while we pick cooking apples for their chunky jams.

An alley skulks down the garden’s exposed right side;

a garage, plastered to Atlantico’s torso, is an artificial limb;

huge Catholic windows stand watch over the distant Thames

which despatches mist and fog horns on grey mornings.

Sprawling, bedraggled, it is a wild mix of town and country.

IF I WERE a poet, Ellen muses, I’d say life’s a mangle,

squeezing every last drop out of me till I’m bloodless.

My arms are either full of babies, shopping, food,

or steeped in bowls of soapy water – flakes and liquid.

Saturday nights are action-packed. It’s all Go! Go! Go!

down at my psychedelic disco. I barely catch my breath.

First four hours I bathe, comb and file my grubby eight,

then pop their curly tops into bed, bunks and cots.

Just as the evening play comes on telly and a piping cup

of tea seeps and tingles through my bloodstream,

I trot down to the kitchen sink, roll up my sleeves to erase

all childhood stains from tops, bottoms and all-in-ones.

The whites go into a huge pail on the stove to dissolve

dirt and fill my house with the aroma of boiling cotton.

I make intimate, passionate love with some hard green soap,

seducing woollens, synthetics and coloured cottons.

By 10.30 I’m done but it’s no Saturday night movie for me.

My final flirtation is with an iron and ironing board,

a week’s ironing does not get done by fairies in the night.

By 12 the party’s over and I’m ready to collapse, comatose.

Sleep inevitably takes me to a paradise Greek island

but just as I nod off my youngest starts screaming.

A CATS’ CHORUS rains onto corrugated dustbins

as autumn’s first wind howls around Atlantico’s girth.

Lara kneels, face squashed against the steamy window

of the playroom, deserted by her siblings who’ve

tripped, leapt and elbowed down to tea in a whirlwind gallop.

In the front garden through the blur of splattering rain

she sees people watching her, young, old, so strange,

sitting motionless in a semi-circle on the grass,

lips unmoving but eyes alive with the singing of song:

‘Lara kiss, Lara kiss, we love you always, Lara kiss.’

Lara holds her breath, screws her eyes shut then opens

them to nothing but bruised grass and a whisper of a tune.

‘Lara! Get down here this minute. Whatever are up to?’

‘I’m coming, Mummy,’ she descends the wooden stairs

to take her place on the plastic-flowered kitchen table.

‘Mummy, I saw Daddy People in the garden singing me.’

‘Yes, and pigs might fly. Now eat your tea before I eat you.’

‘I did!’ she screeched, then sat pushing out her bottom lip.

Ellen raised her eyes to the ceiling, this fourth child of hers

was just the limit at times. Too fanciful, too boisterous

and too much silly imagination for her own good.