Roots

Last night I listened to the Ghanaian-born poet Kwame Dawes reading on the radio from a poem he wrote after talking with old women who had spent their lives in South Carolina. The poem was about potatoes, carefully stored in straw away from frost. Shift a few details, forget the three continents, and this fine poem could have been about my own family: root vegetables, roots.

Both my grandfathers were able gardeners. My father grew vegetables obsessively, planting out seventy-five leeks just before he died, aged eighty-two. My sister seized a fork and dug some for me after his funeral. We grew up chewing on orange swedes, which our father’s father also fed to his employer’s prize sheep. I think swedes are probably best left to the sheep. But as the light dips and the frost sharpens I begin to crave the old foods of winter, the red flush of King Edward potatoes, the curled parsnips, sweetened by frost, which my father grew so well.

Death throws you back to roots. I realised, left alone with those curling leeks, how close I had stayed to my working class grandparents. At first the differences seem immense. They did not listen to music, or read anything beyond the local paper and Farmers Weekly. They never owned a house, or travelled outside England. But my poor parents, who thought my Oxford scholarship would lead to wealth and glory, were dismayed that I remained in a tiny house, spending too much on horses, watching badgers, (which my grandfather got up at five o’clock to see, tumbling on sunlit banks, on his way to work up the limestone hill. Gloucestershire, too, is limestone.)

I ruined my skin riding in hailstorms. I ruined my hands hacking through the clay of a recalcitrant garden, where I still have the descendants of the white bluebells my grandmother dug from her small garden and sent for me, because I had praised them. Then I ruined my worldly prospects, as my parents thought, working in a sky-blue boiler suit in my husband’s family’s metal finishing business. I did not give dinner parties; I did not even have a dining table. I was uneasy in large houses, and did not covet expensive clothes. I did not, arguably, keep enough time for poetry. But anything that was good in it owed much to these stubborn roots.

“Roots” was the title that Steve Knightley, from the duo Show of Hands, gave to one of his best songs – darkened only by a rash verse about the Union Jack, which was seized on by the National Front. Roots have little to do with flags. They touch death, of course, as Rilke’s Eurydice must. “She was already root.” “To pastors (shepherds) and to poets the angel first appeared” wrote Langland. It is not enough to go back to roots. They are there to produce: potatoes, poems. Here is one, kept from the cold.

The shed


He looked after tools, not just his own,
Palm-polished handles, Victorian elm,
Stamped with initials for John Maidens Barnes

My grandmother’s father, who never bought farms,
But his own clutch of ditch-tools. Reach down the hoe

A blacksmith beat for the left-handed twist
Of his father, the shepherd, who weeded bean rows
In after-work dazzle, the pipe’s long blue mist.

How far they have travelled. This death is still raw.
Shallots’ small worlds, held by knots of string,

Spin as I brush them. I unhook the fork
He had wiped clean. Soil’s finest grains cling.
Though I know it is sun, swept through glass, over land,

The handle grips hot as his palm to my hand.

Alison Brackenbury