![](https://michaelgraeme.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/snowyroad.jpg?w=800)
It was January, I think, the winter of 1985. I’d driven south, two hundred miles in the snow for a meeting. What I’d yet to find out was it had been cancelled the week before, but no one from my office had thought to tell me. I was a kid, starting out in life, first job, keen to please, feeling my way and all that. The meeting wasn’t important, and neither was I, which was why they’d sent me. They’d wanted a face around the table, that’s all, and not necessarily anyone knowledgeable. I don’t even remember what it was about. That was it with those big companies. A lot of time and money got wasted, doing inconsequential things, and nobody cared.
The pool car they’d loaned me was a lemon. The washer bottle ran out at Corley. I had to refill it using an empty coke can I’d chased across the carpark in a howling wind. Then the water I managed to trickle in there had frozen by the time I got to Watford. I’d never been out of Lancashire before, never driven a motorway, let alone one as aggressive and as endless as that M6, M1 route. And all the time there was the clock ticking on when I’d thought the meeting was due to start, and a rising anxiety, not wanting to let the team down, by showing up late.
So, destination: Harpenden, Hertfordshire, way on down south. By the time I got there, I felt I’d almost died a dozen times: whiteout, ice, fog, the swirl of snow spinning my head so much it sometimes felt like the car was running backwards. I arrived about midday, dizzy with fatigue, to find the whole thing had been a waste.
The lip-glossed, shoulder-padded, frizzy-permed receptionist thought it was funny. “What? Nobody told you?”
I didn’t think it was funny at all.
The radio said they’d shut the M6 around Birmingham for the snow by then. It was coming down heavy around me too, the roads clogging up, and then the forecast was for a big freeze that night. The office had booked me into a hotel at least, so I drove there, and checked in. I’d never stayed in a hotel before. My parents had always holidayed in caravans. They’d not much money. Most of my colleagues were what you’d’ve called middle class back then, and had been to university. I wasn’t, and hadn’t. But if you laboured long at technical college, a working class lad could still get himself a white collar job. It wasn’t that I’d aimed myself in that direction out of any clear material ambitions. It had just seemed the right thing to do, that’s all. I mean to study, to cram the maths and the trig, and to become an engineering draughtsman, maybe one day even a designer. It sounded like interesting work, and it’s what Dad would have wanted – anything, he said, to keep me out of the pit.
Flopping down on the bed in that hotel room, after such a long drive, I was thinking I’d landed myself in a different world to the one my parent’s knew, and had prepared me for. And it was not a world I was altogether comfortable with, at least not if this was how casually people treated it, and how little difference I was making. I couldn’t ring my mother to let her know I was okay, because we didn’t have a home phone, though I knew she’d be watching the weather and fretting. Dad was long gone by then, but there still wasn’t a day when I didn’t think about him. He’d risked his neck all those years underground, and then it was something as mean and sneaky as the cancer that got him, stabbed him in the back, and robbed him of so much life.
I was still angry about that – oh, not all the time, but it could bubble up at the slightest thing and, though I was cursing the privilege and the incompetence of my white-collared middle-classed colleagues that day, it was Dad I was thinking about, and Mum on her own, just about managing on a widow’s pension. And there I was in my shirt and tie, sent way down south, stuck in the middle of Herfordshire, in a snowstorm, and for no good reason. And so what if I’d died on the road that day? What if I’d spun off on bald tyres, gone under the wheels of truck? Well, it would have done nothing but prove the pointlessness, the banality of the individual life. Like Dad’s, maybe. Except,…
I sat down at the little desk in that hotel room. The light was soft, coming from the snowed in world outside, and further softened as it was filtered through the net curtains. I took out a notebook, and began to sketch out a poem about a girl I loved, but who didn’t know my name. I’d not seen her for years, not since we’d left school, and went our separate ways. I’d fallen really hard for her, about the time Dad passed away. I think everyone expected me to fail, to go off the rails over that, and I suppose I might have done, except by some miracle, I fell madly, deeply in love with this girl, and wanted to impress her so much I was going to change the world, and then she’d want to be with me. Was that it? Was that what pulled me through those years of aching grief? That girl who didn’t even know my name?
