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FOSDYKE AND ME

A SAGA

© John Gilham 2000

Fosdyke and Me

 

 

The reason the 12th West Middlesex Boys' Brigade football team

Never won a match was Fosdyke and me

Week after week Fosdyke and me would stand there in the freezing rain

Peering through the West London grunge to where

The tall, lithe, athletic, skilful, bodies of our team-mates

Leapt and plunged after the entirely unpredictable movements

Of a small, sodden, leather mass that me and Fosdyke were there to stop

 

Right back, him, and left back, me

We got agitated when figures loomed out of the drizzle, coming our way

Fosdyke and me would paw the ground like nervous thoroughbreds

Dash this way and that, look threatening behind our NHS specs

Though our legs, I seem to remember, developed all the elegance of a new-born giraffe

As the ball was tapped expertly between them and on towards goal.

 

Every Saturday me and Fosdyke used to cycle out to some forgotten field,

No changing rooms, no bogs, no spectators, except dogs

(Who'd cock their leg on your bike)

And spend an afternoon being shouted at, pushed in the mud, or told by the goalkeeper to

"Leave it to me!" just when we might have had a kick at it.

 

Fosdyke and me were responsible, I'm sure,

For our Captain's permanent sore throat, instructing us from a distance.

"Cretins" he called us, which wasn't polite, or p.c., but understandable,

Unlike "Mark your man!" or "Lob!"; and the offside rule eludes me still,

Though I was shouted at about it quite a lot

 

Fosdyke and me got elbowed aside quite a lot too,

If not by the casual thundering force of the opposition

So that by the time I'd cleaned the mud off my glasses

They'd scored another three goals,

Then by exasperated members of our own team,

Desperately trying to save the day.

Stopping me and Fosdyke getting the ball got to be quite important for our side

 

Usually, we lost ten-nil or so, though once it was only one - nil

When the other side had only six men.

 

Me and Fosdyke used to commiserate between spurts of action.

"Only another seventy-three minutes to go."

We didn't always remember to change ends at half time

And when our glasses steamed up and our knees froze beneath our shorts

And everything else beneath our shorts as well,

And we'd been knocked over and trod on and shouted at for nearly 90 minutes

I sometimes used to wonder why me and Fosdyke were there at all

 

Except that I knew.  They needed us. We made a full squad.

No-one could ever say the 12th West Middlesex Boys' Brigade

Was two players short of a footballteam.

  

Fosdyke and me and football remained strangers to the end

Even when we both simultaneously slide tackled a player coming out of the mist

And it was the referee, even when, once, we scored - and it was an own goal

They knew we were loyal and dutiful, me and Fosdyke

And we kept going one whole season, even though no-one ever said thanks

or "Well-played" (which anyway would have been a lie)

 

Fosdyke and me, we had our day."'

 

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Me and Fosdyke, Again.

Every time the Heston and Isleworth Young Socialists held a dance, I'd go with Fosdyke

Me and Fosdyke would get on the bus, self-conscious in Italian suits, winklepickers, slimline ties, and    national health spectacles,

We'd pat our pockets for the dance tickets, the ten-bob note for drinks, the packet of Durex we'd bought last time and never used but still hoped to, and a stolen tube of K Y jelly just in case

(though we weren't sure in case of what, or where you applied it, or when)

And we'd spent all day curling our lips like Elvis, pouting like Billy Fury, moving real slow like Gene Vincent, fixing them with a look

And in the mirror, anyway, our chat-up lines worked every time, like Brylcreem in the ads.

 

Not that we were ever real Young Socialists, me and Fosdyke.

We felt left out.  All that heady talk of comrades and the Trots made us think of horses, or diarrhea

And we weren't Young Conservatives either - wrong clothes, wrong accents, wrong breeding, wrong kind of dancing, wrong politics even,

Those long-legged, horse-riding, bacardi drinking, weekend sailing, super girls were not for us

And we weren't anybody's idea of a bit of rough, even.

