0038 Why I'm ashamed of being British
It was so easy being a British child
in the 1930s:
everything was – or so it seems to memory’s
selective mind - so ordered:
how old was I, when I stopped
raising my school cap
(‘Don’t just touch it, Michael;
lift it! ’) to, not just staff at school,
but anyone to whom my parents talked
or who had talked (‘My, hasn’t he grown! ’
as if this was some personal achievement) to me,
or more likely, over my head, as I
shifted from foot to foot,
trapped in a grown-up world
of politenesses; which however
my mother loved and rightly
as one now raised in her station
from being polite to customers
in grandma’s terrace front-window shop
where homemade cooking was the income
now that the cotton dust had got to grandpa's lungs;
but now the wife of a man retired
at thirty-eight, stone-deaf… But then, haven't all of us, by some
trick of space-time unexplained by Einstein,
lived, as a child, in better times – or at least,
if any didn’t, we never heard of them;
or if we did, it was because the missionaries
were putting all that right, if we just simply
put a penny or two in their box, and here’s a flag to pin
on your jacket like some painless medal..