It’s always nice to receive a good review of your work! The way this one came about is quite unusual as it stemmed from the genealogy website, MyHeritage. I was contacted by Bernard, who it turned out was a ‘relative’ by the marriage between my great-uncle Billy and his great-auntie Nelly. Billy died when I was very young but I always loved visiting Auntie Nellie who always had a steady supply of Gipsy Creams to hand whenever we came round. The photo accompanying this post is of Billy and Nellie’s wedding day which I had never seen before Bernard had contacted me.; so it was lovely to see this.

Bernard has kindly written a review of the poetry of mine he has viewed on my website and I thought that seeing he has gone to the trouble of writing it, then it deserved to be seen by others…plus it is a very positive review!

It turns out Bernard and I had much more in common than our ‘relativity’ as you will see from his piece. He is also a writer himself and has written Whispers in the Lancashire Fog (under the pseudonym Meg Goodman) the cover of which can be seen below.

Ode to Graham Lightfoot

For them that knows Gray it will come as no shock to know what a clever bloke he is.

I’m not trying to bull him up, nor knock him down. I just wanted to pen something after reading some of his work.

The fact is that we are ‘related’. My Aunty Nellie married his Uncle Billy, the brother of his grandmother, Susan Jane; he is Janies’s grandson. That’s not where the coincidences end, both our mothers had infantile paralysis, polio in today’s money, lived in a mill town called Brierfield on the same street. There are more twists but they are not relevant!

We’ve never met but I can say for certain, in reading his work, I know we have had lots of similar experiences. 

Just take his Uncle Alex, living on a street that sloped down to some railings beyond which the canal flowed. His ‘Burlington Street’ covers the days they did flow, not like now with everything that’s been thrown in ‘em. My grandparents lived in a similar terraced house with a tippler for an outside toilet. One of the scariest things a little lad could ever have to sit on; if you fell in, you’d be doomed into a never ending well and Victorian drainage.

If he had, he’d still have come up smelling of roses.

As I sat think about writing summat, I thought he won’t tell me off because I’m older than him and youngsters don’t tell their elders off, they advise them politely. That is, the ones of our age anyway.

Anyhow, there’s nowt to be told off about; everything’s good. I contacted him after genealogical research identified him in my family tree, still kicking with the possibility of him knowing stuff I wanted to find out about. [It is at this point I want to mention ‘Mary Ann’ who has written on his ‘Blog’. I have references to a ‘Mary Ann’, already written, by me; it is no way a reference to her. My ‘Mary Ann’ is a fictional character in a work of fiction and only the name is used.]

Graham sent me a link to his brilliant work, well all of it not just the outstanding stuff. It is difficult to split the outstanding from the brilliant! I hit back with a with questions about Jack Moore’s monkey and if he could remember. The worst part of this getting older business, my brother used to tell me, was starting a sentence with “Do you remember …” when you know they probably don’t.

I did tell him that he was definitely a poet, which his poem suggests he isn’t. If you’re reading this, you already recognise how accomplished and thought‑provoking his work can be.

It’ll take time for me to catch up with numerous years of excellence, but I will in time. ‘The Last Bus’ makes you think or should. Obviously ‘I’m not a proper poet, me’ is so connected. The ‘Joke’, where lads our age used to laugh at no longer appropriate comedy! But I’d question whether Scotsmen were the only brunt of folks being mean, when we had Yorkshire nearer to point our finger at in that regard. While they would quip “Lancky born, Lancky bred; strong in the arm, thick in the ‘ead”.

When he finally takes his one man operated to the terminus in the sky, he’ll be able to park it next to his father-in-law’s double decker with his mother-in-law punching tickets next to my dad’s Burnley, Nelson and Colne yellow and maroon omnibuses or is that omnibii?

Bernard Marland