by Michael Bloor
(first published in Literally Stories, July 31st, 2023)
By and large, old age doesn’t suit poets. I’m not saying that, once they pick up their pensions, all of them start to regret that they didn’t crash and burn in their twenties, like Keats, Shelley & Co. Or that they start experimenting with monkey gland injections, like poor old Yeats. Nor that there aren’t quite a number of poets, like Seamas Heaney, who could keep the pot stirring through all the transitions of age (indeed, I know a couple of pensioner poets myself).
But Andy Brailsford wasn’t one of those functioning pensioner poets. Though fortunate in other ways, he hadn’t written more than the odd birthday card in thirty years. As a kid at school in the early 1970s, he’d written a lot of mawkish stuff about sunsets and dreary stuff about post-nuclear winters. There was no family job waiting for him when he left university, his dad being a van driver for the Co-op in Burton-on-Trent. So, he did what a lot of fellow English Literature graduates did: he joined an Advertising Agency.
Instead of writing poetry in the evenings in a London garret, as previously envisaged, he found himself in London pubs in the evenings listening to a lot of slightly older Eng Lit graduates earnestly discussing whether Wilkinson Sword, a safety razor manufacturer, could out-sell Gillette, another safety razor manufacturer. He smelt the future and it stank. So he dropped out and joined a commune in the Black Mountains of South Wales.
Andy then wrote a lot at Pen-yr-heol. He wrote about holy springs, about green mistletoe bushes high among bare oak branches in bleak mid-winter, about ruined churches, about young lovers and home-brewed beer. He published a few things in little magazines; some of them paid a few quid and some of them didn’t.
He learned a lot too. He learned that milking a goat is completely different from milking a cow (you mustn’t pull on the teat, instead pinch the top of the teat with your thumb and forefinger, and then squeeze the teat with the rest of your fist). He learned that to get a crop you must feed potatoes but starve carrots. Sadly, he also learned that if you keep open house, then you’re inviting visits from the constabulary. So he once again did what a lot of fellow Eng Lit graduates did: he got a ‘TEFL’ job abroad – teaching English as a foreign language.
He was dead lucky: he landed in Siena, among the Tuscan hills. The Sienese Republic, alternately a democracy and an oligarchy, lasted four hundred years; the wealthiest city in medieval Europe with its bankers to the Popes and its traders travelling to Persia and beyond. Eventually, in the fourteenth century, the Black Death swept through it and left behind a ruined economy and a perfect living medieval monument. So perfect that, for Andy, just living there was enough. Nearly always.
Andy had kept copies of his old poems and very occasionally he’d take ’em out and look at ’em, noticing that the paper they were typed on was turning brown and slightly brittle. More frequently, he’d take a wander over to the Palazzo Pubblico, the parliament building of the old republic, and gaze there at the great Ambroglio Lorenzetti fresco of the city with its celebratory dancers in the streets, artisans in their open workshops, crops in the fields outside the city walls, and – in the middle distance – laden packhorses heading towards the gates of Siena the Magnificent.
On a May morning, soon after his retirement and following yet another visit to the fresco, Andy came out of the Palazzo Pubblico, sniffed the spring breeze and headed over to a small park with a view of the new-green Tuscan hills. He passed a little group of picnicking tourists on the grass. One of them, playing a guitar, began a quiet song. Andy stopped, stunned: the girl was singing one of his poems, set to music.