug and gorged; even Mother.

Dad wouldn't try the apricots and persimmons,

turned up his nose at foreign muck. He bit

into a wrinkled Worcester Pearmain,

scowled from his chair by the wireless.

We were cold and pale because of Mother:

we too could have bared our arms to the African sun

if it weren't for her fear of snakes. Dad never

met her eye. We felt his resentment

as we filled our mouths with mango, litchi, peach;

scoffed our way to the bottom of the box.

Uncle Tony

Mother said he was a sex-maniac: she'd heard

the bedsprings when we stayed with them

in Scarborough. I don't remember UncleTony;

only custard tarts, and my cousin

showing me how to knit.

Then his photo was in the News of the World.

Pills and whisky in a double bed with a woman

who had rabbit teeth and wasn't Aunty Joan.

Suicide was a crime in the fifties; they prosecuted

the ones who failed.

Uncle Tony and the rabbit got six weeks in Durham.

They married afterwards. He was a black sheep now.

I never saw him again. I wondered if she was

as pretty as Aunty Joan, who never had a headache,

never touched so much as an aspirin.

How to Forget

Dad never missed the Black and White Minstrels,

sniggered at the dark side of light entertainment

while I sashayed into St Peter's with Mum,

prayed for boys at Ev...

Table of contents

• Dear Mr Asquith