 

No, when Fosdyke and me went dancing, we went for the girls who went for Johnny Red and the Pirates and if they couldn't have Johnny up there on the stage would maybe have us, on the rebound Girls came in twos and we'd always say "I don't think much of yours", hoping that we'd get the pretty one and not her fat friend

And then we'd close in and ask them to dance, try to keep 'em going till the band did a slow one and we could touch them, smell their perfume,

Look down the front of their dresses at their teen bras

 

Me and Fosdyke had one thing in mind - our virginity, our inexperience

And consumed with lust, we'd paw and fumble round the dance floor

Hoping that the low light wouldn't show the lump in our trousers

Hoping the Clearasil was hiding our spots and not cracking (you had to put it on thick to hide the big ones and the blackheads)

Worrying whether our breath smelled, should we be using Amplex, and what was Amplex anyway,

if she minded blokes with glasses, if she'd come outside

 

When there was a break, we'd compare notes in the bog

"Did you get a feel? Were they real?

Did she put her tongue out when you kissed her?

Will she go?"

 

But inside ourselves, we wondered what it all meant, me and Fosdyke

We wondered why the girls we chose always had their father coming to collect them at 11, 

Or wanted their friend with a flat chest, tartan gymslip and knee socks to come outside too, who moved your hand when it approached an erogenous zone (and they seemed to be everywhere) 

Who wouldn't open their lips when kissing, who giggled with their friends and talked behind their hands and who didn't make up for our lack of conversation and savoir faire by talking to us themselves, 

And who were the only ones we dared ask to dance because the ones with the very short skirts and the red lipstick and the tight, pert, sexy little bodies that they enticed us with 

And who smiled and who knew everything and how to do it, or pretended they did and were only our age or even younger - 

Were just too scary !

And then we got the last bus home, and went upstairs and hid the unused Durex in the back of our sock drawer again, 

And wanked, and dreamed of stocking tops, and buttocks, 

And what it must be like to be Johnny Red and take your pick.

This poem was going to be called "Me and Fosdyke Went Shagging", but that would be a lie.

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Me and Fosdyke Do Poetry

When me and Fosdyke did poetry, we wanted to do it right

It's not easy, poetry

 

We had to know about metre and measure and rhyme schemes and stress schemes and spondees and dactyls and sonnets and alliteration and epics and epigrams,

And epithalamia and sestinas and couplets and triolets and haiku and similes and assonance and dissonance and consonants,

And euphony and bathos and pathos and onomatopoeia and sprung rhythm and the Writers and Artists year Book and how to type

And you had to have a subject, we believed.

 

Well, me and Fosdyke did some of that - some of it was "O" level after all

You could pick it up from Wordsworth and the Metaphysicals,

(Getting it done like Donne was marvellous)

We'd slip in a dash of Hopkins, and a pinch of bible-black,

(But careful with the Tennyson, too much could spoil it),

And then the merest hint of Eliot, to give a taste of greatness.

 

And we said "Right, no good hiding our lights under the flight path to Heathrow, out here in the Kipling-reading, nodding-dog suburbs,

We need a sophisticated metropolitan audience"

So we took our poems up to Speakers Corner, on a Sunday.

 

You had to have a soapbox, we knew that, but I didn't know what a soap-box was - our soap came in a paper bag - no elevation to that.

So we took an old wooden box my mum kept the shoe-cleaning in and we went up on the Tube and Trevor Huddleston was standing up there

And all the black power guys and the hell fire guys and not yet the women's lib guys cos this was the sixties -

And the Communists and the Nazis and the flat earth people and not yet the gay rights people cos this was the sixties

And the CND people and Bertrand Russell (cos this ’was’ the sixties) and a old woman with an umbrella who heckled everybody and waved it in your face and said we were rubbish

And me and Fosdyke doing our poetry.

