There is a shelter in the park that acted as a goal,
the football aimed squarely at whoever was unfortunate enough
to act as the keeper, imagining they were Peter Shilton, Ray Clemence
or in my case the great Gordon Banks or even
Bert Trautman.
Not that I often went in goal, I didn’t like diving
on to bare concrete and seeing my T-shirt
ripped to shreds in a strange, weird way of portraying machismo.
I made allowances when some of the girls that we knew
made their way down to the Garth but it was easy to see
were always more interested in Biggsy,
although he couldn’t play
with the ball properly or my mate Andy who seemed to have
the girls falling at his feet with his cockney loving attitude,
the stubby end of a purloined cigarette
hanging out of his mouth,
as if it were a lighted toothpick, cool, suave, most girls dream lad
it seems.
That cigarette was always one of a packet he used keep hidden
in a wall down the alleyway near his house
and in which the day after my granddad died
I thought of a 100 miles away as I joined in the smoking
revolution for about six months.
If I had been back in Bicester I may not have succumb,
for I would have walked solitary stiff down the Launton Road, slipped
into that alleyway and begged him to let me try a drag;
knowing that one would have been plenty
but where I lived at that moment, I had no one to stop me
from filling my lungs with the taste of Players no.6.
The Garth was a natural playground,
the ideal of a Victorian relic neatly preserved
in thought and in which the bandstand seemed
completely out of place, no more wars for our generation
to fight and bring the girl we were courting
down in her bountiful dress and parasol umbrella
on a summer’s day whilst on leave. Sitting
on a deckchair licking ice cream as the sun sat serenely in the sky
The closest we came to wars in that Bicester town
was arguing about whose turn it was to go in goal,
never a peace accord signed, it just ended up in childhood
world war or unless the girls came along, the embodiment
of cool, then the scramble to be seen to be brave
was all the encouragement needed.
The Council office, strangely in keeping with the Victorian idea,
stood erect like a Warrant Officer, Red Cap brushed within
an inch of its life and waiting with bated, stern, commandant breath
for the ball to come crashing through the windows
and with foreboding pleasure report us to our parents
and at the same time make detailed statement
on which boy fancied which girl and the declarations of love
made by teenagers as the rest played football
as in pairs the act of growing up was tested.
No park was ever the same as the Garth,
perhaps I didn’t hang then with the same crowd
or even the parks never had the same teenage allure.
Now a park is somewhere to avoid for the most part,
full of screaming and laughter, at night who knows what
creeping in the shadows, certainly not the gentle
innocent kiss of a teenage girl and boy and the revealing
of deep anguish and thoughts of naked
ambition.
Possibly it might even be that the best of times
were had in the Garth and no perfectly mown lawn,
no shelter from the pissing down rain on a dull Sunday afternoon
in a small town or stolen kiss from Melissa
could ever top that feeling
of being alive.
Ian D. Hall 2015.