![](https://michaelgraeme.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/way-on-down-south.jpg?w=800)
When it was time, I went down to dinner. Maybe you take all this for granted – hotels, I mean, dinner and such. For me, back then, it was a trial, it was a battle of wits, sitting there, trying to convey the impression I was cool about it all, when I plainly wasn’t. There’s peculiar ritual to the hotel dinner table, one that’s almost comical. Menus were always a nightmare to me, never could find my way around them, and there was no British Standard to help you navigate the fancy names they gave to stuff. So, then you order, and hope you’ve picked something half-way edible, and the courses come the one after the other, served by supercillious waiters. And then there are the times between times when you’re conspicuous in your aloneness. So I hid my eyes in the notebook, and I worked some more on the poem. Sometimes it helps push back the craziness of the world, the mad, noisesome falseness of it. Other times it’s all too much, the world caves in on top, and the words won’t come.
I was always comfortable with poetry, the way it cut to the quick, the way you could express in a few lines what it took an entire paragraph of prose. But even then I knew there was no money in it, not for a guy like me, with my background, my accent. Who the hell would take me seriously as a poet? Even if I took myself seriously, which I didn’t. But I could draw technical stuff, lay out views on engineering drawings, knew my BS308 back to front, I could work with a neatness and a precision in ink that made everyone else in the office look cack-handed. I could earn a living by it, good money too, and Mum would feel easier knowing I was on my way. And if there was an afterlife, maybe Dad would rest easy too.
I just had to keep quiet about the poetry, because there was no good in it, and certainly no money, no way to make your way by it. It was also the mark of a flaky, effete sort of person, and in my world you were only as good as your last mistake on the drawing board – a misplaced view, a missing dimension, a feature that couldn’t be tooled. And Lord Byron didn’t work in a mill, did he? He racked up monumental debts, and shagged his way round Europe. John Clare spent half his life in an asylum, no use to anyone, and William Blake was mad a box of frogs. God rest them all. No, if you had any poetry in you , it was safer to keep it to yourself, lest others judge you the wrong way.
I knew the routine about hotels from listening to the older hands at the office. After dinner you were supposed to retire to the bar and get mildly drunk on expenses. But alcohol wasn’t a thing for me. I had enough trouble keeping a clear head when I was sober. But dinner that night had at least wasted a couple of hours. The best thing I could do now was sleep, then I could make an early start on the journey home in the morning. Except we never ate so late at home, and I knew I’d not sleep on a full stomach. The hotel lounge looked empty, soft-lit, peaceful and airy, so I sat down in there, to be quiet for a bit, and took out the notebook again.
That’s when I saw her, a tall girl, short hair, blue dress, and Doc Martins. She was slouched down in a Chesterfield, sort of all folded up. I’d not noticed her before, but suddenly she unfolded herself, and she was looking at me, smiling. I wasn’t used to that, I mean girls looking at me, let alone smiling. She had a pale, oval face and a sharp chin, and piercing blue eyes. I want to use the word challenging, but I don’t mean it in an aggressive way, more a speak your mind and don’t be so buttoned up sort of way.
I felt self conscious of course, and slipped the notebook back in my pocket. She looked a little older than me, and I guessed way more worldly, which wouldn’t have been difficult. She looked like she was expecting conversation, but I didn’t know where to begin, and that only made me more self conscious. Some guys go through life leaving a trail of broken hearts. Me? I’ve left a trail of women who never even knew I was there.
It was she who broke the ice, made all the running, made me easy in myself.
“What you writing?” she asked.
American accent. You can’t imagine how exotic that sounded to me. And I wondered if maybe that’s why she was so forward – being American, I mean. It’s just how American girls were, perhaps. Every English girl I’d met no sooner looked at me than they were turning their backs. Maybe they smelled the poetry in me. It came with an intensity, a seriousness, and they didn’t like it. It scared them. They wanted fun, that’s all.
I tried evasion. “Em,… writing?”