 

We got an audience, and some of 'em stayed longer than it took to find out what we were talking about,

And some of 'em heckled

And sometimes we ad libbed back like early rappers

And when we stopped rhyming moon with June and moved on from our adolescent sexual fantasies, full of euphemism and sublimation

Masturbation on paper

And got stuck in to the Vietnam war and LBJ and McNamara and Field Marshall Ky and all those men we loved to hate

(Before Thatcher introduced an equality of hatred)

Then all the American tourists in the audience would wake up a bit            and some of them would shout about patriotism and communism and the threat to freedom

And then some other Americans would start yelling about imperialism and fascism and the military industrial complex and killing women and children

And pretty soon we'd have to take our shoebox somewhere else

While they kept the audience.

 

And a few people who didn't know much about poetry or who didn't speak English or who had designs on our bodies told us how good we were

And some made obscure invitations to what I only now realise were illegal practices but which slid off our innocence like KY jelly

'Cos this was the sixties

 

And somehow we got invited to read our poetry at the Norwegian YWCA one evening

And the place was just stacked with young Norwegian Christian women in relaxed poses

And me and Fosdyke read our poems of wistful schoolboy lust until they and their blonde hair and their long legs were all put under lock and key at ten-o-clock

And we were put out on the street.

 

Poetry never did pull the girls like we hoped it would

For somehow, when we moved from the carefully crafted expressions of undying passion on the page to real life on the settee,

We got into difficulties of articulation and communication and presentation and premature ejaculation

 

And we entered competitions and didn't win anything

And we wrote out haiku in neat calligraphy and hung them on the railings of the Bayswater Road for sixpence and didn't sell anything

 

Me and Fosdyke did poetry all one spring and summer

We lyricised, we elegised, we sonnetised

We blank versed, we rhymed, we limericked

We grew long hair, we looked mysterious, we practised epigrams

We confessed shyly to girls that we were poets

And they giggled and found they had something else to do

 

And we faced the dilemma, me and Fosdyke

That you can alliterate and resonate and carbonate your words

Till the lowing herd winds slowly o'er the lea

But you have to write about something

 

(And at seventeen, me and Fosdyke had bugger all to write about)

 

You know, you get some poets, like Wordsworth and Tennyson and Armitage

Who grind on long after the inspirations's gone - living on their fame

But fame had never come to me and Fosdyke, nor inspiration,

And the mainspring of our feelings was frustration

 

For oh how we wanted to lie in bed with a girl on a sunny morning

And make poetry out of used tea-bags and last-night's stockings hanging over the radiator

Like all the other poets who wore long scarves and cord jackets

And had girlfriends with long hair and short skirts to be their bed-sit Muse.

 

Me and Fosdyke packed up our haikus and picked up our shoebox 

And went home through the sodium lighted evening to our separate semis in our identical streets, underneath the flight path to Heathrow

And waited for something to happen, so we could write about it.

 

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Me and Fosdyke on Holiday.

   

The year Fosdyke's Dad gave him a second-hand, beat-up, almost-undesirable-even-to-Fosdyke Hillman as a birthday present,

We drove to Spain.

 

Or rather, Fosdyke drove.

 

Spain was where it was hot and sunny

And you could laze on the beach all day and drink all night

And the clubs were full of purple light and girls who were over 16

And just ripe for a holiday romance on the beach by moonlight.

And it was cheap.

 

Me and Fosdyke believed all of this.

So we packed our short-sleeved shirts and light-coloured drainpipes and the faithful Durex and Fosdyke's mask and flippers into the Hillman

And we drove through France, far into the night.

We had some of those tie-on plastic adaptors that re-align the headlight for the wrong side of the road

And we roared down the Route Nationale illuminating the tops of the poplars and the opposite verge like a lit-up Quasimodo

Until we were so tired and not far enough on so we stopped for the night in Toulouse.

We went into the first cheap-looking hotel we came to -

Where there were women guests standing in the doorways who didn't have much on and what they did have wasn't the sort of underwear our mothers or sisters wore back in Hounslow

And we passed several male customers loitering in the hallways, waiting, or negotiating, and some didn't look like very nice     men at all,

So we jammed a chair under the door knob and I slept in my sleeping bag for protection

Which was just as well because when we woke up there was a cockroach under Fosdyke's coat on the door.

