My Family and Other Superheroes
for the Edwardses
My Family and Other Superheroes
JONATHAN EDWARDS
Seren is the book imprint of
Poetry Wales Press Ltd.
57 Nolton Street, Bridgend, Wales, CF31 3AE
www.serenbooks.com
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Twitter:@SerenBooks
The right of Jonathan Edwards to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
© Jonathan Edwards 2014
ISBN: 978-1-78172-162-9
ISBN: kindle: 978-1-78172-164-3
ISBN: e-book: 978-1-78172-163-6
A CIP record for this title is available from the British Library.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted at any time or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the copyright holder.
The publisher acknowledges the financial assistance of the Welsh Books Council.
Cover painting:‘Cock-a-Hoop’ by James Donovan, http://jamesdonovanart.com/
Printed in Bembo by Bell & Bain Ltd, Glasgow.
Contents
1
My Family in a Human Pyramid
Evel Knievel Jumps Over my Family
Gregory Peck and Sophia Loren in Crumlin for the Filming of Arabesque, June 1965
The Voice in which my Mother Read to Me
The Death of Doc Emmett Brown in Back to the Future
Half-time, Wales vs. Germany, Cardiff Arms Park, 1991
How to Renovate a Morris Minor
Bamp
Building my Grandfather
Lance Corporal Arthur Edwards (1900-1916)
My Uncle Walks to Work, 1962
2
Anatomy
View of Valleys Village from a Hill
View of Valleys High Street through a Café Window
Colliery Row
USA Family Kebab House, Merthyr Tydfil
Owen Jones
Raskolnikov in Ebbw Vale
X16
Chartist Mural, John Frost Square, Newport
Capel Celyn
In John F Kennedy International Airport
FA Cup Winners on Open Top Bus Tour of my Village
3
Girl
Welsh National Costume
Us
The Doll
Decree Nisi
Jack-in-the-Box
The Bloke in the Coffee Shop
Aquafit
4
Bookcase Thrown through Third Floor Window
Restaurant where I am the Maître d’ and the Chef is my Unconscious
Rilke at War
Seal
The Hippo
Flamingos
Cheerleaders
Bouncers
Nun on a Bicycle
The Bloke Selling Talk Talk in the Arcade
Starbucks Name Tag Says Rhian
The Girls on the Make-up Counter
Karaoke
Brothers
The Boy with the Pump-action Water Pistol
The Performance
Holiday
On the Overpass
Acknowledgements
1
My Family in a Human Pyramid
My uncle starts it, kneeling in his garden;
my mother gives a leg up to my gran.
When it’s my turn to climb, I get a grip
of my bamp’s miner’s belt, my cousin’s heels,
say Thank you for her birthday card as I go,
then bounce on my nan’s perm and skip three rows,
land on my father’s shoulders. He grabs my ankles,
half holding me up and half holding me close.
Here he comes, my godson, Samuel Luke,
passed up until he’s standing in his nappy
on my head. And now to why we’re here:
could the Edwardses together reach a height
that the youngest one of us could touch a star?
Sam reaches out. He points towards the night.
Evel Knievel Jumps Over my Family
A floodlit Wembley. Lisa, the producer,
swears into her walkie-talkie. We Edwardses,
four generations, stand in line,
between ramps: Smile for the cameras.
My great-grandparents twiddle their thumbs
in wheelchairs, as Lisa tells us to relax,
Mr Knievel has faced much bigger challenges:
double-deckers, monster trucks, though the giraffe
is urban legend. Evel Knievel enters,
Eye of the Tiger drowned by cheers,
his costume tassels, his costume a slipstream,
his anxious face an act to pump the crowd,
surely. My mother, always a worrier,
asks about the ambulance. Evel Knievel
salutes, accelerates towards the ramps.
I close my eyes, then open them:
is this what heaven feels like,
some motorcycle Liberace overhead,
wheels resting on air? Are these flashes
from 60,000 cameras the blinding light
coma survivors speak of? Before he lands,
there’s just time to glance along the line:
though no one’s said a thing,
all we Edwardses are holding hands.
Gregory Peck and Sophia Loren in Crumlin for the Filming of Arabesque, June 1965
Sunday. The crowd beneath the viaduct
waves banners made from grocery boxes, bedsheets:
Welcome to the valleys Mr Peck!
Wind turns their chapel dresses into floral
parachutes; their perms don’t budge an inch.
