Frinton Flats

a memory of childhood

We used to play outside,
my brothers and I.
Not far, not much,
just in the granite court
beyond the front window,
an enclosed yard
where sun beats down eternally
as I remember it.

Memory was always my strongest feature.
Trained on the books my mother left,
having dismissed me as too thick to teach.
And one of my earliest memories
is running down and up the steps
inside a pebbledash tower,
beside the Frinton flats.

(I could have been one of those kids,
I told my brothers once,
you read about in tabloid trash.
About how his mummy was too drunk to care
as the pervert pulled up in the park.)

The funniest part of it all, to me,
is how much dad pretended class.
How it must have rankled him to learn
that sometimes whores don’t make housewives.
That sometimes girls whom you find on the beach
need more than engineers to make them good.