‘Caroline Smith’s selection is an amazing tour-de-force… a fiercely strong piece of work which deserves some sort of award for story telling.’
Edith
This extended thirty-page narrative poem ‘Edith’ unfolds the life of a woman born in St. Helens, Lancashire in 1899. In 1954 Edith moved to Glasgow and became nanny to a family for 35 years, but there is a secret, from before the war, at the heart of Edith’s life and it is this that emerges in the latter years of her life and after her death.
‘Caroline Smith’s selection is an amazing tour-de-force… a fiercely strong piece of work which deserves some sort of award for story telling.’
‘What strikes me particularly is the pervading feeling of love the poem evokes.’
‘I find the similes arresting, often the result of careful observation, like the sparrow, “clicking its beak of knitting needles”, the doves who “crouch over the bird table/and drink like monks.” (p119)’
Edith VII
Her stories fitted together like the jumpers
she knitted, a beautiful cream
with an odd white streak down one sleeve.
There was no trace of her in Somerset House
and her mantelpiece, tiled grey and gleaming,
had no family photographs.
But always the five-pound note would arrive
on the anniversary of some long-remembered kindness
and any questions would be blocked.
‘It’s a long time ago.
I lost everything in the Blitz.’
Edith VI
They were looking for her teeth.
They’d put them in the wrong mouth.
Opening mouths,
clicking them down
and removing them, checking,
and pushing them back in like drawers.They found who’d got them.
‘Muriel had your teeth, Ede!’‘Is that what she’s in for, then?’
Edith XXV
I was disentangling a story
locked together like a thong of washing.
‘Ede, what happened with the watches?
Did Sandy recognise Father’s watch
in confession as the one he’d fenced?’She was spitting out bits of nut from her chocolates,
snail tongue extending over her gums.
‘Father had his stolen.
I got one from Tan Tivvi for his birthday
and ended up giving him back his own watch!’I saw her with the young Fathers –
servicing their flocks.
She’d been mesmerised by their
easy tally of sin and forgiveness.The washing was the closest she’d got
to understanding their religion.
Filling the deep sink,
puncturing bloated clothes with fawn tongs,
scrubbing out the dirt,
pouring it like spaghetti, resisting,
then in one mass
wriggling and unflicking off the side.The simplicity of clean sweet-smelling clothes
folded and put away.
It had always been like that for the men.
The one she’d left St Helens with
had returned home a year later.The Fathers would glide by
with their proud rigid necks,
a galleon of swans splintering water,
crowbars framed into meekness.‘When was that , Ede?’
‘I don’t remember.’
The room had become a solid brick sky,
the air static with her agitation,
her brow whipped into serrated water.I stroked the veins of her hand,
lead divides of a stained-glass window
shiny as tissue paper.She’d decided a long time ago never to tell,
as he lay sucking in the weight of
milk through his beaker spout,
squelching as he stopped the downflow to ask‘Why did you come to live with us?’
His eyelash was pricking her saggy neck,
the damp patch of her breath on his head.
How could she tell him that there’d been another little boy?
That she’d found no sin and forgiveness
only choices
and the guilt of caring, greasy as starlings
shaking their spiked heads.How have this love
blown back in her face
like the used breath of a kitchen vent?