It Didn't Mean Standing Still

We called it the writing cupboard, in Mr Poll’s class,

until he taught us the word stationery

and the mystery of why it didn’t mean standing still.

Head-teacher in a rural primary school, after sea-time

as first mate in some of the places

he told us about that we sneaked looks at in atlases.

He was very brown, the only brown skin in that school,

in those days of shorts and snake-belts,

dull school dinners and crates of tiny milk bottles.

Nobody asked him where he was from, no point,

you could hear it in the Hotspur “R”

- a Northumbrian consonant stolen from Old Germanic.

Mr Poll would look over half-moon glasses at me

or one of the other brightly disruptive boys

and say “What do you think about that, Sinbad?”

Perhaps he didn’t know our names, thirty to remember

is quite a lot, after all. So all the boys were sailors,

but the girls got their names and he meant nothing by it.

I wonder what happened to Graham Poll, now and then,

he looked like Herbert Lom, somehow escaped

from that Sunday afternoon film The Ladykillers.

Footnote: the Hotspur "R" sounds like the Germanic R that is pronounced towards the back of the mouth with no tongue intervention. Harry Hotspur (of Shakespeare fame) had a speech impediment, they say. The pronunciation survives in North Northumberland.