104. Graham Lock
A man steeped in words and music
Graham Lock was born in Sidmouth, a little Devonian seaside town, so quiet it was once described in The News of the World as “England’s only graveyard with a Woolworths.” He took solace in listening to the Beatles, Dusty Springfield and Motown and reading Just William, Jennings and Biggles books.
He began writing poems in the late ‘60s and a few were published in small magazines. He then spent the next 40+ years writing about music, both as a journalist (‘NME’, ‘Wire’, ‘BBC Music Mag’, ‘Jazz FM’, ‘Gramophone’, ‘Goldberg’, ‘Early Music Today’, ‘International Piano’ a/o) and as an academic, in all writing or editing six books relating to jazz, including ‘Forces in Motion’, ‘Blutopia’ and ‘The Hearing Eye’. Then, following a cancer diagnosis in 2016, he started to write poems again. Some have recently appeared in ‘Chainlink’, ‘The Fig Tree’, ’International Times’ and ‘Smoke’. He is currently working on his memoirs of the music business.
Poems
The Wailers, 1973 My Life as a Haydn String Quartet At The Funeral Parlour Cath The English Treatment Love and Space, a 2020 Triptych
Both Cath and The English Treatment are taken from Graham’s Bad Moon Scrapbook sequence.
The Wailers, 1973
Off to see the Wailers, second gig of their first-ever UK tour— Lancaster Uni, 25p on the night. I go with Sue, a friend I’ve known a while, but this will be our first dance (& alas, our last). The hall’s half-empty; there’s space for us to show off our moves, but we quickly hit a snag— our moves are the very English twitch & jerk, right on the beat, four to a bar; the Wailers’ music is all bend & sway, loping offbeats, & a lilting, sensuous undertow. We try to adjust, but fail to (sorry!) catch-a-fire or stir it up. We can’t find our groove in this new-fangled reggae, so we lurch, we lunge, limbs akimbo & askew, all Anglo angular; we aspire to the graceful but end up looking— as the old Devon saying has it— like a cow with a musket! * Years pass, we both move to London, at different times, to different postcodes. Then, one day, by chance, we bump into each other, & resume a tentative two-step. But our timing’s still awry— Sue’s waltzing nightly with her work & I end up in a brief fandango with her flat-mate, Penny. More years pass. It happens again— we meet, by chance, near the bottom of Crouch Hill. This time I’m writing a book on jazz-dance, Sue’s pirouetting with a married man, so we smile fondly, say “see you soon, watch your step” & depart into our different tunes and tempos. * Still, I did wonder. The same person, twice? In a movie, violins would be sashaying towards a big romantic climax. Was it chance? Or was fate, or Eros, trying to nudge us into another turn at tripping the light fantastic? Your guess is as good … but I tell myself, it would never’ve worked: Sue’s too Hokey Cokey, I’m so Mashed Potato. Tripping, yeah, I’m an expert: but the light fantastic? That’s another dance I could never get the hang of. < < <
My Life as a Haydn String Quartet
At The Funeral Parlour
i I take my mother in her wheelchair from the care home where she’s been stranded since my father’s stroke, & we travel by ambulance to the funeral parlour so she can bid him a private goodbye. The undertaker has placed the open coffin on a table, too high for my mother to see my father’s body. I struggle to lift her up, & to hold her, half-crouching, as she leans forward, arthritic fingers stroking his cheek, while her less shaky hand clutches the coffin rim. She murmurs his name over & over, weeping in her grief, & in her anger at his leaving her like this, at his leaving her at all. Stooping to support her I stare into the coffin at my first dead body, shocked to see death is so manifest & has such presence— it’s turned my father into a corpse, empty, like a discarded shell. My mother, still tearful, is scolding my father, saying he’s abandoned her. As I gaze at the pallid face, the waxen skin, the loosely clasped hands, I see only a facsimile of the man we loved, himself abandoned now by all the vestiges of life. ii My mother sighs, & I lower her gently back into the wheelchair. She waves an agitated hand in front of her face. “Don’t fuss, dear,” she mutters, “I’ll be alright.” I squeeze her shoulder & we fall silent for a moment, trying to gather ourselves. I remember the ambulance is waiting. “Ready to go, Mum?” I ask. She nods, & suddenly looks tired as she tries to compose her face. She lifts a hand towards the coffin & mouths “Goodbye, my darling”; then sets her lips tightly together. I wheel her out of the room, towards what’s left of her life. < < <
