Matt Simpson

for Tony, former student

In that shop the things stuck out their mitts wanting to strike bargains, get on with the job.

Hammers, brace-and-bits, hearty saws, planes that I’m cackhanded with, chisels with more edge than I can trust, that scoff at fumbling, my kind of muscle.

‘Get yourself a big one, dad!’ Your joke was good, went home: I could have had a son your...

‘Liverpudlian’ plays self-mockingly on the idea of ‘pool’. I was born in Liverpool. I would be flattering myself if I claimed that you need to be a comedian to survive there. But Liverpudlians do, like punsters, switch things about: they breathe through their mouths and talk through their noses. They are physiological, existential twisters.

Walter Redfern –...

‘Aye, once we get a Protestant Pope,’ my father cheeked shawlies in the snug, hard-nosed chars clattering gangplanks, early-morning mops.

Next Door’s would have scowled. Across a creosoted fence we scarcely spoke, their lad-my-age and me. Sometimes at the coalshed and him at the bin, scraping cinders, shovelling coal, I’d try ’Too cold for...

I myself have seen the wild roses grow upon the very ground which is now the centre of the borough of Bootle.

William Ewart Gladstone

This road I trogged to school down, eleven-plus, in fluorescing socks and Yankee tie; the solid end of town, Victorian sandstone, tall windows, doors-up-steps, attics for cramping servants in. I drive through blackened gates to tarmac where a garden used to...

for U.A. Fanthorpe

A Busby-Berkeley stunner: thirty-second sequence of curtains swished back one after one all down the ward. I’m standing near my bed, a raw recruit, screened off and hushed.

Then trundlings and swivellings on polished boards, quickly in and quickly out, and final curtains scraped back one by one.

‘Behind you! Through the window!’ next-bed said.

...