Ever Innocent Days - the Promised Deconstruction of a Masterpiece

I have been invited by Michael Glover, that toothsome and ever teasingly importunate editor of The Bow-Wow Shop, to deconstruct one of my many masterpieces. Preferably a relatively short one, he added, with just a tiny drip of acid from his short, magisterial pipette of - oh yes! - once crystalline molten glass. When I read that word deconstruct again, and then again, it seemed to leap out at me as if it were as good as alive. And yet, richly paradoxically, it had no meaning for me. No enduring presence. It was as far from being, say, an aluminium bucket afoam with the slops of night or the Middletons' faux-antique Chippendale dining room table as one could ever imagine. It had never once walked the boundlessly streaming acres of Swaledale, I could swear to that, or spewed forth unprettily from the mouths of the little local folk as they divagated away from their fleeting pleasures at closing time, voices and vices baying at full throttle.

In fact (and I always deal in solid, sober-suited fact in the midst of the pink mouthwash of all this pleasantry), it was as alien to good Yorkshire practice assushi once had been. Deconstruct…  I bodily, and quite boldly, jumped back a pace or two as I intoned its polysyllabic strangenesses for a third time, fearing it might grasp hold of me by the naked windpipe, and wrestle me to the cold linoleum of the porch floor. Metaphorically speaking, of course. Life is wide and tall and ever onrushing enough without the rude and unhelpful intrusion of needless exaggeration.

I know of the majestic building of verbal artifice, I said to myself just then (for there were no others within earshot), oh how well I know of that, of that mighty upraising, brick by verbal brick, of verbal edifices, and for how long too... But - but - with the unbuilding of that which one has created so laboriously, and with such loving fingers, I believe that I know nothing. Not so much as half an eviscerated rabbit's whisker.

Where to find help then? I asked myself as I climbed the turning stairs, one by one, head drooped, quite meditatively, like a great soon-to-be-fishward-swooping crane, to the casement turret. And then, soon - a matter of micro-seconds later, it could have been no more than that - after I had twisted my long and gorgeously agile neck out of the casement window, and jerked it skyward, it came to me all of a rush: the moon was in the quaternary. Which meant that the moment was a propitious one for a little Ouija-board surfing with dear little senatorial Willie Yeats and Georgie, his horsey sidekick, who were always game for such things in the wee small hours, but especially so when the moon is in the quaternary…

We sat around the table, all three of us, in that high attic room, amidst the low boomity boom-boom of the wind, Willie breathing heavily and with metronome regularity in his button-straining, mossy, three-piece suit, and Georgie leaning hard over the table in the uncanny direction of that which was to come, teeth fully attent. Just then, as if magicked into being, the poem itself appeared in front of us, in the air, as if suspended by the finest of spirit threads. Here are its words just in case you are not fully in tune with us at this moment of exquisite visionary exaltation:

Ever Innocent Days

Elsie, with her brightest smile,

Took me aside to share the truth

Of innocence and its pastures green

Where we still gambol, side by side.

Elsie and I, two staunch walkers,

Seldom a word, but plenty of eating,

Sandwiches, buns, chocolates, toffees,

Brazil nuts smooth with praline perfection,

Toffees, skimmed with a chocolate coating,

Buns with raisins and shards of cherry,

Liquorice pipes for blowing out sherbet,

And gum, ever chewy, of every complexion…

And still we gambol, Elsie and I,

Innocent lambs in these innocent days,

Chewing and chewing and stumbling a little -

When the ground gets pitted, tempers fray…

Toffees, skimmed with a chocolate coating,

Buns with raisins and shards of cherry,

Liquorice pipes for blowing out sherbet,

And gum, ever chewy, of every complexion…

I could see Willie's eyes moving across and back through the air, back and across, that great neck of his perpetually on the swivel, as if reading some ticker-tape newsreel as it spews wantonly out of the machine. There was such a silence in that room, a listening silence. Minutes, entire hours may have passed before I violently twisted my lumber region in his direction. 'Well, Willie?' I said. 'Well? What help is to be had from the great and revered dead on this night of nights?'  He drew in a mighty lungful of long-spent, fetid air. 'Begin again,' he replied, quite curtly, in that gravelly way of his.

We have not spoken since that day. At the very least I am alive.

Addendum by Dame Polly Syllabix