Cath
I think I’m having a bad time, until, coming home from the hospital, I learn my friend Barry has suffered a heart attack and my friend Cath has fallen into a coma. Barry recovers, and months later we’ll meet again, two old codgers blinking in the sunlight, like tortoises grateful to wake after a long hibernation. But Cath dies. And because I can barely walk (bloody catheter!) I have to watch her funeral online. Small screen, fixed sightline, fickle sound— it’s hardly a proper goodbye to a friend I’ve known for nearly 50 years. I missed her birthday party too, back in the autumn. It meant staying overnight and I was afraid I might wet the bed, so I made an excuse, and promised to be there for next year’s bash. Now there’ll be no more birthdays. Instead I’ll stay at home, and curse myself for feeling too embarrassed to share my piddling secret. The cancer diagnosis cured me of that folly, but came too late for me to make amends to Cath. I’m so sorry that I held my fears closer than I held my friend < < <
The English Treatment
The radiotherapy machine breaks down
half-way through my session.
“Try not to move,” the intercom tells me,
“we’ll send someone in to fix it.”
An engineer arrives.
He turns it off, then tries to turn it on again.
When this doesn’t work, I suggest,
“Oh well, just give me two aspirins
and a cup of tea instead.”
“Sounds like a plan,” says the intercom,
“we’ll go and put the kettle on.”
FOOTNOTE
A few weeks after the events detailed in The English Treatment , the Radiotherapy Unit was holding a cake sale to help raise money for new equipment! According to ex-junior doctor Adam Kay, the ever-smirking Jeremy Hunt, Health Secretary between 2012 and 2018, “left the NHS in tatters”, and was “the villain” responsible for “hacking back at NHS funding, driving overworked staff to breaking point, leaving us with over 100,000 vacancies, then watching unflinchingly as his actions saw every imaginable waiting time soar, from ambulance call-outs to oncology appointments.” Presumably many subsequent COVID deaths may also be linked to Hunt’s leaving the NHS “in tatters”.
Love and Space, a 2020 Triptych
For MBC
i. The Kiss I think of Rodin, Klimt & Judee Sill, & Bach’s entwining violins - Largo ma non tanto I think of us, that night, that kiss, our first, our last, communion & farewell. Oceans stretch between us now; locked down & distanced, we blow our kisses at computer screens, then watch them as they freeze & die. When (or if) we kiss again, let’s kiss like those embracing sculptures, let’s kiss like those caressing strings, no more time or space, no hiatus, just duo after duo, your lips & mine - Largo ma non tanto ii. Astronomy We look for the comet as it falls across our skies, you in your night-time & me in mine — same stars over different skylines. Strange I was once so moonstruck, so afraid to come close, scared I might crash & burn, like a meteor turning our planet into heaps of ash. Different skylines, yes, but the same fate locks us down; Skype & Zoom the closest we can come. You say goodbye, & my screen turns black as deepest space, where I drift in endless orbit, like an asteroid lost amidst the debris of other worlds that might have been. iii. Virtual Laughing, pulling faces, we take snapshots of each other on Skype. We look so crazy-happy you’d think we were young & carefree, not elders, half a world apart, held captive by a global plague. Did the camera lie? Perhaps. But in cyberspace we can jettison our years, our serious faces, let the blue light go to our heads like champagne, & dally in a love that’s virtual, yet feels real enough for solace, & even acting a little giddy. < < <
Hope you’re feeling better. Very enjoyable poems. Thanks.
Really enjoyed reading these funny / sad poems. Thank you