Five Poems by Peter J Donnelly

 

Fairfax House

 

I haven't yet been back

as I told my diary I would the day after

my trip twenty-three years ago

on a Friday morning in September.

 

I paid the entrance fee with a cheque, 

borrowed a calculator to work out 

my remaining balance, to write it 

on the stub. There was a tour

 

that day - only a few of us

so we were allowed to walk up 

the great staircase. I had lunch

at the Bar Convent, not in

 

the red saloon where a woman asked

'What about the ladies?' when

the guide explained how a gent 

full of booze would relieve himself 

 

behind a screen. I don't remember 

his reply, nor what I did in the afternoon, 

only that I saw West Side Story 

that night at the Grand Opera House. 

 

I bought nothing from the gift shop, 

though since then I've gone in there

many times, once got a birthday card 

for my aunt of a purple emperor butterfly.

 

 

Unexpected Things

 

I never thought I'd get the job

with the Mothers' Union, and I didn’t.

I interviewed well but failed the test.

Nor did I think I'd see my old 

piano teacher at King's Cross 

as I paid £1.20 for a tube ticket. 

She must have been on the same train

going down. The last thing I expected 

to happen walking back from 

Mary Summer House to the Underground 

was that as I passed an office door 

a lady I'd been at college with in Wales

would step out. I'd forgotten her name 

and she mine, but naturally we talked.

It turned out she came from Yorkshire too.

I hadn’t expected to meet her again,

and never have done since.

But what I least imagined then

was that except for Heathrow Airport 

it would be more than twenty years 

before I would be back.

 

 

Your Seven Years in Dulverton

 

I can see why you moved 

from Rochdale to Dartmouth,

but why from there to Dulverton

after a quarter of a century?

In Somerset for one thing,

and inland. Why not Porlock,

Lynton or Lynmouth?  

The sound of seagulls perhaps.

Dad and I didn’t look for your house

the day we walked there from Bampton.

It can’t have been far from the border.

We didn’t have the name or address

of where you’d spent seven years

before going back to Devon

where we little knew we were to see you 

next day at Willow Dene.

Had we known that I’d have bought you

a box of Milk Tray too,

instead of just one for your daughter

who’d arranged it, as she announced

over lunch at Meadowsweet.

 

 

Middleham

 

Till today it was a place to pass through

en route for Richmond or Aysgarth.

Now we miss the castle and car park,

slowing down for horses. Reaching moorland

never seen we turn round in a layby 

with a memorial to Dante in a dry stone wall -

the racehorse not the poet. The castle’s closed

for Christmas but we find a walk for another time,

gaze in the window of Ann’s Antiques, also shut.

More horses trot down the hill,

their riders say hello. The General Stores

don’t look a patch on Campbell’s of Leyburn,

so on we head there for some cheese,

to Hewson’s for cards, in time to see 

a steam train pull in as we drive away. 

I will come back on the bus one day.

 

 

Housing Maintenance, Repairs Section

 

My first office - an attic

in Duncombe Place with a view 

from a dormer window

down Blake Street towards Betty's.

At fifteen I wanted that fortnight

not to end. Coffee whenever

I chose, the shops at lunchtime,

drives to suburbs I didn't know

existed, a walk to a hidden garden

in the city centre. And once

tea and biscuits in an old couple's

ground floor flat. Like Christmas

or the holidays, it ended,

but the attic's still there, above

what's now an antique centre.

The view will still be there too,

hardly changed in twenty-seven years,

but not the same people to see it.

Peter J Donnelly lives in York where he works as a hospital secretary.  He has a degree in English Literature and a MA in Creative Writing from the University of Wales Lampeter.  He has been published in various magazines and anthologies, was a joint runner up in the Buzzwords Open Poetry Competition in 2020 and came second in the Ripon Poetry Festival competition in 2021.  His first full length collection Solving the Puzzle was published in 2023 by Alien Buddha Press, as was his chapbook The Second of August.