My Grandmother’s Story
We hadn’t been there long.
That night, we blew the candles out
said our prayers and went to bed.
Hobnailed boots on cobblestones
in the dark outside the window
heading down the garden to the shed.
There were no cobblestones
outside the window, just an
overgrown, untended flower bed.
But every night: the unmistakable
familiar sounds of hobnails
on the cobbles, heading for the shed.
My dad, he told us not to be so daft.
He hated seeing garden go to waste
so dug, ignoring what the neighbors said.
Beneath the window, down a foot, or less,
he scraped his spade on cobblestones.
Looking up, he saw where they had led.
Well, lord, you can imagine
we didn’t sleep that night.
Father was right middling upset.
Even more so when he found
what was beneath the floor boards
in the garden shed.
I first heard my English Grandmother (see previous post) tell this story when I was still in primary school. Much later I asked my aunt about it and heard the 'explanation': what they found under the floor boards and how it got there and whose hobnailed boots were walking on the cobbles.
But this is the story as I first heard it, converted into verse.
First published in Under the Radar, and then in the book Rough Spun to Close Weave.
Copies of Rough Spun to Closeweave are still available from the shop at www.liamguilar.com
