Some lady

Background – the scene is one similar to a Coronation Street setting in the opening: backyards, and streets with rows of houses. We lived at 10 Spencer Street from sometime early in 1942 until I left Preston in 1954 to emigrate to New Zealand. The ‘lady’ in question lived a few doors up from us and I visited her regularly. She was always ‘Janey’ to me and was pretty much as I describe her here.

 *

I saw at first only her outside,

which my quite young, quick-snap assessment judged as plain.

She of the outside knew better; had lived with it some 45 years or more,

and grateful I who came to know her later learned she was anything but plain.

*

A fire burned there.

Yes! In that old pink-cardiganed, greying and straight-haired, firmly-packaged homely frame.

The fire? A kind of faint, low-embered hope,

many years smouldering lay there…kept her alive.

*

Sometimes, when she had gone to her alcoholic bed,

her Hollywood conditioned eyes lit by romantic novel or pictures from some fashion magazine,

fanned those small embers to a warming glow, just for a while;

enough to keep for her the momentum of the cycle she called life.

*

There was something else about the outer,

and in my honest, clumsily outspoken, rather cheeky innocent of ways

I asked about one day: 'What are those three small black marks there on your face?'

She gave a kind of smile, turned away a moment, blew her nose and then looked back at me;

her dark eyes sparkled and she smiled again. Yes!

and with good-natured, down-to-earth common-sense fact accepting fun,

she whispered with a wink, ‘Those are my beauty spots, Dennis love.’

*

And then, with one hand delicately holding the hem of skirt,

she danced a few light steps gracefully across the floor.

*

She could have stiffened angrily, snapped or scowled some dark reply,

shrivelling my spirit some as others before and since have often done from time to time.

But she danced and smiled and beauty spot friends we continued as from then.

Oh yes! She's been 'some lady' in my life since I was ten.

*

Dennis Crompton © 1994

(first published www.denniscrompton.wordpress.com 2013)