Salad Sundays

After tea and ‘Songs of Praise’ 

early on Sunday evenings, 

weather permitting 

we’d all walk back to Irthlingborough,

~

if auntie Margaret and uncle Len 

had been to visit, we’d walk them home 

across Patterson’s fields 

two and a half miles, cross-country

and then get the bus back home,

~

it was a decent jaunt, 

over spring bridge, past the bomb craters 

rich with newts kids caught in jars,

up to Cherry Hall Farm, 

it’s shiny red Dutch barn

a half-way beacon for miles around,

skirt the quarries of the Headvale Mine,

then all downhill the rest of the way

with the bus often waiting for us 

at the Queen Eleanor cross

~

I remember the warm summer air, 

blossom in the orchard

sweet wheat field aromas 

and curious stationary sheep, 

father always trying to frightening us

worriedly on the look-out for a bull

~

we’d always meet other people

coming the other way, same journey backwards,

grown-ups I didn’t know but my parents did, 

a chance for mums to gossip and dads to light-up fags

~

on the bus back, hopefully

a green United Counties double-decker, 

if I was lucky and the conductor knew my dad

he’d give me the near-spent 

rolls of bus tickets to take home,

a highly-prized treat

for when I played buses

on mum’s parlour chairs

lined up in the hall 

*

© Graham R Sherwood 03/22