I was thinking of writing a sequence of poems about Dad’s shed.

Okay. I know how lame that sounds. It’s not a subject that leaps up on the table with jazz hands. But honestly – there’s so much to say about that shed. It was so much more than a rickety old hut he knocked up one weekend. It became his place of retreat, his sanctuary. The one place he could be alone, and sit at his workbench with a cup of tea, and stare through the windows into the garden, and wonder how the hell he’d got there.

We’d started off in London, in a much smaller flat above a flower shop in Pimlico – which sounds ludicrously Ealing Studios, especially given the old woman who lived immediately below us, banging on the ceiling with a broom handle and running a pair of scissors down the prams in the hallway. When things got too much, Dad took a job that came with a house, at a printing works in Wisbech, Capital of the Fens, (I’m guessing when they awarded the title the only other place in the running was a cluster of apple shacks). The house was bigger than the London flat, but the kids kept coming – so relentlessly you’d think it was by some other, novel process, like vegetative budding – until we’d outgrown the new place but couldn’t afford anything else. So a three bedroomed house had to accommodate six children and two adults, and occasional visits from Grandma, sleeping on a zed-bed behind the sofa. If you imagine someone lifting the roof off, cramming us all in, then slamming the roof back on and sitting on it like the lid of an overfilled suitcase, arms and legs sticking out of the windows, you’d be close. If it wasn’t for the fact the garden backed onto woods, apple orchards and playing fields, we’d have gone completely insane.

So without anywhere else to go, the shed became Dad’s sacred retreat. And even though it was made of scavenged wood, with a door so thin if a wolf came by he wouldn’t need to huff and puff, he could force entry with one paw whilst innocently inspecting the nails on the other – in our minds it was something much more, something powerfully and spiritually aligned with the essence of Dad, as brightly as the rows of jars of odds and ends with their bolts and screws and panel pins and nails of every size, ingeniously fixed by their caps to the undersides of the shelves he’d put up, and his tools, sitting in their outlines like they’d burned their shapes onto the hardboard by sheer force of utility, and that single bulb hanging from the ceiling hook like a torturer’s light, with a rough tin shade cut from an oil can. All these things. So utterly DAD.

And then one day, he’s gone. The shed falls to ruin. And I drive over to pull it all down and throw it in a skip.

So maybe, somewhere amongst all the spiders and Pifco torches with the corroded points and the drawers filled with anonymous crap, maybe there is a poem or two to be salvaged.

But a sequence?

Speaking of poems about sheds

Here’s the latest:

There’s also a new post in ‘Voices’: Daisy D.

Thanks for reading!