Doodlebug

Doodlebug

I remember now the ashtray,
a silvered metal tower with a spinning disc
that launched the crumpled stubs
off at a tangent into the bowl below.

I remember, too, the blazing fire
we were never allowed to turn our backs on
- 'lest we melt our marrows' -
and the history book whose bright red cover
opened easily in our young hands
to the cross-section of a doodlebug.

And Grandad's whistling voice as he tells us,
not for the first time, about the neighbour's boy:
'thirty eight and still at 'ome, his brains forever addled
when one a them fell on t'thear 'owse
and them lucky to be 'uddled in thear Anderson'.

The smouldering cylinder of metal, thirty miles off-course,
as incongruous in this mining village as the ashtray in his house.