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Philip Larkin - I Remember, I Remember
Work rating: Medium

Coming up England by a different line
For once, early in the cold new year,
We stopped, and, watching men with number plates
Sprint down the platform to familiar gates,
`Why, Coventry!` I exclaimed. "I was born here.`

I leant far out, and squinnied for a sign
That this was still the town that had been `mine`
So long, but found I wasn`t even clear
Which side was which. From where those cycle-crates
Were standing, had we annually departed

For all those family hols? . . . A whistle went:
Things moved. I sat back, staring at my boots.
`Was that,` my friend smiled, `where you "have your roots"?`
No, only where my childhood was unspent,
I wanted to retort, just where I started:

By now I`ve got the whole place clearly charted.
Our garden, first: where I did not invent
Blinding theologies of flowers and fruits,
And wasn`t spoken to by an old hat.
And here we have that splendid family

I never ran to when I got depressed,
The boys all biceps and the girls all chest,
Their comic Ford, their farm where I could be
`Really myself`. I`ll show you, come to that,
The bracken where I never trembling sat,

Determined to go through with it; where she
Lay back, and `all became a burning mist`.
And, in those offices, my doggerel
Was not set up in blunt ten-point, nor read
By a distinguished cousin of the mayor,

Who didn`t call and tell my father There
Before us, had we the gift to see ahead -
`You look as though you wished the place in Hell,`
My friend said, `judging from your face.` `Oh well,
I suppose it`s not the place`s fault,` I said.

`Nothing, like something, happens anywhere.`
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