Bell Green, Foleshill, Longford, Little Heath –
George Eliot would have known these names. To me
they were the growling crimson buses come
to meet us at the school stop. I can see
their friendly faces, smell their diesel breath.
Dropped off at an awkward place for home,
I’d cut through by the old canal, its rust-
gnawed railings, overgrown, too drunk to stand.
Among the red brick houses, row on row,
lay scrubby patches of forgotten land
(the sites of secret camps in summers past)
and sprawling factories: Courtauld’s, Smith and Co.,
Alfred Herbert’s, Armstrong Siddeley and the Jag.
Shift-changes jammed the gates with men on bikes
in macks and clips, with bags on handlebars.
I still rehearse the working words I liked
when all our dads were fitters on the track
or minders of the capstan lathes (the cars
themselves weren’t mentioned, as if undeserved)
or grinders gauging tungsten carbide dies
to tolerances specified in thou.,
one handed, with their own micrometers,
the emblems, velvet-couched, of their time served.
Well, that was how it was. But all gone now.
A cottage by a ford, an old oak tree –
the ‘Haywain’ Mum hung on the kitchen wall
was witness to a world far out of reach.
Remote now too the childhood I recall.
I drove along the bypass yesterday;
noticed a business park called ‘Middlemarch’.
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