May 2014 – Writer-insighter

Bunged up

I haven’t done any open mic nights or any other performance for a couple of weeks. And I’m getting antsy about it.

About three weeks ago, but maybe four, I got what I thought was hayfever. I haven’t had hayfever this bad for years, not just the sneezing (but suspiciously not much of that) and sore throat but eyes full of crud every morning as well as being itchy all day long and that horrible feeling in my legs as if I’ve had a massive electric shock and that never very pleasant pain in the kidneys. And a cough. And a really sore throat. And feeling tired all the time.

I don’t generally get ill, no more than one cold a year, but this was a big one. The net result has been I’ve gone temporarily deaf in one ear, which is ringing out white noise all the time anyway. It means I can’t hear how loud I am and I can’t accurately hear my own voice full stop.

So all in all, it’s not great for performing. I’m a little concerned about it, because I was enjoying doing it and the three-piece band that seem to have assembled behind me were really getting it together and transforming the spoken word stuff I do into something very much better.

That and the police. Last time I went to Woodbridge I got breathalysed. That was fine. I don’t drink and drive, or not over the limit, anyway. But although the breathalyser thing tested nil alcohol, which was odd in itself as I’d had two small glasses of red wine so it should have shown something, there were a lot of odd things about the whole stop, as we road-warrior non-criminals call it. So much so that a friend whose husband was a police officer until he was killed told me ‘it’s not what you think it is. Watch out.’

Back when I lived in Trowbridge a policeman saw a police van parked up at the side of the road so he went over for a chat, tapped on the window and found it wasn’t Gary Robbins’ dad, the PC who usually had the van. It was someone else entirely. Someone not actually in the police. And it wasn’t a police van either. As things got odder and odder at the side of the road I remembered all that happening and wondered if it was the same thing. My friend refusing to say what it was if it wasn’t what I thought it was in a Facebook private message creeped me out a bit too.

So that’s why I haven’t done any spoken word recently. I’m bunged up. But for the moment at least I’m not banged up too.

Diversity training

As a skive from real work today I was booked into a diversity training course. We didn’t have diversity when I was at school. Or rather we did, but we didn’t know about it.

There were precisely two black children at my school, out of 1300 pupils. There was one black child at primary. Also at primary there were two sisters, called Miriam and Rebecca who had very sallow skin and dark hair and like their parents, kept themselves very much to themselves in rooms sectioned off from a friend’s grandmother’s terraced house. I went there just once. It was mid-afternoon and the window curtains were part drawn, as if they were hiding from something.

Looking back, I don’t think I was particularly stupid not to realise that of course they were. The war they’d fled from back then wasn’t even as long ago as the Miner’s Strike is now. It also explained why my school was full of kids called things like Geno Petrillo, Chris Kozlowski and Bozenka Kalinka. The airfield up the road where we rode our FS1E mopeds was a refugee camp for Poles just after the war ended. Geno’s dad almost certainly came to live in Wiltshire, like the Difazio family who had motorbike shops, like the ice-cream van man, because there was also a massive PoW camp for Italians nearby.

I say ‘almost certainly’ because I don’t know. Because it was never talked about and we never asked. I found a paperback at a jumble sale once, about a Polish Spitfire squadron and no adults felt like telling me any more than that there was one. And that was it. We had a Polish deli that was nothing like anything I expected from films about New York. That was our integration. Don’t ask. Don’t tell. It’s nothing to do with you where anyone came from, Bennett. You came from Stratford-on-Avon, not Wiltshire. You, Joyce, came from London. Whitmarsh, Kent. Anyone else wants to play where are you from? I didn’t hear you. Right. Let’s get on. Mr Bertillon, le duanier, est arivee encore. Aven une sange.

Notwithstanding my impeccable diversity credentials, I managed to balls it up anyway.

My breakout session was supposed to be in a place called the Stour Room, named after the Suffolk river. I’m not feeling too great after lots of late, late nights (no, sorry, not going into any details there) and an epic dose of hayfever that obviously assumed I was doing O-Levels so it could totally mess my life up instead of just having a go at the past week.

I wasn’t sure where the Stour Room was so I asked the first person I could find. She happened to be black but that had nothing to do with what happened next. Her accent was pure Essex.

Me: Excuse me, do you know where the Stour Room is?

Woman: The which, sorry?

Me: The Stour Room.

I’ve got hayfever and I can’t hear properly, so I can’t really hear how loud my voice is or what it sounds like.

Woman: Oh! The Stower Room!

Me: Yes, the Stour Room.

Woman: You say Star!

Me: Well no, but I’m not from Suffolk.

Woman: I say Stower. I am.

Me: Well…

Woman: I say Stower, because I’m common.

I couldn’t really see where all this was going. I wasn’t feeling great. I’ve had ringing in my left ear for four day now. All I wanted to do was find the room I was supposed to be in, not ask her out or anything. So it wasn’t really my fault what happend next.

Me: No, it’s not that.

Total silence.

You can’t take words back. I almost added “I mean, I didn’t mean that’s what makes you… I mean, I’m sure you’re not….. oh look, hares mating outside the window” I wanted to try that last one because then I could have run away and hidden, rather than inevitably being paired with the poor woman in team building exercises for the rest of the afternoon.

However you were, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to call you common. You did start it though. And I’ve not been well. Sorry. No, really.

P.S. I just tried to post this on Reddit, under Diversity. But apparently I’m not allowed to. Maybe I’m not diverse enough, or something.

Before the war

You know who they are. Everyone knows who they are. They're you. — You know who they are. They’re you.

Before The War

Before the war in our hearts

We kissed on the platform.

The guard blew his whistle.

Wooden doors slammed shut

Minding our fingers.

My hand on your waist.

Your fingers on my shoulder.

Remembering other times

And our hands and hearts

And when I remember that now

I know it didn’t happen.

There were no steam trains

Long before you were born.

I didn’t wear a hat or a British Warm.

You didn’t wear an A line skirt

And a long woollen coat

And we weren’t afraid of babies.

There were plenty of things

We were afraid of

But not that. And we didn’t talk

About them anyway, so it didn’t matter.

It wasn’t as if they could get in the way.

There were no cheery porters

Carrying our bags for a tanner tip.

‘Blimey, thanks guvnor,

You’re a gent and no mistake.’

It wasn’t ever that way in our lives.

Django Reinhardt didn’t play as our Blue Train

Wheeled down to the Cornish Riviera

We didn’t take the Boat Train to the Continent

Via Harwich, tapping our feet in memory

Of Sidney Bechet on clarinet at the Trocadero

The night before; via all the places

Where once other heroes queued in line

Embarking or demobbed, waiting patiently

For their lives to begin again,

The ones that could.

So why do I remember it this way?

You’re still here. We are, maybe.

Who is it talking to me?

Why do I seem to see a woman’s face as if in fog

Sometimes until I look again

And there’s no-one there?

There never was.

Who is it calling to me, telling me be nice

It doesn’t matter, nothing does?

Only love. Take care.

Make love, take love while it’s there.

Call the ceasefire.

Agree terms, an honourable peace,

Even unconditional surrender

If you mean it. But stop the fighting.

Put up your bright swords

Put down your arms

Put your fingers on each other’s lips

And kiss. Do it now.

While your hearts are still bare.

(c) Carl Bennett 2014

Just to clarify, no, I haven’t had a massive bust-up with anybody. Quite the opposite. This is a poem. It’s a first take, down in one like a Saturday night cocktail. It probably needs a bit of tweaking. But like any fiction, while it might call to you and I hope it does it isn’t real. But as the other Bladerunner said right at the end of the film, then again, what is?