Guy Stephenson
Hiding
Our family’s migration from the UK’s North Sea coast to Fermanagh took more than twenty-four hours of train, ferry, train. Children quickly adapt to the new; strange bleeds in to normal.
boy's wide eyes—
behind kitchen doors
greatcoats and leather holsters
My new school is three miles from Enniskillen, amongst drumlins and lakes. Our classroom is ruled by the master. He wields a metre stick in response to our morning mistakes—left hand for spellings, right for multiplication tables; no one cries. Later in the morning we learn by heart lines from a little grey book called “How We Differ From Rome.” My mother advises me not to believe everything I read.
This school is not surrounded by tarmac, has no blocked-up WW2 air raid shelter to hide behind. Instead, it has a whole beech wood for a playground. Released at play-time, we surge down the slope between the silvery boles. Strong root buttresses leave crannies to hide things; small holly trees make prickly obstacles in our chasing games. At the foot of the slope is a wide dry sheugh* which fills each autumn with rustling beech leaves.
Girls tie long ropes to trees and sing out skipping games. Boys race toy cars down clay slopes, fight mock battles. Sometimes we re-enact imagined skirmishes from the world war that ended just before we were born. Sometimes our play refers to Troubles much closer to home.
hide and seek
in leafy debris—
holding my sneeze
Voices call out, “Guy, coming to get you.”
Author’s Notes: Shortly after we moved to Northern Ireland in the autumn of 1956, County Fermanagh became the scene of much of the action during what was called “The Border Campaign,” though it had mostly petered out by late 1958. Some of my classmates had fathers who served in the police, or in the notorious “B” Specials, a part-time paramilitary auxiliary police force.
Enniskillen, the county town, is where the infamous Remembrance Day bombing took place during much later Troubles, in November 1987.
* “Sheugh” is an Ulster word for a ditch: “she” as in the English “she,” “u” as in the English “luck,” “gh” as in the Irish “lough,” softly guttural.
About the Author
Guy Stephenson has been writing and publishing haibun since 2016. He has also published other forms of poetry and is interested in aspects of art such as gardens, ceramics, and cooking. He lives in Donegal, North West Ireland.
I think to see conflict being presented from a child’s perspective always carries a bit more impact. Recently I had been to the Ulster Museum which holds an amazing record of the troubled times. How even simple objects added meaning and depth to the narrative became significant in that experience. I hope to go back and spend more time there. The imagery in your prose reminded me of another poem titled, ‘The Second World War’ by Elizabeth Jennings.
Thank you Shalini, for your kind comments. I am sometimes surprised, myself, to remember that when the events I describe happened, WW2 was little more than 10 years in the past. We played at fighting the Germans! Bomb sites still scarred many places in the UK. In our parents minds it was the recent past.