The emotion of it’s too much for one girl’s
mascara. We love you Miss Loren! My father
parks away from them, around the corner,
in his brand new car, a ’30s Lanchester,
with stop-start brakes, a battery he shares
with a neighbour. All sideburns and ideas, a roll-up
behind one ear and a flea in the other
from my gran for missing Eucharist,
he coughs and steps down from the running board,
as two Rolls-Royces pull up opposite.
Gregory Peck, three years after being
Atticus Finch, steps from one, says Good morning.
From the other – it isn’t! – it is, wearing her cheekbones.
My father’s breakfast is nervous in his stomach,
but he grabs his Argus, pen, and Yes, they’ll sign.
Her high heels echo away through the whole valley.
That’s how my father tells it. Let’s gloss over
how his filming dates aren’t quite the same as Google’s,
the way Sophia Loren formed her Ss
suspiciously like his. Let’s look instead
at this photo of the crowd gathered that day,
he walked towards to share those autographs,
his fame. There, front and middle, with her sister,
the girl he hasn’t met yet – there. My mother.
The Voice in which my Mother Read to Me
isn’t her good morning, good afternoon, good night voice,
her karaoke as she dusts, make furniture polite voice,
her saved for neighbours’ babies and cooing our dog’s name voice.
It isn’t her best china, not too forward, not too shy voice,
or her dinner’s ready, your room looks like a sty voice,
> or her whisper in my ear as she adjusts my tie voice.
It’s not her roll in, Friday night, Lucy in the Sky voice,
her Sunday morning, smartest frock, twinkle-in-the-eye voice,
that passing gossip of the vicar with the Communion wine voice.
It’s not her ‘Gateau – no, ice cream – no… I can’t make the choice’ voice.
It’s not her decades late, fourth change, ‘Is this skirt smart enough?’ voice.
It’s not her caught me with the girl from number twenty-one voice.
That voice which she reserved for twelve-foot grannies, Deep South hobos,
that sleepy, secret staircase, selfish giants, Lilliput voice.
That tripping over, ‘Boy, why is your house so full of books?’ voice.
The Death of Doc Emmett Brown in Back to the Future
I sit here in the darkness with my father,
slurping Pepsi, passing popcorn round.
The Libyans come fast around the corner,
pump Doc Brown with automatic fire.
My feet are dangling, inches from the ground.
I sit here in the darkness with my father,
as Marty hits 88 miles an hour,
goes back to ’55, to warn Doc Brown.
The Libyans come fast around the corner,
pump Doc Brown with automatic fire:
he gets up, dusts his bulletproof vest down.
I sit here in the darkness with my father,
who starts to gently snore. Now time goes quicker:
the cinema’s knocked down, moved out of town;
the Libyans come fast around the corner
on DVD. My boy asks for Transformers
instead as, from the wall, his bamp looks down.
I sit here in the darkness with my father.
The Libyans come fast around the corner.
Half-time, Wales vs. Germany, Cardiff Arms Park, 1991
Nil-nil. Once the changing room door’s closed,
the Germans out of sight, the Welsh team can
collapse: there’s Kevin Ratcliffe, belly up
on the treatment table; Sparky Hughes’s body
sulks in the corner, floppy as the curls
which he had then. All half, they’ve barely had
a kick. Big Nev Southall throws his gloves
to the floor, like plates in a Greek restaurant
as, in tracksuit and belly, Terry Yorath
looks round at a room of Panini faces:
he doesn’t know yet he will never get them
to a major finals. He does know what to say.
Ryan Giggs, still young enough to be
in a boy band, stands up, doing an impression
of his poster on my wall. The crowd begins
to ask for guidance from the great Jehovah
and Ian Rush’s famous goal-scoring
moustache perks up. He’s half an hour away
from the goal that cues the song that makes his name
five syllables. What he doesn’t know
is I’m in the stand in my father’s coat,
storing things to tell at school next day.
My father pours more tea from his work flask
and says We got them now butt, watch and asks
again if I’m too cold. What we don’t know
is we’ll speak of this twenty years from now –
one of us retired, one a teacher –
in a stadium they’ll build down by the river.
But now it’s Rushie Sparky Southall Giggs.
8.45: the crowd begins to roar,
wants to be fed until they want no more.
The tea tastes just like metal, is too hot
and something catches – right here – on the tongue.
The changing room door opens and they step out,
toe-touching, stretching, blinking under floodlights –
it’s time to be the people we’ll become.
How to Renovate a Morris Minor
That’s him, in the camouflage green overalls,
hiding under the car all day from my mother.
