When the sun finally bears down to unfurl flowers,

Ellen is scooting outside after breakfast, cycling the vast

acres of empty playground with her new friend Gerard,

the gamekeeper’s curly, red-haired son with freckles.

Their giggles bubble behind hills as they roll down

a long green slope stopping just short of the muddy lane.

From the manicured gardens of No 31 to the echoing hills

of Necton, Ellen grew into her wildness without hiccups.

REDCURRANT, blackcurrant, blackberries, gooseberries

grow everywhere to be gorged by the voracious two

between hide-and-seek in the woods and on-the-hop pees

behind bushes. Gerard crowned the straggly-haired Ellen

the Buttercup Princess with a garland of flowers

before racing her to the walls of the Hall where injured

soldiers recuperated in the absence of the owner

who’d ‘gorn orf’ to the Bahamas for the duration.

When cold sunk the countryside several feet in snow

and building snowmen was boring, Gerard battered

Ellen’s toys on the floor, just like a soldier, he said, sneering

at her cry-baby tears over beheaded dolls and gutted teddies.

‘You bully, you!’ she screeched before storming

off to Auntie Dora, whom she knew adored her.

Term time Dora taught evacuees in the village school,

holidays she picked fruit, made jam, trifles, soups

while the laughing pair threw mud pies at each other,

squelched their feet in mud, their hair clotted dollops

until Dora threw pails of water on their pale squirming

bodies then scrubbed them down until their skins flushed.

Night-time she snuggled Ellen to bed and told her to pray

for her parents, orphans and the war’s sorry suffering.

VISITORS glide through the folly like woodland fairies,

their visits gilded treats, bringers of goodies, transient.

Wintertime, Jacob brought a toboggan made in Hamburg,

shipped over when he fled the Nazis in the Thirties.

Like a reindeer he heaved the great ‘Alaskan sleigh’

over frozen ponds to the squeals of his delighted passengers.

The quick-click heels of Peggy were heard some weekends

while she ‘set the kitchen to rights’, she said, tut-tutted

the angles of Ellen’s hair into two tidy plaits, slipped

a floral dress over shorts, bemoaned the new-found

exuberance in her usually taciturn child, but let it go –

all creases would be starched out post-war. Her heels

ground into gravel as she briskly waved herself away.

Arms brimming with toys, Auntie Violet’s laughter

preceded her fur-draped self. Lounging on the sofa,

regaling wide-eyed Ellen with tales of the war’s horrors,

lips dangling a cigarette, whisky kissing her mouth.

She slurred her tottery cheery-byes to a tittering niece

for whom war was homemade lemonade on a daisy-strewn,

sun-soaked field of a shimmering summer’s afternoon.

ELLEN

DEAR MUMMY and daddy, thank you for the choklate

very much i had my tooth out last week the fairees

put a sixpence under my pilow. I play very happily with Gerard

we go to school all day. how i like it. we have a teeny weeny