Gulls wheel over the fields
And boys, with their trainers and low-slung bags
Slouch down to the gate
We carried haversacks – remnants from the War
Green from the army, blue the RAF
It's good to see that slouching has endured
Baggy clothes and, written in Gothic script,
The names of the latest bands
Where my school was, a college now stands
Themed for learning, it is all angles and curves
Like a high-tech shopping mall
Students mill around
The playground is gone – playtime how quaint
Games of football with an old tennis ball
Weirdly, at the edge of the site, is an estate of ‘executive’ homes
New and strange, like a clump of mushrooms
I recall Balloon Woods, Strelley village
Cross-country runs we were forced on
I bet they don't do that now
Iron filings heaving in my chest
Sketching graves in an old churchyard
The green, moss-covered walls
I can just make it out – the touchline where we watched girls
Strange, distant creatures, to me they still are
Wollaton Hall stands out
A turreted chateau, improbably close
The scrubby fields where the old pit was
More memories – experiments with gunpowder
Those strange, disreputable magazines
I feel, in one way, like the slouching boys
In another, like an old soldier
On a battlefield that barely survives
As I re-trace my cycling route from school
I recall, precisely, the pebble-dashed houses
And the faux-rustic street names
Inside, I am a boy on his bike
These streets were my patch, my Serengeti
I arrive, finally, at the house
Where I left childhood
Number one, Burnbreck Gardens
It is a brick villa, modest yet somehow smug
Pleased with its social status, its neat walls and its privet hedge
That was my bedroom window
The walls ice blue, the ceiling chocolate brown
Strange colours for a child
Roasting meat, joints of home-grown weed
King Crimson, the Moody Blues from my sister's room
Those are my memories of that house