But she wasn’t to be deflected. “Yea. Like just now, and in the restaurant. I was watching you. Sure didn’t look like no business report, neither. Least not from a distance. Looked more,… creative. You know? Soul stuff.”
Okay, confess it. “Bit of poetry, that’s all.”
She rolled her eyes, dramatic, teasing. “All? Is all, he says.”
So I went all defensive: “I mean,… it’s just a hobby. I’m not,… you know,… not a poet or anything.”
“You write a poem, makes you a poet. Least it seems that way to me.”
Did it? I suppose so. “Maybe.”
But she was emphatic: “No maybe about it.”
We were quiet for a bit, and I was feeling awkward again, not wanting to leave and appear rude, but not knowing what else to say to make the staying easy for us both. We were strangers in a hotel lounge, ships in the night and all that. She was a little brassy, confident, perhaps a litte odd, too. I was awkward, inexperienced, tongue tied. I presume there was a sophisticated etiquette for dealing with all of that, but I didn’t know what it was. Again, though, she made things easy, managed to keep things going: “Sure snowed hard, today, didn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“So, where you headed?”
“Home, tomorrow. Back up north. You?”
“Me? London.”
“Ah, way on down south, London Town.“
She laughed at that. “You know Dire Straits? That’s a line from Sultans of Swing, isn’t it?”
“Yes, got all their stuff.” Sure, I’d cracked a joke, an in joke, a cool joke. And she’d got it.
“Cute accent by the way. That where you’re from, up north you say?”
“Yes.”
“Gotta check that out some time. North of England?”
“You do that.”
She smiled, such a sweet smile. There was something of the street urchin about her, I mean in the way she dressed, in the cut of her hair, but there was something powerful too. We’d broken the ice now, opened the way to some easy conversation, but this was to be the briefest of encounters, as I find the most significant ones usually are – a fleeting intervention of the gods. A look here, a word there, a touch on the rudder, and the world changes, though you may not notice at the time. Then some guy appeared round the doorway, nodded to her, and she got up to leave. But in passing she took something from the pocket of her dress. It was a marble, pale blue, but swirled with darker blues of every shade. She held it out, and dropped it into my palm.
“A small blue thing,” she said. “For luck, maybe.” And then: “Be anything you need to be to get by. But always be the poet in you too. Take care, now.”
I slept well that night, and the morning brought a bright new world. There was sunshine and a sparkling frost. It took me a good half hour to ready the car. There was an auto-shop across the road, where I filled up with screen wash. The radio said the motorway was open all the way, now. We’d take our time, but we’d make it, and we’d show those smug bastards at the office we weren’t fazed by anything. They’d risked my neck for nothing, but on the upside, I’d had a night away in a decent hotel, all paid for by the company. Oh, and I’d met some kind of goddess, who spoke with a Brooklyn accent and who’d gifted me a marble. For luck.
It was around Corley, heading north, when I first heard that song on the radio: Small blue thing. It collapsed me back inside myself, made something small of me, but also transcendent. I remember that drive like it was yesterday. I remember that song playing, and the world changing around me. It was becoming more manageable for being viewed through the coolness of a different kind of eye. It was a way of looking that stripped away all the layers of deceit. The poet Blake had it, hundreds of years earlier when he wrote: This life’s dim windows of the soul distorts the heavens from pole to pole and leads you to believe a lie when you see with, not through, the eye.
I’m not saying it was her. Lots of girls looked like that, and dressed that way in those days. I’ve no idea who she was. She was a kindred spirit perhaps, sent by the faery-folk to rescue me from my lonesomeness and my anger, that night. Or more likely, she was just a friendly American girl who was into that kind of music, and into poetry. And she was so into that song, she kept a pocket full of blue marbles then she could give them out in passing to lonely strangers. I don’t know.
Naturally, that song has haunted me for forty years. In that time I’ve made my way, been what I needed to be to get by, and I’ve changed when I had to. I wasn’t always inspired by what I’ve had to do, but that’s just the way things are for most of us. It’s a whole lot easier though if, like she said, you can always be the poet inside of yourself, too.