 

Then we drove on down to the Costa Brava and parked by the beach and Fosdyke threw off his shirt

And he had so many cockroach bites all red and swollen on his chest and back he looked like an epidemic

Then we booked into a hotel which was nice and clean and cheap in a dusty area just reclaimed from the Spanish desert

And we started to drink rum and cokes quite early on empty  stomachs

Which we washed down mid-evening with some chicken and chips

And watched some girls dancing over a few more rum and cokes and thought we'd try them another day.

That was the night we found out that this town had a policeman and he was very fat and very greasy and wore a moustache and dark glasses, even at night,

That he kept an alsatian and that they both hated the English

Even before I was sick over his jackboots from where I was resting  in the gutter.

It must have been bad because the alsatian didn't even offer to lick it up.

 

And another thing was that the night porter at the hotel would give you your room key if you could remember the number

But he wouldn't help you find your room or give you a little assistance with the stairs or the lift or anything

Which wasn't very friendly

And we said we'd stay there anyway but we might not come back next year

And I think what he looked at us with was contempt (but I wasn't seeing very clearly)

 

In the morning it got hot and we took our headaches to the beach and read some English papers which turned out to be yesterdays

And watched the fat policeman and his dog stopping the girls from sunbathing topless

Which me and Fosdyke had been in favour of;

And we went swimming and that was actually pretty good -

If I borrowed Fosdyke's flippers and snorkel I could see shoals of fish, and sea urchins and if you smashed a sea urchin with a rock there'd be a feeding frenzy of little fishes for its insides

Then we hired a pedalo and swam from that which was really great fun

And we came back to lie down on our towels and gradually remembered that we weren't just kids anymore -

That we were here by ourselves without our families and this could be the one golden opportunity to lose our virginity.

So we sauntered up and down the beach a bit, one of us very white, turning a nasty red and the other a sort of uncomfortable pink with serious blotches where the cockroach bites were turning septic

And there seemed to be quite a lot of local competition for the little  English roses we'd set our sights on

For the beach was littered with the limbs and bodies of off duty waiters and bartenders and night club bouncers, 

Brown and handsome, with muscles where it mattered and tiny tiny little black swimming trunks which bulged unashamedly at the front

And they were caressing our English roses and staring into their eyes and promising them nights of latin passion

 

That was when me and Fosdyke's confidence began to falter.

 

Though we played the game.

We'd go to the discos and dance crazily with any girl who'd acknowledge our existence.

We'd use up all our best lines and then go back and sit at their table and learn they came from Formby or Goole or Port Talbot 

And just what their Mums had to say about them coming here on their own, with Janice.

But though Fosdyke and me tried to look Latin and romantic and got a few kisses and twined a few tongues and pressed our trousered erections against a few tummies

And he says he got his hand far enough up a skirt to feel the soft, delicately fluffed curve of a buttock

And I know I had my fingers on a nipple

That was just the time when they had to go -

Doubtless to wait in the moonlight for their Spanish lovers

Whose touch would be so much surer and more experienced and more forceful and more successful than ours.

 

And I remember that me and Fosdyke accepted our lot in the end, and that the best nights we had were in the chicken and chips taverna

Where they had a guy with a guitar who could sing the Beatles and Guantanamara and Auld Lang Syne and Sally in our Alley and Viva LEspana and Bluebirds over the White Cliffs of Dover

And all of the audience except us was over 40 and sang along till there wasn't a dry eye in the house

And me and Fosdyke sang too because that was all there was

And nobody seemed to mind

And maybe Mums and Dads away from their kids and their homes and their politics are all right really.

