It was a secret,
one of those places you
were not aware of
until you were properly ready
to understand the significance of the change
it would bring
into your life and the preparation
into the adult that would stand bare naked one night
thirty years later
as the world became a more lonely place.
I found myself recalling the piece
that landed me my first part
inside the hallowed halls of the most exciting building
in the whole of Bicester and started to hum it,
appropriately with tears stinging my eyes,
the burning sensation, hot, deserted, all eyes upon me, nervous
but carrying on all the way determined
as Marillion’s Script
landed me the part of the best friend at The Double,
I never lost on any playground equipment that day
but one day
I did indeed play the boy who fell in love
with the clown
and her sweet singing serenade.
The Garth may have been the place to kiss a girl
for the first time, that sweetness as they gently nuzzled in,
and I was more nervous but hid it well each time
as their lips parted gently to reveal honesty in a future ode
that would adorn the back of a grey, 1980s text book,
more suited for the insanity of Maths than song lyrics
and my own feeble attempts at trying to imitate
The Alarm or the teenage anger at a world that I didn’t fit into,
until that day I crossed the threshold of the Courtyard
and like dear Elizabeth’s mother I allowed my head to
be placed on the block.
The Garth may have been the place to kiss a girl,
all women now and with their own beautiful stories to tell,
their planned seduction techniques now lost as we enter
the final phase,
no longer teenagers and yet inside The Courtyard, the ghosts
would come with pleasing smiles as they show me the image
of how I was taught to kiss properly, staged and acted
out for a hundred discerning adults to watch.
My father
only ever saw me perform the once on stage
and if it had to be anywhere, then inside the small room
to the right of the entrance, laid back as he watched me
lay on a bed of nails, the spikes leaving tiny red, open pin pricks
into my scared skin, even through the dungarees which I insisted
made me feel like in tune with a worker
in a far off country and in who I felt affection for,
despite the growing tension that hung in the air to us as kids
in Bicester, was the right place to see it.
The Courtyard, there was no place like it
as we grew up, but we were not welcome until
we were ready to lay down childish things and learn
how to pretend, how to act our way in a society
that even frowned upon us
spending our Saturday mornings, and perhaps
our Mondays too, in the only decent record shop
where I first learned the lines to an entire epic
that would see me join the world and feel
the despair at the game being terminated.
Ian D. Hall 2015