That Awkward Age Read online

  Some recent books by Roger McGough

  Poetry

  The Way Things Are

  Everyday Eclipses

  Collected Poems

  Selected Poems

  Penguin Modern Classics:

  The Mersey Sound (with Adrian Henri and Brian Patten)

  For Children

  Sky in the Pie

  Until I Met Dudley

  Bad, Bad Cats

  Good Enough to Eat

  The Bee’s Knees

  All the Best: Selected Poems

  Slapstick

  Theatre

  Tartuffe

  The Hypochondriac

  Autobiography

  Said and Done

  That Awkward Age

  Roger McGough

  VIKING

  an imprint of

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  VIKING

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

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  (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

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  (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)

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  (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  www.penguin.com

  First published in 2009

  Copyright © Roger McGough, 2009

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  All rights reserved

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book

  ISBN: 978-0-14-192403-8

  At that awkward age now between birth and death

  I think of all the outrages unperpetrated

  opportunities missed

  ‘Here I am’

  (Melting into the Foreground, 1986)

  Contents

  To Meccano

  To My Violin

  To Poetry Please

  To Bedtime Stories

  To Contact Lenses

  To Deya

  To Advice Given to Aspiring Writers

  To Airplanes

  To Writer’s Block

  To Haiku

  To My Old Addresses

  To Macca’s Trousers

  To Larry David

  To Mistaken Identity

  To Absence

  To Wisdom Teeth

  To Religion

  To Temptation

  To My Final Poem

  Beau Geste

  ‘Street Urchins’

  Press Save

  Eternal Rest

  Carpe Diem

  I Am Not Sleeping

  A Fine Romance

  Queue Music

  Love in the Launderette

  The Collection

  Not to Mention the Reader’s

  The Wrong Beds

  The Lucky Ones

  Jockeys, a Perspective

  One Liner

  A Real Live Poet

  On Good Authority

  Je est un Auto

  Paradise Lost

  Shearing on the Côte d’Azure

  The Flag’s Proud Boast

  The Poet on Fire

  In Case of Hire

  Zen and the Art of Poetry

  Lost Property Office

  The Care Less Cat

  Mr Nightingale

  Mr Sappho

  Mr of Arc

  Mr Blyton

  Lord Godiva

  Mr Mae West

  Monsieur Piaf

  The After-dinner Speaker

  Dylan the Eavesdrop

  An Almighty Gloosh

  ITZ

  Quiet Zone

  Payback Time

  Try This For Size

  Being Careful

  Not a Page-turner

  How to Escape from Prison

  One after Another

  The Dada Christmas Catalogue

  Welcome Winter

  A Bull in a China Shop

  Yak ad Infinitum

  Acknowledgements

  To Meccano

  Like me you were born in Liverpool,

  and after the war, as soon as you reappeared in the shops,

  Dad was first in the queue for my birthday present.

  The introductory box for beginners contained

  perforated strips of red metal, nuts, bolts, spanner,

  screwdriver, an axle and a pair of wheels. Magic.

  I couldn’t wait to turn you into small feats of engineering,

  a miniature Golden Gate Bridge, a scale model

  of the Titanic, a two-wheeled double-decker bus.

  But there was less to you than met the eye,

  and although my father would sit beside me,

  boyish and enthusiastic about cobbling together

  a pair of ladders, a crucifix or a luggage trolley,

  little Isambard Brunel would wander off to rummage

  in mother’s sewing box. Sorry, Meccano.

  My best times were spent as a fireman during the Blitz,

  rushing fearlessly into burning buildings to rescue zips,

  buckles and bra-fasteners trapped in tangled heaps of red metal.

  To My Violin

  I loved the very shape and feel of you.

  The curved lightness of a body

  lovingly carved from an Alpine spruce

  in a sun-filled garden in Cremona

  by Geppetto, the blind violin-maker.

  I never tired of snapping open the case

  and unclipping the bow, your Sancho Panza,

  tightening the horse-hair and applying the rosin.

  The silkiness of your neck as I slipped you under my chin.

  God’s in his heaven, let the music begin.

  I’m sorry, violin, but it never did.

