Anticipating

Miss B often sat alone

In her dusty, erratic sitting-room,

Seldom closing its slatted blinds

On the dense Edwardian gloom.

She would sit and peer at

Newspapers -

Using a large magnifying-glass -

Pages lit by the uncertain glow

Of an oil lamp fashioned out of brass.

Village kids threw stones at her window.

Yet she seemed not to care.

Smiling at them and offering 'sweeties'

That she'd bought that morning "Just to share."

Her unruly hair was 'pepper and salt'.

Short in the leg and long in the arm,

She was no beauty, of course,

But possessed a gentle charm.

Her brother had been buried alive,

It was said, in 1917 -

His name now carved on granite

By their tiny village-green.

She could not grieve and still believed

One day he would come marching home.

He never came, of course.

Yet she kept the lamp lit in their room -

Alone.

This poem is set in the early 1960s, when I was young.