A place where I'll post up some thoughts and ideas - especially on literature in education, children's literature in general, poetry, reading, writing, teaching and thoughts on current affairs.
Sunday, 26 October 2014
New poem: Brooch
Sometime after my father died, my step-mother came
over with a small plastic pot. One of the things in it was
a brass brooch of a miner’s lamp. I had never seen it
before. I went online to see what it was. I found out
that they were sold by the miners’ union during and
after the General Strike of 1926. It was to help the
miners’ families who were starving. I remembered from
when I was a boy, my father saying that he could
remember the General Strike from when he was 7.
Something about a type-writer being thrown over a wall.
He hadn’t ever mentioned the brooch. It must have
been his mother’s. He didn’t know his father. He was
in the US. He, his sister and his mother didn’t live
near any pits and coalfields. They lived in Whitechapel,
in east London. In a house with 6 or 7 others. He said
he shared a bedroom with his Uncle Sam. They didn’t
talk to each other he said. Sam had spoiled a cap my father
had been bought on Petticoat Lane. I asked him who
turned the bedroom light out? Neither of us, he said. They
had candles, not lights. I remember his mother. He called
her ‘Ma’. I didn’t know then that she had had a baby who
died. Or that her father and mother came from Poland. I
don’t know if anyone in the house knew any miners. My
father said that sometimes sailors used to come to the
house. He remembered a sailor who came from Jamaica.