  It was the lines and funny dots that kept me out.

  I thought that if I concentrated really hard

  and imagined the tune, then you would overhear

  and amplify it, weaving melodies out of thin air.

  You, after all, cost hard-earned money my parents

  could ill afford. Plus the lessons after school.

  But as a ragged claw scuttled across the floor

  of the fingerboard, and Sancho see-sawed

  sea shells on the C sharp, you lost interest.

  Eventually I realised that what came between us

  was music, and so we went our separate ways.

  Me, to doing this, and you, laid out in a dusty cellar,

  to dream of being kissed awake by a handsome prodigy.

  Remembering, not a garden in Lombardy, but a factory in Taiwan.

  To Poetry Please

  What a daunting pleasure it has been over the years

  to sit in a studio and present you to the nation @bbc.co.uk.

  To celebrate poetry. Seven buxom women abre
ast,

  staggering and sliding on the ice-bound road.

  The red wheelbarrow. A boy falling from the sky.

  Dappled things, borogroves and runcible spoons.

  The secret ministry of frost, full moons and little Frieda.

  Rainbows and the liquefaction of Julia’s clothes.

  To celebrate the joy of socks. Love in the back of vans,

  sing the body reclining and the warming of her pearls.

  The way we were and the way we will be. Growing old,

  wearing purple, a joy to behold. And let us not forget

  the vacuum cleaner and the Ford Cortina BS8 2LR.

  More feel-good than Gielgud. Rhyme. I like that stuff.

  Let us sleep now. To Poetry Please, a little momento,

  some of your favourite lines stitched into a cento.

  To Bedtime Stories

  ‘How we envy the infant McGoughs tucked up in bed.

  Night after night of magical word-juggling at the hands of a consummate craftsman.

  How lucky they were, how grateful they must feel.’

  The Signal Award

  Sadly, you weren’t around when I was a child.

  In wartime, with blackouts and nightly bombings,

  the printed word was rationed, and there was little time

  for ill-fitting glass slippers and transvestite wolves.

  Sadly, my own books weren’t around either.

  How proud Mother would have felt reading

  my stories to me, as I joined in the exciting bits

  and quickly learned the poems off by heart.

  Because I write for children and often perform

  with apparent enthusiasm in front of young audiences,

  people assume I enjoyed reading to my own kids,

  the bedroom aglow with lilting reassurance.

  Alas, bedtime stories, I let you down. Grimm’s the word.

  I yawned my way through the classics. Boring swiftly

  of fables and fairy tales I would leave out great chunks.

  ‘Once upon a time they lived happily ever after. The end.’

  I blame the war and the clash of opening times and bedtimes.

  One eye on the smiling Thomas the Tank Engine clock,

  ‘Gosh, is that the quality time? Goodnight, sleep tight.’

  Kiss, kiss, and Daddy is down the stairs and off to the pub.

  So inept was I, so famously bad, that when the kids

  were still making a noise long after lights out

  my wife would shout upstairs, ‘Now go to sleep

  or your father will come up and read some of his poems.’

  We could hear the groaning as they burrowed

  beneath the duvets. ‘Oh no, not another night

  of magical word-juggling at the hands

  of a consummate craftsman.’ Then silence.

  To Contact Lenses

  We were never really suited, were we?

  A relationship that was bound to fail.

  I lacked the willpower.

  ‘Persevere, persevere,’ was the opticians’ mantra

  Over the years, five in all.

  (Four wearing glasses I seem to recall.)

  Putting you in was always a problem.

  Being short-sighted I could seldom hit the target

  and you would slide over the cornea,

  and disappear from the screen like a lost email,

  unread and irretrievable.

  Getting you out was even worse.

  Last thing at night, I would jab an eyeball

  impatiently like a doorbell, sending you into orbit

  around the cosmos, before landing, I imagined,

  on the dark side of the brain.

  Or perhaps sliding down a nasal passage

  into the trachea to end up lodged in a lung.

  Remember the time I found you on the floor

  of the bathroom, and thought I’d coughed you up?

  The pity is we didn’t meet sooner.

  Who knows what heights I might have achieved

  on the tennis court or the rugby field?

