Chimney Sweep on a Newbuild Estate
Driving back through the estate, all the houses look the same:
The same front doors, the same front windows;
if it wasn’t for the fairy lights and decorations
they could all be the same home, the same Cotswold stone.
He pulls up in the driveway. One day soon,
he’ll get that sticker that says NO TOOLS
LEFT IN THIS VAN OVERNIGHT, but not yet,
and besides, there are. But perhaps he doesn’t care.
Looking out of his window later,
he surveys the same same houses again,
the uninsulated loftspaces, the mosaics
of solar panels, the smooth, featureless roofs.
It’s all wood-burners, these days, if anything,
Bags of briquettes from the front of the petrol station.
Nobody needs his help wiping down a pane of glass.
He knows his days are numbered:
A dirty job, in a dirty country, a dirty century,
and soon he’ll go the same way
as the blacksmith and the lamplighter,
the projectionist and the hangman;
he really doesn’t begrudge the progress,
especially as he looks down at the presents
his wife has started wrapping for their grandchildren.
Then again, as the midnight blue of the late afternoon
is lit by a single plume of smoke
rising on the horizon, he realises
how he’d love to have one more;
how much he’d love to see just one more Christmas.
Thinking about the genesis of this one, I think it comes from my Mum telling me yesterday that the chimney sweep was coming today; that percolated throughout this morning, without much thought, until I was washing up listening to the forgotten Madness Yuletide hit “Inanity Over Christmas“, and the line about chimney sweeps taking to the streets “in the ongoing situation.”
From there, it spiralled, and although it’s not turned out quite as well as I think it would’ve if I’d sat down and tried writing it earlier, Mayoral life got in the way (tonight, a carol service for Thames Valley Police at Christchuch Cathedral, of all things.) With one eye on the clock though, I haven’t left myself enough time to mull it over too much more.
I think there’s something hidden in this poem – some slightly buried meaning, or theme, that I can’t quite put my finger on, that I’ve found the metallic end of, poking out of the soil, but haven’t yet dusted down to reveal its complete shape. Maybe it’s in there, maybe it’s not. Perhaps it’s just due to the deliberately elegiac nature of today’s Door, which pleases me. There’s often something elegiac about Christmas, although we never seem to fully acknowledge it: The poinsettas, in memory of those we’ve lost; the Salvation Army and their mournful brass hymns; the grey where the snow should be, the cold. Christmas seems to have a huge tumulus of melancholy, confined to the corner of our eye. Like those blood vessels that float across our vision sometimes. A solar eclipse we can’t directly confront.
Writing this, I was reminded of a VHS we used to watch with my Granny, called A Christmas Eve Story, or something. As I recall, it began with a dedication to all the children who lived in houses without chimneys. There’s also more than a slight debt, in the way this poem ends, to John Osborne, one of my favourite poets who I’ve definitely mentioned on this Advent Calendar at least once before, specifically his poem “Ex-pupil visits old school”. I deliberately didn’t reread it tonight until I’d finished writing mine, but now I have and it’s more similar than I realised. Sorry John.
I mentioned Madness earlier too, but the more I think about it another song that seems to fit with today’s Door is the great Roy Harper’s sublime “When An Old Cricketer Leaves The Crease“. I first heard it on a free CD that came with Uncut magazine, a compilation of songs in the spirit of Ray Davies, which is a spirit that I often try and write in myself. A non-jingoistic, slightly jaded national pride, eulogising an old England that never quite existed but is nevertheless slipping inexorably away with time itself. A vein of thought as hard to put your finger on as any concept of England itself. I like to hope today’s poem finds itself nestled in that particular hedgerow, hemming in that particular astro-turfed village green.
It must be the sting in the ale. Eleven days to go…
Owen x
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