So They Call You Pisher! by Michael Rosen

Author:Michael Rosen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books

The poem goes on to say how it flitted and rushed around me, then landed on my bed; I trapped it in my pyjama-jacket:

In his own dim thick world he lay there twitching

I threw him out

Crushed and dry

By this time, I had also read Sons and Lovers and Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which was published openly, legally and excitingly for the first time just as I hit puberty. One kid brought it to school covered it with brown paper and wrote ‘Black Beauty, by Anna Sewell’, on it. We all read his edition of Black Beauty.

In both books, I remember Lawrence’s narrators and characters seeing things in desperately intense ways, and – as with the bats – being disgusted. One thing bothered me about Sons and Lovers: it was when Paul starts to dislike Miriam because of the way she looks at flowers. Why, I thought, would you break up with a girlfriend because of the way she looks at flowers? Not that I had a girlfriend.

Many, many years later I arrived at a school to perform my own poetry show, and the deputy head was jigging about and pointing at himself, as if I should have known who he was. I didn’t. He told me: he was Paul, the brother of someone in my year, and somehow or other at that time we had ended up working together at a builders’ supply depot in the holidays. We had found a way to skive off by hiding in an open attic space above the stores. But then we thought we’d chuck things from where we were hiding. This deputy head – as he was now – also reminded me that it was him who had got the sack for chucking stuff, not me. I said I was sorry but I really couldn’t remember it at all.

I did my performances and then he joined up with me again and said that one class had been writing poems and wanted to show them to me. Would I come and have a look? He took me into the room and said, ‘Is there anyone here who would like to show Mr Rosen their poem?’

There was a child on the front row doing that shooting-up of the arm thing and squealing, ‘Me, me, me’ like they’re desperate for the toilet.

‘Carol,’ he said, ‘show Mr Rosen your poem.’

The girl put it in front of me. As I read it, I thought it looked really familiar: the sound of it, the subject matter, the way it was written. I got it: here was a kid who had been reading ‘Snake’ or ‘Bat’ and was imitating the style.

I said, ‘I don’t want to be rude, but this looks familiar; have you been reading any poems by someone called D. H. Lawrence?’

‘No,’ she said.

‘What did Mr Rosen say?’ the deputy head asked.

‘He says it looks familiar.’

‘There’ll be a good reason for that,’ the deputy head said, and he whipped out a copy of our school magazine from the time we were there.

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