Summerfield

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Summerfield Park Bandstand Concert 1909
    Just a little verse - a reflection again of childhood and transition. Summerfield Park was my growing-up space as a child: the closest thing to Herefordshire I had in the City. A green space to hide and play in as a small child, to roll giant snowballs in when school was called off in the long and very hard Winter of 1963, when our teachers gave up teaching in class because the classrooms were as cold as outside and reasoned that we might as well play in the snow for the rest of the day.
    All Summer we'd play football, cricket, fly model planes, fight battles, waste time - the commodity which we had in such abundance - watch the Brewery train puff it's way down from Mitchells & Butlers to The Green in the deep cutting at the back of the park, the scent of the ever-present privet blossom in our nostrils.
    November - the largest bonfires we'd ever seen - Guy Fawkes night was the event - the fire lit from inside, via a man-sized tunnel, and topping out at twenty or thirty feet high and much, much broader in circumference; the blaze magnificent.
    Teenage years and concerts, hanging out and imagining we were cool. And after I dropped out of Sixth Form through sheer boredom it was always Summerfield Park that was my daytime escape.
    Anyway - the verse:


Dust

Summerfield Park,
Secretive boys and girls scatter,
Navigating boundaries - a
Space between City

and

Green
Belted
Sward,
Copper-red
Mud-field

and

Tarmac Strand -
City Road:

A straight mile
Between Child
And Adult

Dust


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