 

We drove home

As the Hillman crossed the Spanish border we lost top gear

And around Brive in the middle of the night we lost bottom gear

And when there was only one gear left we ground on at about 20 miles per hour through thick fog

Which made us nervous because all the other cars going the same way were doing about 100 and every one of them chose to blare their horn as they swerved past

So when Fosdyke went to sleep at the wheel and we slewed off the road before I could wake him, missing all the evenly spaced French trees and ending up in a French field

I wasn't sorry when the car wouldn't start.

It turned out to have no water and hadn't had for long enough for things to get hot and weld themselves together and perhaps some of the thick fog had been smoke.

 

So we waited till it got lighter and started pushing and it turned out to be only 100 metres to a garage

But the garagiste at 6-o-clock on a Sunday morning in rural France wouldn't wake up

So we left a note on the windscreen and followed a sign to the railway station and got a train to le Mans and another to Paris and on to Boulogne

And so back home a few hours earlier than anticipated,

To the amazement of Fosdyke's father.

 

Who was more dazed than amazed by the time he got the car back and had sold it for scrap and paid off the costs to the AA and the ferry and got 20 quid

(Which was more then than it is now)

But he'd paid 200 for it so Fosdyke was in the doghouse for a very long time

 

And me and Fosdyke came back with our virginity and our unused Durex  

But not Fosdykes flippers and snorkel which he'd left in the car 

Because some bugger or bougre had stolen them -

 

And neither me nor Fosdyke has ever had a rum and coke since.

 

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Me and Fosdyke Go Repping.

Some time around 4 o clock in November, in Dewsbury, or Scunthorpe, or Runcorn, looking out at the rain and the already dark,

By chance, as we sometimes did, me and Fosdyke met in some bleak reception area of some filthy factory, off some pitted by-pass,

Both waiting to see the same arrogant Buyer, who despised as we despised him,

And as the light outside decayed and the receptionist started touching up her nail varnish, we decided that life had somehow given us the slip,

Or we wouldn't be here, in Heckmondwyke or Skelmersdale or Doncaster,

Trying to sell things we had no faith in to someone who didn't want to know, 

On behalf of firms who saw me and Fosdyke as Hobson's choice in the repping line, but expendable, and cheap

 

For Fosdyke and me, who wanted to be poets,  had been snared in the end by the need to replicate our genes,

And by mortgages and disposable nappies and detached breeze block boxes in destroyed villages with gardens and integ.gar.  

Each was a "Sales Representative", with a company car.

We were the reps that you see, in any layby, watching the clock tick over till it's safe to go home, 

Falsifying time sheets, signing for calls on contacts who won't see us, who were always in meetings, 

Who had had to go out and           who'd read your literature if you cared to leave it, (and I don't mean poetry).

 

Me and Fosdkye we tried:

When I was in rubber and asbestos and he was in valves, 

What I knew about packings and O rings and nitrile and neoprene he knew about diaphragms and gate valves and flanges and linings

And when I was in switchgear he was in lifts and when I was selling toothbrushes he was selling tampons

And we found that the hearty jokes we had carefully learned and that creased up the engineer at Naburn Sewage Works just pursed the lips of the feminine hygiene buyer at Boots

And had us out of the door pretty quick,

And we, who'd been told that reps don’t sell the product but sell themselves, wondered what we had to offer to a pig farmer in a hurry for a valve for slurry, or a nun running a distillery, or indeed, anybody.

 

Oh, we did try,

We learned about football and remembered who supports whom and who the star players were

And listened patiently while Buyers and Engineers and Storekeepers wasted our time and theirs reliving what they saw on the tele on Saturday and read about on the back pages on Sunday and about which they didn't have an original thought in their head

And they always told us what sort of car they got from the firm and how big its engine was and how much poke it had on the motorway and left us in no doubt that size matters

And me and Fosdyke sat there and pretended to agree with their racist and misogynist and homophobic and jingoistic and bigoted views in order to make the sale of the rubber gloves or the valves with stainless steel balls or whatever we were representing at the time

And then we went home and kicked the cat for brown-nosing and prostitution.

 

And we went to sales conferences and listened to the other reps tell tales about sex with secretaries and barmaids and the managing director's p.a.

