I remember my first day

and the grey jumper of differing sizes

and snot stained cuffs

to which I was then tied throughout

my seven years at Moor Green

was one in which I met you

and forty years later I still

think you’re pretty cool.

 

We stood side by side in class

and in the playground, though I had further to travel

as we didn’t move to Selly Park

till the days when the Four Seasons

sang of a decade before and my first game against

Birmingham City,

and a friendship cemented

through pain, football,

good teachers, teachers who in this day

and age would lose their jobs

and the school playground,

the ultimate decider of gravitas and social standing.

 

Rod Stewart was number one,

sailing murky waters as the boys

proved over time how high they could

get it to go,

and against the backdrop of over a million

unemployed, a fuss over religion

as the Holy Grail stormed

and the beauty of the Sex Pistols to come,

all things shall passed when disappearing

beyond the green flaked gates for the first time…

 

…having let go of our mother’s hands and the shock

that life was not all green grass and chips for tea

and that somebody could tell

you off for singing quietly to yourself

as you found the adventures of Janet and John

not in keeping with the world

you knew and getting your first kiss

from the girl in the off colour skirt

who had worked out that by putting shorts underneath

her skirt she never once let on the colour

and as a boy everyone was painfully aware

of the type of underwear your mother

bought you.

 

We were taught to read and write,

the wrongs and rights

and yet all the time

I felt school was just the place you went

to be social and if not for

the love of Ms. Dicks in my final year

I dead to think what I would be now

as she pushed me like no other teacher

before her, a new breed with radical ideas

and whose perfume I longed to understand.

I miss those days, how could I not,

for you were there beside me all the way

and I love you now as much as I did then,

forty years on I adore you…

For Paul, Christine, Artney, David, Louise, Andrew, Simon, Chris, Adam, the much missed Pauline and Wayne.

Ian D. Hall.