Acts Of Worship: Keeping Warm Poem by Roger elkin

</>Acts of Worship: Keeping Warm

i.m. Aggie Smith

Her home, Barn Farm Cottage, islanded now in town,
had two-holed privy down the Staffordshire blues;
a latched half-door with rattly bolt instead of keys;
and, inside, rough-cut slabs that gave up ground
to quarry-reds on the stillage floor. (How chapel-cool
it was in there.) In the living-room crouched two
horsehair couches, big-busted sideboard, four thirties
dining-chairs, and gas-brackets pfutting in the draught.
A tiled range sprawled raungily across the smaller wall
with always fire fuelling hobs, oven, iron and plate.
She worshipped it; would berate Smith for his gobbing
from “the mester’s seat”; spend Fridays Zebra-leading grate;
the rest of days riddling, poking, mending it. Her job in
wedlock was keeping warm – almost a holy craft.

Ancient enough to be my Gran, she was so small
that, aged ten, I could look down inside her eyes, black
as poppy-seeds on bread, but brighter. Nothing at all
escaped their scrutiny. I’m tempted almost to speak
of her as template for the Doulton figurine Balloon
Seller, but recall a face pulled straight from Hogarth
prints. What fascinated were her teeth: ground down
or stumped, chipped, all black with spaces wide enough
to tip her tongue between. It’s the gas as gives me
dreams. That gas. ‘Drather put up with the pain.
Go all cold, inside, with gas. (Really it was the fear.) She
was so proper that she owned no jewelry save a thin plain
wedding band and mother’s mourning-brooch, in jet,
which kept her clothes together. Her treasure was her hair,
also jet, though streaked in grey, and crowned with pleat.
Only once I saw its length at liberty, as caught unaware
she bent drying it before the fire. (She was all apologies,
and blushed.) Standing up, its stresses slipped the turbanned
towel, streamed down back, past waist, to thighs.
She brushed and brushed religiously. I watched her strand
four hanks, then plait it – over, back, cross, round –
to form a mandarin’s tail which, coiled, was pinned
in place. Though, like her working-man, she swore, was
pillar of the church; loved hymns. She had me sing
at her daughter’s wedding-do – Love Divine. (Her face
collapsed in mists and tears.) But I couldn’t bring
myself to join the choir in her funeral hymn, Abide
With Me. Instead, for months, was haunted by nightmares
of stumping teeth. Unmended fires. All cold inside.
And riddling worms plaiting stickily through her hair.