  But by the time you appeared on the scene

  the scene was an accustomed blur.

  Eventually my aim improved and lenses

  softened, but by then I’d given up on you.

  Now my sporting days are over

  and girls make fun not passes,

  and though tempted by the occasional fling,

  I face the fact, I’m stuck with glasses.

  To Deya

  I just wanted to say hello,

  and to thank you for the good times

  spent in your company without mentioning olive trees.

  But there, I’ve done it.

  Fallen straight into the holiday trap of making promises

  that cannot be kept, of failed resolutions.

  Olive trees, they’re bloody everywhere.

  Filling the terraces that stretch down to the sea

  from the garden in which I sit writing a poem

  (that seems, against my will and better judgement,

  to be about olive trees).

  When the moon is full, their leathery, silver leaves

  fall to the ground, curl up and become cicadas.

  Their trunks so rough and gnarled

  that lovers cannot carve their names into them.

  Even Robert Graves, whose house overlooks

  the terraces, forswore the knife for the pen.

  But thank you Deya

  for putting on a good show year after year.

  Swimming down at the cala, music at Sa Fonda,

  vino de casa, grilled squid and tumbet.

  And there was something else… Something interesting…

  But it’s too hot to think,

  sitting here in the garden looking at an olive tree

  that has become a poem about an olive tree

  that looks like another poem, and yet another,

  filling the pages that stretch down to the sea.

  To Advice Given to Aspiring Writers

  You mean well, let’s concede that from the start.

  Only the paranoid would point a pilgrimage of lemmings

  towards the cliff edge in the name of art.

  Given freely, your intentions are the best,

  but poured from a great height, you evaporate

  and your effectiveness is rarely put to the test.

  To avoid appearing venerable and dogmatic,

  the friendly and thoughtful, even playful approach

  is preferred, which in itself is problematic.

  Knowing there are few short cuts, no easy answers,

  you trot out the usual: Read, read, read.

  Avoid vanity presses. Don’t expect huge advances.

  My advice to you, Advice, is speak your mind,

  brutal honesty preventing a lifetime’s rejection.

  (Except of course to children, that would be unkind.)

  Imagination? Dear me, no. Talent? Not a lot.

  Abandon your dreams. Although your heart

  is in the right place, your words alas, are not.

  To Airplanes

  You have never let me down yet.

  (Well, you have actually, many times,

  although not in a screaming, texting-loved-ones,

  fireball-crashing-to-earth kind of way.)

  The trick you often play is to wind me up

  a few days before I’m due to take a flight.

  One of you will crash, often soon after take-off,

  although mountainsides and mid-air explosions

  over the Atlantic make for scarier news stories.

  And of course, it’s never your fault.

  Blame the weather, or human error, it’s

  air traffic control, ice on the runway, terrorists.

  Our adventures would fill a poet’s log.

  The night you took off from Bratislava during a blizzard,

  my feeble
protests lost in translation. Hailstones

  battering the windows like demented seagulls.

  As you zigzagged through the Tatra mountains

  (my publisher crouched under her seat with a bottle

  of slivovitz), the pilot tannoyed in a Slovakian falsetto.

  ‘What’s he saying?’ I yelled. ‘What’s he saying?’

  ‘He’s praying,’ she whimpered. ‘He’s praying.’

  But despite the helter-skelter buffetting,

  the erratic aerobatics, turbulence and flatulence,

  you bobsleighed safely along the runway at Košice.

  You are truly a miracle. We board you time after time,

  innocent as children. Watch the crew miming

  the blowing of whistles and the inflating of life jackets,

  and three Hail Marys later we are a thousand feet above the earth

  and climbing, climbing, climbing, climbing, climbing

  To Writer’s Block

  I will write a poem…

  when I’ve had another drink

  when a loved one dies

  when it stops raining

  when the threatening letters arrive

  when that filling is replaced

  when my wife leaves me

  Not as something blocking the drain

  a foreign object lodged in a U-bend of the brain

  But as an executioner’s block

  that’s how I have always imagined you.

  Bereft of ideas I am blindfolded

  and led by the gentle hand of a Muse

  up on to the blood-blackened scaffold,