The Taming of the Shrew - Margaret Leighton
The Shrew
It isn’t the
one performance I’ve seen,
open air,
gender-swapped, abridged,
that comes
back to me
as I read it
for the first time
in twenty-one
years,
well as I
remember that,
at Fountains
Abbey, the day after
my final exam.
Sly was Scottish,
they messed up
the ending,
Bianca
disappeared as the actress
was playing
Petruchio as well.
Nor is it
Burton and Taylor,
though I can
just picture them now.
Katherina’s
voice for me
will always be
that of Margaret Leighton
on the Harper
Collins recording
I had on two
white cassettes
and wish now I
had kept,
or got it on
CD instead.
Go get thee
gone,
thou false
deluding slave
was the only
line I thought I remembered,
as it’s
printed on a postcard
I use as a
bookmark
in my book of
Brontë poems.
It turns out
there are hardly
any lines I
have forgotten.
Services
These days
they have Costa, M&S, Gregg's Bakers,
you can take
your picnic indoors,
once you
couldn't even eat it outside on the grass.
You had to
cross a glass bridge over the motorway
to queue for
food that had stood there all morning.
You got to
know them, remembered when
you had been
there before,
like Charles
Ryder coming back to Brideshead
or Maxim de
Winter at Monte Carlo.
You'd
recognise the map on the wall,
the freezer in
the shop where last time
you were
allowed an ice cream.
I used to
think they were miles away
from anywhere,
not near the outskirts of towns,
that people
who worked there
had to travel
for hours each day
and back. I
wondered where they lived,
did they have to stop on the way?
Waking Up
In the night
is like
stopping off
on a long
journey.
You often
don't
know where you
are.
It's neither
yesterday
nor tomorrow.
Both
are hours away
like home, or
the place
you're
travelling to.
Nature calls,
you drink some
water,
maybe even a
cup of tea.
Look out of
the window,
see cars going
past,
you wonder
where
they’re going.
Usually for
me
it's at
half-past three.
I think of
what I was doing
twelve hours
ago,
where I was
and where I’ll
be
in twelve
hours’ time.
Granny’s Roast Dinners
It was always beef, never pork or lamb.
It felt like Sunday lunch time but could have
been four o’clock during the week,
perhaps Good Friday or the day after Boxing Day.
I learnt years later she used cornflour
in her gravy but I’ll never know
her secret ingredient for Yorkshire puddings,
which always rose - except once.
Dessert, if there was one, was mandarin oranges
or mandeerian, as she said it,
in orange jelly, maybe with ice-cream.
You had to save room for afternoon tea
or in our case more lemonade or cola,
chocolate bars or the icing and marzipan
from a Christmas or anniversary cake
somebody else had baked.
My Second Letter to Rosemary
You didn’t receive the first one
written nearly thirty years ago,
sent to the address of an R Sutcliff
that I found in the phone book
after I was told you lived in York.
Someone must have got it,
but they didn’t return it
though at thirteen I knew
to write my address on the back.
My school librarian must have been
thinking of some other children’s author,
I can’t imagine who. You had died
about three months previously,
but I didn’t read newspapers then -
just your books. Even new copies
had gone to print while you still lived.
It must have been the following year
after I had grown out of them
that I came across one in a shop
or library and learned from the first page
that you’d passed away in 1992,
the year I’d started reading you.
I hadn’t grown out of writing stories
though I never started the one I’d planned
about my local White Horse
after reading Sun Horse Moon Horse
and I’ve never yet been to Uffington.
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