IT TOOK ME BACK... (My poem inspired by Lucy Manfredi's artwork, 'Missed The Bus'...)

 It Took Me Back…

(Inspired by Lucy Manfredi’s painting, ‘Missed The Bus’, oil on board, 2021…)

The sickening mulch of an inclement winter sky

Reflects the snow, quite downtrodden by pedestrians

Hurrying home chilled, with no hint of tarrying

In the gathering evening gloom of a downtown

Street. And the laden woman who steps cautiously

Across the still, bleak scene has missed her bus, glared at by 

A silhouetted chimney and a weathered tower, high

Above a church. The dark uprights form curious misdirections    

 In the quiet, dank dusk as she treads, perhaps worrying,

Towards home, her concern doubtless exposed by a frown.

And the sky’s greys, greens and mustards mingle nauseously

Above the tracks in the snow as they writhe and seethe awry…

Pete Ray

26th December 2023…

As a Year 8 pupil at King Edward’s Grammar School in Aston, Birmingham, getting home to Shard End estate was always an awkward journey.

I recall a snowy late afternoon when I changed buses at Nechells Place, which was then very industrial, near the gas storage towers of Saltley. I had jumped off a number 8, ‘Inner Circle’ bus but I couldn’t catch a number 55 because each one passed by full from the city centre.

It was bleak, I was despairing and I missed several buses until finally I was allowed to stand downstairs on a crowded 55, clinging to my cumbersome haversack.

My father was working and used a bicycle in all weathers but we had no car until I was 15. We didn’t have a telephone at the house either and of course mobile phones hadn’t been invented in 1963… 

The above painting by Lucy Manfredi made me think of those awful days of missing a bus…