What is he but a pair of feet, my father,
muttering prayers to God and the sump gasket,
wearing oil drips, enough zips for all
his secrets? On his back, he pokes a spanner
up at a nut, as if unscrewing heaven;
grease-fingers make a crime scene of the kitchen.
He gives the stars in his bucket to the bonnet
and when he sees his face in it then it
is smiling. His foot on the accelerator
makes the world go, his right arm at the auction
can’t say No and when the day is over,
that’s him, that’s him – he’s snoring on the sofa,
Practical Classics open on his lap –
his eyes dart under their lids as he sleeps,
like Jaguars he’s racing in his dreams.
Bamp
That’s him, with the tweed and corduroy
skin, wearing the slack gloves of his hands,
those liver spots like big full stops. That’s him
passing time with his favourite hobby, which is
you know, pottering, or staring closely
at the middle distance, enjoying the magic tricks
his watch does. His pockets are for special things
he has forgotten, no one fills the holes
in crumpets like he does, and in his wallet
is a licence from the Queen and what it means
is he can say what the hell he likes and you
can’t do nothing. That’s him, with a cupboard full
of tea cosies, a severe hearing problem
round those he doesn’t like, gaps in his smile
and stories, a head full of buried treasure
and look, that’s him now, twiddling his thumbs
so furiously, it’s like he’s knitting air.
It’s only him can hold the air together.
Building my Grandfather
He comes flat-pack, a gift for my eighteenth.
We tip the bits out on the living room carpet:
nuts and bolts, a spanner, an Allen key,
tubes halfway between telescopes and weapons.
At first he goes together easily:
slippered left foot clicks into the ankle,
shin joins at a perfect right angle.
We have more of a problem with the right knee,
but my father remembers it was always gammy
from twelve-hour shifts, labouring in tight seams.
I fit the lungs, pumping in mustard gas
which filled each breath he took from 1918.
Something seems to be missing from the heart
and for a while we search beneath the sideboard,
but then my father says it’s probably
for the old man’s brother, who joined up when he did
and didn’t make it back. The cheek and neck
and nose slot in and soon, we’ve almost got him:
my father holds the lips, the final bit
before he opens his eyes and I meet him.
A glance in the mirror at what he’s going to see:
a pale-faced boy by an electric fire,
Nike swoosh like a medal on my chest.
It’s then I say Stop. What will he make of me?
Lance Corporal Arthur Edwards (1900-1916)
You took the River Ebbw to the Somme
in your canteen, and never brought it back,
but it’s still there, each time I look out my window.
I picture you there, holding the bottle under
to catch the water which proved you’d make it home.
Mid-river, stooping, shorter than your shadow,
your Sunday trousers are rolled up to your knees
so your mam won’t kill you. A sixteen-year-old flamingo.
Now your face is blown
up, above our mantelpiece;
you’re prey to the latest image manipulation.
Your eyes are horror movies’; your eyes are God’s.
You’re close to the portrait of your elder brother
as he was to you when the blast hit. You look like each other:
his painted face is a sorry imitation.
My Uncle Walks to Work, 1962
He has a summer job as a postman,
so races up at six. In the living room,
my gran is poking the fire, cursing my grandad
who’ll die before I’m born.
Out of the house and down the hill,
past The Crown, sometimes repenting the night before.
He rounds the corner by the block of flats,
or would do but it isn’t there yet,
into the sorting office,
knocked down when I was a kid.
He shoulders his bag of mail
and staggers back up the hill,
into his street, into his house,
my gran still poking and cursing,
up the stairs. He drops the sack on the bedroom floor
(careful not to wake my father
who has to get up for work in an hour)
and goes back to bed.
He’ll do the delivery when he’s properly rested.
Let him sleep. He has much ahead of him:
a bag of mail, a wife, three children,
five (and counting) grandkids
and every year he buys me a hardback copy
of the winner of the Booker Prize.
2
Anatomy
These shoulder blades are Snowdon, the Brecon Beacons.
Walk gently on them. This spine is the A470;
these palms are Ebbw, Wye, Sirhowy. This tongue
is Henry VIII’s Act of Union, these lungs
pneumoconiosis, these rumbling guts
the Gurnos, this neck Dic Penderyn. This manner
of speaking is my children, my children’s children.
These vital organs are Nye Bevan, this liver
Richard Burton, this blood my father. These eyes
have been underground for generations; now
they’re adjusting to the light. This gap-toothed smile
is the Severn Bridge, seen from the English side.
View of Valleys Village from a Hill
From here you see how small it is, how narrow: