Ode on a Greyson Perry Urn by Tim Turnbull

 

Tim Turnbull

Hello! What's all this here? A kitschy vase

some Shirley Temple manqué has knocked out

delineating tales of kids in cars

on crap estates, the Burberry clad louts

who flail their motors through the smoky night

from Manchester to Motherwell or Slough,

creating bedlam on the Queen's highway.

Your gaudy evocation can, somehow,

conjure the scene without inducing fright,

as would a Daily Express exposé,

can bring to mind the throaty turbo roar

of hatchbacks tuned almost to breaking point,

the joyful throb of UK garage or

of house imported from the continent

and yet educe a sense of peace, of calm -

the screech of tyres and the nervous squeals

of girls, too young to quite appreciate

the peril they are in, are heard, but these wheels

will not lose traction, skid and flip, no harm

befall these children. They will stay out late

forever, pumped on youth and ecstasy,

on alloy, bass and arrogance, and speed

the back lanes, the urban gyratory,

the wide motorways, never having need

to race back home, for work next day, to bed.

Each girl is buff, each geezer toned and strong,

charged with pulsing juice which, even yet,

fills every pair of Calvin’s and each thong,

never to be deflated, given head

in crude games of chlamydia roulette.

Now see who comes to line the sparse grass verge,

to toast them in Buckfast and Diamond White:

rat-boys and corn-rowed cheerleaders who urge

them on to pull more burn-outs or to write

their donut Os, as signature, upon

the bleached tarmac of dead suburban streets.

There dogs set up a row and curtains twitch

as pensioners and parents telephone

the cops to plead for quiet, sue for peace -

tranquility, though, is for the rich.

And so, millennia hence, you garish crock,

when all context is lost, galleries razed

to level dust and we're long in the box,

will future poets look on you amazed,

speculate how children might have lived when

you were fired, lives so free and bountiful

and there, beneath a sun a little colder,

declare How happy were those creatures then,

who knew the truth was all negotiable

and beauty in the gift of the beholder.

Click here to read Ode on a Grecian Urn by John Keats

from Possession by A. S. Byatt

A. S. Byatt

Set on the night of 15 October 1987, Hilderbrand Ash and Mortimer Cropper are digging up a grave of one of Ashe's relatives to retrieve a box buried with the relative.

They dug. They threw up an increasing mound, a mixture of clay and flints, chopped ends of roots, small bones of vole and bird, stones, sifted pebbles. Hildebrand grunted as he worked, his bald head glinting in the moonlight. Cropper swung his spade with a kind of joy. He felt he was over some border of the permissible and everything was just fine. He was not a grey old scholar, smelling of the lamp, sitting on his fundament. He was doing, he would find, it was his destiny. He poised his sharp spade above the earth and struck and struck with a terrible glee, slicing, penetrating the sloppy and the resistant. He took off his jacket and felt the rain on his back with pleasure, and his own sweat trickling between his shoulder blades and down his breast, with joy. He struck, he struck, he struck.

"Steady on," said Hildebrand, and "Keep going," hissed Cropper, pulling with his bare hands at a long snake of the yew's root system, getting out his heavy knife to cut it.

"It is here. I know it is here."

"Go steady. We don't want to disturb the—disturb—if we can help it."

"No. We shouldn't have to. Keep at it."

A wind was getting up. It flapped a little: one or two of the churchyard trees creaked and groaned. A sudden gust lifted Cropper's discarded jacket briefly from the stone where it hung, and dropped it to the earth. ... Cropper snuffed the air. Something seemed to move and swing and sway in it, as if ready to slap at him. He felt for a moment, very purely, a presence, not of someone, but of some mobile thing, and for a moment rested dully on his spade, forbidden. In that moment, the great storm hit Sussex. A long tongue of wind howled past, a wall of air banged at Hildebrand, who sat down suddenly in the clay, winded. Cropper began to dig again. A kind of dull howling and whistling began, and then a chorus of groans, and creaking sighs, the trees, protesting. A tile spun off the church roof. Cropper opened his mouth and shut it again. The wind moved in the graveyard like a creature from another dimension, trapped and screaming. The branches of the yew and cedar gesticulated desperately.

Cropper went on digging. "I will," he said. "I will."

He told Hildebrand to go on, but Hildebrand couldn't hear and wasn't looking; he was sitting in the mud next to a gravestone, clutching the neck of his jacket, fighting the air that had worked its way inside. Cropper dug. Hildebrand began to crawl slowly round the rim of Cropper's excavation. The very bases of the yew and the cedar began to shift, to move laterally and to complain. Hildebrand pulled at Cropper's sleeve.

"Stop. Go in. This is—beyond the limit. Not safe. Shelter."

Horizontal rain whipped and sliced the flesh of his cheeks.

"Not now," said Cropper, poising his spade like a divining rod, and struck again.

He hit metal. He got down to the earth and scrabbled with his hands. It came up—an oblong thing, covered with corrosion, a nugget recognisably shaped. He sat down, on the adjacent stone, clutching it.

The Great Storm 15 - 16 October 1987

He set out across the churchyard. The air was full of noises. There was a whining, ripping noise, which he saw was the sound of the trees along the track and in the hedgerow whipping to and fro, tossing their crowns of trailing twigs from earth to sky to earth.

Click here to buy a copy of Possession by A. S. Byatt

Some questions

What different ways does Byatt use to create the storm in this scene?

How are the two men presented in this episode?

The Pedestrian By Ray Bradbury

  

Ray Bradbury

To enter out into that silence that was the city at eight o'clock of a misty evening in November, to put your feet upon that buckling concrete walk, to step over grassy seams and make your way, hands in pockets, through the silences, that was what Mr. Leonard Mead most dearly loved to do. He would stand upon the corner of an intersection and peer down long moonlit avenues of sidewalk in four directions, deciding which way to go, but it really made no difference; he was alone in this world of A.D. 2053, or as good as alone, and with a final decision made, a path selected, he would stride off, sending patterns of frosty air before him like the smoke of a cigar. 

Sometimes he would walk for hours and miles and return only at midnight to his house. And on his way he would see the cottages and homes with their dark windows, and it was not unequal to walking through a graveyard where only the faintest glimmers of firefly light appeared in flickers behind the windows. Sudden grey phantoms seemed to manifest upon inner room walls where a curtain was still undrawn against the night, or there were whisperings and murmurs where a window in a tomb like building was still open. 

Mr. Leonard Mead would pause, cock his head, listen, look, and march on, his feet making no noise on the lumpy walk. For long ago he had wisely changed to sneakers when strolling at night, because the dogs in intermittent squads would parallel his journey with barking if he wore hard heels, and lights might click on and faces appear and an entire street be startled by the passing of a lone figure, himself, in the early November evening. 

On this particular evening he began his journey in a westerly direction, toward the hidden sea. There was a good crystal frost in the air; it cut the nose and made the lungs blaze like a Christmas tree inside; you could feel the cold light going on and off, all the branches filled with invisible snow. He listened to the faint push of his soft shoes through autumn leaves with satisfaction, and whistled a cold quiet whistle between his teeth, occasionally picking up a leaf as he passed, examining its skeletal pattern in the infrequent lamplights as he went on, smelling its rusty smell. 

"Hello, in there," he whispered to every house on every side as he moved. "What's up tonight on Channel 4, Channel 7, Channel 9? Where are the cowboys rushing, and do I see the United States Cavalry over the next hill to the rescue?" 

The street was silent and long and empty, with only his shadow moving like the shadow of a hawk in mid-country. If he closed his eyes and stood very still, frozen, he could imagine himself upon the centre of a plain, a wintry, windless Arizona desert with no house in a thousand miles, and only dry river beds, the streets, for company.

"What is it now?" he asked the houses, noticing his wristwatch. "Eight-thirty P.M.? Time for a dozen assorted murders? A quiz? A revue? A comedian falling off the stage?" Was that a murmur of laughter from within a moon-white house? He hesitated, but went on when nothing more happened. He stumbled over a particularly uneven section of sidewalk. The cement was vanishing under flowers and grass. In ten years of walking by night or day, for thousands of miles, he had never met another person walking, not once in all that time.

 He came to a cloverleaf intersection which stood silent where two main highways crossed the town. During the day it was a thunderous surge of cars, the gas stations open, a great insect rustling and a ceaseless jockeying for position as the scarab-beetles, a faint incense puttering from their exhausts, skimmed homeward to the far directions. But now these highways, too, were like streams in a dry season, all stone and bed and moon radiance.

He turned back on a side street, circling around toward his home. He was within a block of his destination when the lone car turned a corner quite suddenly and flashed a fierce white cone of light

upon him. He stood entranced, not unlike a night moth, stunned by the illumination, and then drawn toward it.

A metallic voice called to him:

"Stand still. Stay where you are! Don't

move!"

He halted.

"Put up your hands!"

"But-" he said.

"Your hands up! Or we'll Shoot!"

The police, of course, but what a rare, incredible thing; in a city of three million, there was only one police car left, wasn't that correct? Ever since a year ago, 2052, the election year, the force had been cut down from three cars to one. Crime was ebbing; there was no need now for the police, save for this one lone car wandering and wandering the empty streets. "Your name?" said the police car in a metallic whisper. He couldn't see the men in it for the bright light in his eyes.

"Leonard Mead," he said.

"Speak up!"

"Leonard Mead!"

"Business or profession?"

"I guess you'd call me a writer."

"No profession," said the police car, as if talking to itself. The light held him fixed, like a museum specimen, needle thrust through chest.

"You might say that, " said Mr. Mead. He hadn't written in years. Magazines and books didn't sell any more. Everything went on in the tomb-like houses at night now, he thought, continuing his fancy. The tombs, ill-lit by television light, where the people sat like the dead, the gray or multicoloured lights touching their faces, but never really touching them.

"No profession," said the phonograph voice, hissing. "What are you doing out?"

"Walking," said Leonard Mead.

"Walking!"

"Just walking," he said simply, but his face

felt cold.

"Walking, just walking, walking?"

"Yes, sir."

"Walking where? For what?"

"Walking for air. Walking to see."

"Your address!"

"Eleven South Saint James Street."

"And there is air in your house, you have an

air conditioner, Mr. Mead?"

"Yes."

"And you have a viewing screen in your

house to see with?"

"No."

"No?" There was a crackling quiet that in

itself was an accusation.

"Are you married, Mr. Mead?"

"No."

"Not married," said the police voice behind the fiery beam, The moon was high and clear among the stars and the houses were grey and silent.

"Nobody wanted me," said Leonard Mead with a smile.

"Don't speak unless you're spoken to!"

Leonard Mead waited in the cold night.

"Just walking, Mr. Mead?"

"Yes."

"But you haven't explained for what purpose."

"I explained; for air, and to see, and just to walk."

"Have you done this often?"

"Every night for years."

The police car sat in the centre of the street with its radio throat faintly humming.

"Well, Mr. Mead," it said.

"Is that all?" he asked politely.

"Yes," said the voice. "Here." There was a sigh, a pop. The back door of the police car sprang wide. "Get in."

"Wait a minute, I haven't done anything!"

"Get in."

"I protest!"

"Mr. Mead."

He walked like a man suddenly drunk. As he passed the front window of the car he looked in. As he had expected, there was no one in the front seat, no one in the car at all.

"Get in."

He put his hand to the door and peered into the back seat, which was a little cell, a little black jail with bars. It smelled of riveted steel. It smelled of harsh antiseptic; it smelled too clean and hard and metallic. There was nothing soft there.

"Now if you had a wife to give you an alibi," said the iron voice. "But-"

"Where are you taking me?"

The car hesitated, or rather gave a faint whirring click, as if information, somewhere, was dropping card by punch-slotted card under electric eyes. "To the Psychiatric Centre for Research on Regressive Tendencies." He got in. The door shut with a soft thud. The police car rolled through the night avenues, flashing its dim lights ahead.

They passed one house on one street a moment later, one house in an entire city of houses that were dark, but this one particular house had all of its electric lights brightly lit, every window a loud yellow illumination, square and warm in the cool darkness.

"That's my house," said Leonard Mead. No one answered him. The car moved down the empty river-bed streets and off away, leaving the empty streets with the empty side-walks, and no sound and no motion all the rest of the chill November night.

I Spy by Graham Greene

Graham Greene

Charlie Stowe waited until he heard his mother snore before he got out of bed. Even then he moved with caution and tiptoed to the window. The front of the house was irregular, so that it was possible to see a light burning in his mother’s room. But now all the windows were dark. A searchlight passed across the sky, lighting the banks of cloud and probing the dark deep spaces between, seeking enemy airships. The wind blew from the sea, and Charlie Stowe could hear behind his mother’s snores the beating of the waves. A draught through the cracks in the window-frame stirred his night-shirt. Charlie Stowe was frightened. 