And even the female buyers who were a real challenge

And we watched them enjoying themselves by pissing out the window and vomiting in the aspidistras and throwing nursery puddings and fumbling up the skirts of the waitresses

And we shrank and apologised for them and asked the staff if we could help clear up

And then our bosses thought we lacked committment and team spirit and hadn't signed up to company values

And when they came down in the morning with hangovers and feelings of guilt they bollocked us over breakfast for being miserable bastards who didn't know how to enjoy ourselves anyway

And who with sales figures like ours were likely to get the company award of the golden wanker at the end of the session 

And we sensed it was time to move on.

 

And I'd wind up once a week in Stirling, on a Wednesday, and have sex with Stella, who worked as a waitress in the café on the ring road, thinking that I was a real rep now

And I told Fosdyke all about it and he told me he had Stella on Tuesdays (he was in rubber boots at the time)

And that there was a chap in rosaries and vestments on Mondays and one in corned beef on Thursdays and at the weekend her husband came home -            (and he was in haggis)

And their company cars would stand in the street all night and in the morning they'd slip her a fiver and she'd make out a fifteen quid receipt for the Wee Deoch and Doris Guest House for their expenses - and mine, and Fosdyke's.

 

And Christ it was lonely out there on the motorways between rejections

Except at Christmas when they'd all want to see you and walk you out to your car in the company car park so you could slip the hamper or the crate of whiskey into their boot and they wouldn't have to declare it ,

And I never met one you could give a boxed set of Brandenburgs to, or a free ticket to a poetry reading

Though the illustrated Karma Sutra in hand tooled leather or a subscription to Paedophiles Monthly might have tickled a few and got you an order for pickled eggs or incontinence pads or whatever you were representing at the time

 

And they'd ring us at home on a Saturday because their production line was down and they needed a spare part they knew we happened to keep in our boot

And we had to say to our wives - let's go to Immingham today dear rather than Whitby, I've never showed you Immingham

And the only reason we stayed married was because we were at home a lot and could take the kids to school and collect them while our timesheets said we were in Gilberdyke

And because the company gave us a car and we could lie about the mileage

And sometimes we could be in bed with our own wives, in the afternoon while the boss thought we were in Cleckheaton

 

And me and Fosdyke would hail each other wearily across the bar at Scotch Corner, or in the queue at the Watford Gap services, 

Indistinguishable from all the other pin-striped, tired men with clean shoes, escaping from selling bog rolls and Duraglit and combine harvesters

And sit over our pints or our inedible fry-ups and swap complaints about our bosses and compare performance of our company cars 

And show each other pictures of our kids and tell each other all about our dull holidays on identical hot beaches in Mablethorpe on the Med.

 

And we don't go back to that moment of revelation in Pudsey, or Widnes, or West           Hartlepool

Because to know that life has passed you by doesn't pay for the dishwasher, or the home computer, or the subscription to several years of unread "Poetry Review",

And besides, life maybe has something for us yet, some small tragedy, some minor disappointment, some even smaller joy.

 

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A Dream of Fosdyke.

 

 

I had a dream

I had a dream that I was old, and alone, and that some of the more unsatisfactory bits about my body

(The hearing, the plumbing, the waste disposal)

Didn't work as well as they used to

And I dreamed that I was banged up in some nursing home miles from anywhere, with a high wall

Where a man who called me John all the time and to call him Barry

Shoved my wheelchair into the sun lounge next to another old bloke in a wheelchair and said,

"I'll leave you here, John. Perhaps you two can be friends. Wouldn't that be nice? Take your mind off your troubles"

And I looked at the old chap with two day's stubble and not enough teeth and a skein of drool looping off his chin and liver spots and the shakes

And it was Fosdyke.

 

So I said, "Christ, Fosdyke, what the hell are you doing here?"

And he said nothing

His eyes were light blue and they didn't blink or turn or flicker

So I wheeled myself round to where he ought to be able to see me clearly and said, "Fosdyke old chap".

