Andy Humphrey is a legal adviser by day and a
poet by night. His writing uses images from nature, myth and fairy tale to
create contemporary narratives of love and loss with an undercurrent of social
comment. He is the author of two poetry collections (A Long Way to Fall (Lapwing, 2013) and Satires (Stairwell Books, 2015)) and has appeared in the Bridge
House prose anthologies Making Changes and
Spooked.
They hunted my brothers to extinction – the old man and
his people, with their gunpowder and hounds. Far away from the big old house
they drove me: beyond the wide sloping lawn and the fairy ring, the high
lichened wall with its razor curls of wire. I am Reynard, and I am the last of
my kind. But they could not keep me away for long.
Through the bars of the black iron gate I creep. And I know
you’ve seen me from your high, narrow window. You watch as I slink a slender
shadow across the lawn, ears cocked for sense of danger. You wonder who I am,
and why I’m here.
You’re the girl who sings for her supper now. You’ve grown
up on quails’ eggs and ewes’ cheese, on spring water mixed with hot milk and
spiced with pepper to help you fight off the chills. It’s clammy in the big old
house, as the dampness fastens her crafty, crumbly fingers between the stones
and round the roof-beams. The old man lights a crackling fire in every hearth
to keep the chills at bay. The servants are weary from their foraging, bowed
like old trees under the weight of wood they’ve scavenged from the ruins of
what used to be the forest. The damp has got into their bones too. They smell
of it. The house smells of it.
I haven’t forgotten the child you: how you used to let me
watch as you sat at the window and brushed out your hair, ready for bed on
those long summer evenings when the light seemed to last forever. You used to
wave to me, blow me kisses. I think you barely remember me now. I’m a shadow on
the lawn, the ghost of a memory you can’t quite summon. But I never forgot you.
This is a world without birdsong now. The old man and his
kind have left us a ruin of a kingdom. Black silhouettes of lime and poplar,
lining the driveways of their estates. Skeletons of hawthorn, branches
scrabbling against the stones of their everywhere walls. The linnets and
goldfinches have left us in droves, looking for faraway lands where the grass
is as green as it used to be in our childhood, the berries as ripe and bright.
Tar and concrete cover the acres where my mother used to play as a girl. The
air has an oily taint to it.
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