But the thought of the tobacconist’s shop which his father kept down a dozen wooden stairs drew him on. He was twelve years old, and already boys at the County School mocking him because he had never smoked a cigarette. The packets were piled twelve deep below, Gold Flake and Player’s, De Rezke, Abdulla, Woodbines, and the little shop lay under a thin haze of stale smoke which would completely disguise his crime. That it was a crime to steal some of his father’s stock Charlie Stowe had no doubt, but he did not love his father; his father was unreal to him, a wraith, pale, thin, indefinite, who noticed him only spasmodically and left even punishment to his mother. For his mother he felt a passionate demonstrative love; her large boisterous presence and her noisy charity filled the world for him; from her speech he judged her the friend of everyone, from the rector’s wife to the ‘dear Queen’, except the ‘Huns’, the monsters who lurked in Zeppelins in the clouds. But his father’s affection and dislike were as indefinite as his movements. Tonight he had said he would be in Norwich, and yet you never knew. Charlie Stowe had no sense of safety as he crept down the wooden stairs. When they creaked he clenched his fingers on the collar of his night-shirt. 

At the bottom of the stairs he came out quite suddenly into the little shop. It was too dark to see his way, and he did not dare touch the switch. For half a minute he sat in despair on the bottom step with his chin cupped in his hands. Then the regular movement of the searchlight was reflected through an upper window and the boy had time to fix in memory the pile of cigarettes, the counter, and the small hole under it. The footsteps of a policeman on the pavement made him grab the first packet to his hand and dive for the hole. A light shone along the floor and a hand tried the door, then the footsteps passed on, and Charlie cowered in the darkness.

At last he got his courage back by telling himself in his curiously adult way that if he were caught now there was nothing to be done about it, and he might as well have his smoke. He put a cigarette in his mouth and then remembered that he had no matches. For a while, he dared not move. Three times the searchlight lit the shop, as he muttered taunts and encouragements. “May as well be hung for a sheep,”” Cowardy, cowardy custard,” grown-up and childish exhortations oddly mixed. 

But as he moved he heard footfalls in the street, the sound of several men walking rapidly. Charlie Stowe was old enough to feel surprise that anybody was about. The footsteps came nearer, stopped; a key was turned in the shop door, a voice said: “Let him in,” and then he heard his father, “If you wouldn’t mind being quiet, gentlemen. I don’t want to wake up the family.” There was a note unfamiliar to Charlie in the undecided voice. A torch flashed and the electric globe burst into blue light. The boy held his breath; he wondered whether his father would hear his heart beating, and he clutched his night-shirt tightly and prayed, “O God, don’t let me be caught.” Through a crack in the counter, he could see his father where he stood, one hand held to his high stiff collar, between two men in bowler hats and belted mackintoshes. They were strangers.

“Have a cigarette,” his father said in a voice dry as a biscuit. One of the men shook his head. 

“It wouldn’t do, not when we are on duty. Thank you all the same.” He spoke gently but without kindness: Charlie Stowe thought his father must be ill.

“Mind if I put a few in my pocket?” Mr Stowe asked, and when the man nodded he lifted a pile of Gold Flake and Players from a shelf and caressed the packets with the tips of his fingers. 

“Well,” he said, “there’s nothing to be done about it, and I may as well have my smokes.” For a moment Charlie Stowe feared discovery, his father stared round the shop so thoroughly; he might have been seeing it for the first time. “It’s a good little business,” he said, “for those that like it. The wife will sell out, I suppose. Else the neighbours will be wrecking it. Well, you want to be off. A stitch in time. I’ll get my coat.”

“One of us will come with you if you don’t mind,” said the stranger gently.

“You needn’t trouble. It’s on the peg here. There, I’m all ready.”

The other man said in an embarrassed way, “Don’t you want to speak to your wife?” The thin voice was decided, “Not me. Never do today what you can put off till tomorrow. She’ll have her chance later, won’t she?”

“Yes, yes,” one of the strangers said and he became very cheerful and encouraging. “Don’t you worry too much. While there’s life … ,”

And suddenly his father tried to laugh.

When the door had closed Charlie Stowe tiptoed upstairs and got into bed. He wondered why his father had left the house again so late at night and who the strangers were. Surprise and awe kept him for a little while awake. It was as if a familiar photograph had stepped from the frame to reproach him with neglect. He remembered how his father had held tight to his collar and fortified himself with proverbs, and he thought for the first time that, while his mother was boisterous and kindly, his father was very like himself, doing things in the dark which frightened him. It would have pleased him to go down to his father and tell him that he loved him, but he could hear through the window the quick steps going away. He was alone in the house with his mother, and he fell asleep.

Tobacconist shop 1914