![](https://michaelgraeme.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/suzanne.jpg?w=800)
I still carry a notebook, then I can let that side of me out, whenever he feels the need to express himself. It’s through him I find the meaning of my life, rather than out in the world. Out there, there’s still just the M6 and the M1, and the weather, same as always. But not me. I’m not the same now as I was back then, but I do still have that small blue thing, like a marble, like an eye. Sure, it just a piece of China, a piece of glass, but then some things are worth more than their weight in gold, worth more than a million words of prose. I’d write a poem about all of that, but a better poet than me beat me to it, a long, long time ago.
This is the best I can do.
Thanks for listening.
Oh, by the way, way on down south? Play me out, guys:
I love that Michael.
It resonates with me.
Dookes
Thank you, Dookes. Much appreciated. 👍🙂
Nice one Michael.
Thanks. Thought I’d try a bit of fan fiction. 🙂
Hit the spot.
Who’s been playing with Ai picture generation again, then?
It’s a guilty secret, but one of my lesser vices.
Last week I had my sister and a nephew with me in a little engineless Broads Cabin Sailor I’d hired. They were humouring me, being kind, but whenever I didn’t ask anything off them, they both disappeared back into the cabin, and under their duvets, no matter how stunning I thought the scenery, wildlife, or weather. They were untouched by the unlikeliness of getting the thing to go upwind in a blow. As we reached a little shallow lake, I made a miscalculation. It had worked before, I had put the boat intentionally on the reeds, taken off and stowed and tied down all the sails and spars, and then allowed the strong wind to blow us accross the mere to the sheltered inlet on the other side, where the National Trust make a curious affair of running a windpump. This time the wind, not quite as strong, was blowing from a slightly different direction, and we just fetched up on the reeds on the other side.
I’d tied up the sails so neatly, I really didn’t want to get them out again, I decided we needed a rescue. I called Donald, who used to run, wildlife trips in his little trip boat from the staithe, and sent him a text, and asked if there was anyone there who might pull me off, and leave me upwind of the sheltered little harbour. Not being a regular rescue service, Donald didn’t answer straight away.
Then a little electric dayboat appeared, and I frantically flagged it down. They took our painter, but instead of pulling us away from the reeds, they pulled us along the reed bed, and got themselves stuck . I had to climb out and wade through the reeds to push them off. They circled a little, then scurried off wishing us well. Eventually I gave up and put up the sail, and found we weren’t even stuck, with no effort at all we dragged along the reed bed, and then were off, and before long, my sister was steering us in as I was gathering in the sail, and stepping ashore to tie us up. It even looked like we meant it!
I texted Donald, to tell him we were ok, and he replied to tell me his rent had been increased 8 fold, and he’d had to move to another site, (with less passing trade). Then I told him my crew were abandoning me there, and my next crew not due for a few days, and he arranged for a lovely Yorkshireman and his collie to sail with me the next day. Richard was not only crew, but tutored me in handling the traditional craft, and it’s dreaded quant pole, and he pointed out, and named, all the wildlife that might have passed me by.
So the next day I went looking for Donald, to thank him. He’d be a perfect character for one of your books Michael, at the staithe by the windpump, in addition to running his trip boat, he used to collect dues from the boaters, and offer to fetch milk and eggs. On the occasion I’d arrived in an overcrowded boat, he’d immediately offered me his own houseboat. After I’d given up finding him, he turned up on a ancient “grease black” honda motorbike, and found me. He insisted in taking me in his trip boat to the pub for a drink. He told me not only was his business in trouble, but his new wife, who’d previously understood that he had roots there, now wanted to move with their two small children to Orkney. And he is thinking maybe somehow he can do a one week/three week split.
I’m not sure if this relates to your story Michael, but it is my recent experience, and though I probably would want to share some of it anyway, I think your curious history brings Donald’s very different story to mind, and I thought you might enjoy it.
Best wishes,
S.
This is writing at its very best, Michael. I was completely immersed in this enthralling story.
Thank you, Tanja, much appreciated. I enjoyed writing it.
It’s ideal when our own writing transports us. 😊