This poem is about my mother who came to England in 1947 from India just before Partition. She was an Anglo-Indian and at first was not welcomed by my father's family.

- IN EXILE -

The nurse, this morning, searching for a pulse
along my thin, yellowed wrist;
apropos my inadvertent remark
concerning the changing seasons said,
You have such a charming sing-song voice,
did you ever live out East?
I snickered, Only for a few years during the war -
but English born and bred.
Given an open field and four strong legs
I'd have cantered away, blonde tail flicking,
instead I added, But of course...
as if...who would imagine?
Sufficient words to give nursey the gist
that hospitalised, elderly,
losing my marbles maybe - still,
I was nothing if not a pure bred English lady.

Later drowsing in a chair,
(I am press-ganged from bed at eight a.m. sharp),
I trot back fifty years to September 1947.
We, (my soldier husband of fourteen days
and I), stand in the brown hallway
of his mother's terraced house in Smallheath.
The air seems charged with soot,
bannisters gleam like a row of ebonised bones.
My mother-in-law is saying,
Tell her not to wear that hat.
Tell her working class women don't wear hats.
Tell her, only tarts wear hats like that.

She smelt me.
I was cumin seed and curry powder
lodging in the pinched slits of her nostrils.
I left my foreign spores in the filaments
of her moss stitch cardigans. Out of control,
(in her opinion), oiling my wanton way
over the linoleum landing, holed up for days
in our bedroom where I more than made
my presence felt between the army blanket
and darned sheets. I was a tropical forest
on the move. Plumes of hot vapour
steamed from between my legs.
To save the life of her precious son,
she couldn't have placed her hand in my armpit.

Rain falls like silver fish.
I'm topped and tailed and back in bed
ready as I'll ever be for the long night ahead.
Nurse calls it, A time for playing up
and high jinx, which sounds as if
it might be fun, but is only her cheerful slant
on shouting, cries and senseless laughter.
When I was a child,
rain was an endless, bamboo curtain,
steam curled hot fingers
around the foot-hills below my village.
The temperature truly was ...temperate.
Sounds and smells, noises of the night -
so very different. But that remains
my business.

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