And I thought maybe he'd gone deaf so I touched his arm and said "Fosdyke, it's Me".

His chin quivered a little and some more spittle ran down onto his dressing gown but the shakes continued at the same tempo in the same parts of his body

And I suddenly knew the answer to "What are “’you“’ doing here?"

It was what I was doing there too.

 

Dying.

 

I had a dream

 

For I had a dream that me and Fosdyke had to sell up our houses and turn ourselves in to the Honeysuckle Nursing Home to look after with the proceeds,              

Following some government instruction;

Three meals a day and some almost edible though Fosdyke doesn't get that as no-one feeds him - 

He's thin.

And when I do he slobbers on the spoon

Then Barry comes by and tells me not to bother, he'll only have to change his dressing gown again, and his nappy.

And if I were to ask "why the fuck don't you give him a bib and take the time to feed him with a bottle or some skill and love or something?"

I might lose my place in here for challenging behaviour so I don't

Because my incontinence, although part of the deal, is perhaps challenging enough for now,

 

I have to put up with Barry

I have to put up with Shirley too.  

Shirley, who is relentlessly positive:

"Well at least you haven't sat in it all night";

"Soon get you a clean set of pajamas, lovey", and

"I think Mr Fosdyke enjoyed that"

When he's been dumped in front of the Teletubbies and something about dissecting worms for schools

And his pale blue eyes haven't moved or focussed the whole rancid, mindless, dumbed down time.

But I'm so moved by someone calling him "Mister Fosdyke that I forget how stupid she is and how mistaken she is and my heart goes out to her for treating him with respect,

Although he's so far gone he doesn’t know she exists.

 

Me and Fosdyke.

Poor Fosdyke, by whom I measured my own failures, precedes me now into the dark,

Has already gone beyond the frustrations of consciousness, 

And will soon lay down the indignities of life in glorious resurrection,

When me and Fosdyke, risen again, will be turned out onto some marbled platform and will take the escalator towards the light above

To find there great empty halls, with lost, desultory souls, picking their way through idle crush barriers, prepared for ten times their number,

Towards a vast millennial empty heaven, vaulted beyond purpose,

Where we play football with angels, read poetry to saved and empty schoolkids in the literature zone, and are condemned forever to dance with Young Conservatives, chaste and sober.

 

I had a dream

 

And when I woke up I went down the pub with Fosdyke and we watched the 60th Anniversary of Dunkirk, and             Dad's Army and England losing 5 - nil to the Faeroe Islands

And we remembered how we won the 1966 World Cup

And how we were in Soho after and we all loved the Germans and they loved us

And we sat in the French Pub with some guys from Munich and exchanged addresses and never heard from them again, nor wrote,

Then we sang and danced in Trafalgar Square until it got light and me and Fosdyke took the first tube home.

We'll always remember that night

It was probably the nearest we ever got to heaven in all our lives.

 

I didn't tell Fosdyke about my dream.

We had another pint and embroidered a few more histories and resolved to get shot of it all and take our bikes and cycle across Australia, or maybe France,

Or if we had time, to the Ship at Cawood next Sunday week.

 

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(Appendix)

 

Me and Fosdyke at Christmas.

  [ Listen to this poem as read on Radio Ryedale   http://www.radioryedale.co.uk/story_new_layout.asp?StoryId=3986 ]

 

“I hate Christmas”, said Fosdyke.

Me and Fosdyke were resting up from Christmas Shopping in the Sleigh and Reindeer,

Supping a pint of Duckworthy’s Old Turkey Droppings, full of malt and hops and festive chemicals, 1.9% proof,

And wondering whether we could face another minute of too much choice for too little value

And to whom could we give festive knickers with holly on, or a London Rubber Company gift pack – for this was the sixties.

 

“I hate Christmas”, said Fosdyke. “Me Mum’s Mum comes.

