Portside

The little woman round the corner

By John Daniel

I should like to write a poem for my mother
who made dresses in our small bedroom upstairs
where she banged  steam out of pleats
and treadled her pedal-boat with Singer
written in gold, listening to Mrs Dale’s Diary.

I never thought she was special
because she made dresses for ladies
who couldn’t buy clothes in the shops.
I don’t have to go out to work
she explained, because women only went out

if their husbands didn’t earn enough,
It’s only pin-money she’d say,
her mouth full of pins like a hedgehog,
kneeling down to take up a hem,
but I ‘d sooner make dresses than housework,
or look after babies.

I wasn’t even a girl
she could make frocks for, though she made me
a stuffed Punch-and-Judy and took me to tea
at Swan and Edgar’s

and sometimes one of her ladies
would bring her a picture from Vogue to cut out 

the pattern from newspaper, and said
how clever she was

but I didn’t think she was clever,
not like dad who could make model planes
and brought home the money each Friday.

But I grew up surrounded by words
like bishop and raglan and Dior and Hartnell.

I’m just the little woman round the corner she’d say
although I knew she was not round the corner
but upstairs, treadling her pedal-boat downriver
each afternoon, out to the open sea.

John Daniel has published four volumes of poetry, most recently Lighting the Fire (Oversteps Books, 2015) and an autobiography titled Grownup War. He lives in Devon, England.