Secondary School
From about age ten onwards, I have no record of any verse written by me. I believe I was just too busy at North Manchester Grammar School with homework and extra-curricular activities. Then again I was very much into Scouts, hiking, camping, rock climbing and hill walking.
I have only a couple of efforts to share, both written when I was in the Sixth Form, probably the Lower Sixth in about 1964 or 1965, age about 18. In an English lesson we'd studied some poetry (the Waste Land?) by T. S. Elliott, and the class assignment was to write something in his style. Once I'd finished I dashed off a limerick, that the teacher thought was quite interesting!
In The Style of T S Eliot
Creatures of habit, bustling from the buses
Through draughty shelters, tattered tickets dropped
From thoughtless fingers, trampled in the mud.
Rain sweeps down and seeps persuasively
Through soles of papery shoes.
And home,
To poached egg teas. "What shall we do tonight?"
To settle down with television bright
And pint of beer and cigarette alight.
Or to the pictures where the veil of darkness
Can cloak the polished, torn upholstered seats,
Where holes in lino and last weeks fag ends
Hide and give society a tag -
'Respectable'.
Limerick
There once was a poet - T. S. Elliott
Who led a great literary rebelliot.
When the Press asked him why
He was said to reply
"Mind your own bloody business!"
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