13 April 2005

THOSE START-RITE KIDS…   So much of the writing of poetry involves me, I find, in a trek backwards into my past.  It’s as if I’m trying somehow to account for those moments of epiphany or trauma, setting the dreamlike recollection of them against my understanding of the present, seeking out a continuum along which both lie.  Maybe the poems decode those signals from times past in some way, struggling for some articulation of the ineffable.  Maybe they merely rearrange the data, like notes contained within a scale: a different melody from the same base elements.   Those fumes from the past are often the most potent in the form of images, not words.  In the same way that the tritest of tunes can reconstruct instantly a three-dimensional sense of place & time, so the most banal of visual images can bring whirling back the sense of a world long past.   In days long before kindergarten-size Nike trainers or Converse baseball boots we all wore Start-rite sandals.  With their crepe soles & their stencilled leaf patterns on the uppers, they were unisex & irredeemably juvenile.  Wearing them, it was entirely impossible to present yourself to the world as anything other than a Child.   I shall always associate Start-rite shoes with rationing, trams, short-back-&-sides haircuts, London bombsites, a glass of orangeade & an arrowroot biscuit outside the pub on a Saturday morning just before lunch.  With my own primal innocence.  And, for the world, with hope in a time of exhaustion & decay…   VANISHING POINT   Those Start-rite kids. A tam o’ shantered boy, a bobble-hatted girl, both austerity shod   and utility wrapped against the winter of the world. I used to wonder   where they were going. Somewhere far away, so swaddled and determined. I bet they had their gloves   on long elastic through each sleeve. I bet they had their Chilprufe vests, their Aertex shirts buttoned up across   their breakfasts.  Bet they had hope in their hearts, dreams unconsumed by fire or water, as each set sensible foot   on the long, straight highway. So much is promised us in a hurting world between here and the vanishing point       11:40:22 PM    Mmm? []

© Copyright 2005 Dick Jones. Last update: 29/04/2005; 23:28:26.