One year we sat down to dinner and she said “I’m a vegan now”

So she sat and ate sprouts with no gravy and an air of martyrdom

And flinched every time we took a bite of turkey and said “Oh no, you just go on enjoying yourselves”

And me Dad said he wished she’d told us  and she said “I thought you would’ve guessed, what with me looking so much fitter and younger and having such a clear skin and everything.”

And me Dad said he should’ve guessed from the polyester pants suit and plastic sandals 

Replacing the tweed skirt and brogues and he bet Baby Jesus didn’t turn up his nose at a lamb chop, or camel steak;

And another year”, said Fosdyke, “we all sat round the tree and waited for her to put her stuff there so we could start opening presents

And then she said she wasn’t giving any this year; she’d given the equivalent amount in money to the donkey sanctuary

So my Dad said “Hee Haw, none of them asses would get very fat on that then” and he took back the set of paper doilies she was going to get from us.

 

And I said “Don’t you go to Church?”  and Fosdyke said

“We used to – but me Dad insisted on singing While Shepherds Watched very loudly to the tune of Ilkley Moor which no-one else was doing

So they asked us not to come back.  I hate Christmas”, said Fosdyke.

 

“What about  presents? Do  you get any ?” I said and Fosdyke sighed

“Last year”, he said, “I got a shaving kit cos I was grown up now and a copy of “The Eleven Plus Facts of Life” by Kenneth Barnes which they’d got out of the Family Doctor years ago to tell me why I’d had pubic hair since I was 12

But it didn’t go into what happens next because I wouldn’t be emotionally mature enough to cope with the wave of powerful sensations which might overcome me.”

“But you’re 18”,  I said. “Yes,” said Fosdyke  – and never been kissed".

 

"And one year”, he said, “they gave me an ant town (collect your own ants) and by the time the ants arrived in the Spring I’d lost half the bits

And a Dickie Valentine LP when I’d asked for the Stones and “Two Little Boys” by Rolf Harris on a single when I’d wanted “Come On Let’s Do It in the Road !”

I hate Christmas,” said Fosdyke.

 

He said “Me Mum gets up at 6 to start the dinner so we can eat at 12 which is when Dad gets hungry 

And she overcooks the sprouts and undercooks the turkey and incinerates the Christmas Pudding and gets flustered

And then she washes up till tea time and lays the table with loads of cakes and things and nobody eats any cos they’re all still stuffed with turkey and mash

So she goes away into a corner and cries

It’s no wonder I hate Christmas”, said Fosdyke

 

“So,” I said, “come to us – make a change.

My Mum,” I said, “takes the day off.

She wants to be looked after cos she says the Virgin Mary was a mother

So me Dad does beans on toast and the fire smokes and goes out 

And if you’re lucky me Dad’ll get over-excited on three glasses of ginger wine and throw the whole Christmas tree out into the yard and set light to it  

And  pour some brandy on it to make it burn faster -

He’s done that three years running now - the neighbours expect it

And me Mum says  Let him – it’s Christmas – people should do what they like – and she rests up some more on the sofa.”

 

Fosdyke brightened. “And do you have relations”, he said, “and the Queen?”

I said no, they won’t come – and me Mum won’t forgive the Queen for marrying a foreigner so either we don’t watch it and sing the Red Flag at 3 – o – clock 

Or we do watch it and develop a Marxist critique of the Commonwealth

But me sister usually drags in someone homeless from the shelter cos she’s into evangelism and the Hindus from next door so they can see how we do Christmas in our religion

And me Mum gives ‘em a chocolate orange and some sugar mice

And me Dad sings some carols and puts on his Santa Claus hat and beard and ho-ho-s at them until they go home or back to the shelter

 

So Fosdyke came to us and learnt to say Happy Christmas in Hindi

And how to make a whole ciggy out of tab ends, and he sang carols out of tune with me Dad and danced to the Stones with me Mum cos it was her day off

And Fosdkye snogged me sister for ages under the mistletoe (and that was a first)

And on Boxing Day, at the bar of the Flatulents’ Return “I still hate Christmas”, said Fosdyke “but now I enjoy doing it.”

 

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