Iain - a new poem

IAIN

The tall, tall, slim French boy stood
in the rain with his back to me, his head
snug in a hood. I thought
for a moment it was Iain, my friend Iain
(two i’s in his name) alive again.

In his attic
we pulled out 78s and it was then
I first heard When They Begin the Beguine

that voluptuous tune. One voluptuous night
we played strip poker with the delicious nieces
of Mrs Lichfield. (Very little flesh
got exposed.) We chased them round the garden

- Iain’s idea. Next day I said
he’d acted like a fool. ‘Did they say that?’

he countered. ‘No, they didn’t.’

In his cellar and in my washhouse

we messed with flowers of suplhur
potassium permanganate, zinc,

and hydrochloric acid, and he told me
(as we reverently studied
Griffin and Tatlock’s catalogue of flasks,
beakers, pipettes, burettes, Liebig condensers,
all in voluptuous virgin Pyrex)
that Norma, whom we met on the cricket field
one rosy summer evening
and whom I ached for, really fancied me.

It was a lie.

In Barr’s Private Army
(we were eleven then) he was lance-corporal
but later in the Queen’s Own Khaki Squaddies
only a private. Nonetheless he claimed,
‘I’m dating the Colonel’s daughter.’

Was that a lie? I see him saying it,
hair butchered by the regimental barber,
tall, horse-faced, outside the Jolly Sailor
with great aplomb. On that same spot
I learned that he had died, at forty-two.

The French boy turned, and oh, he wasn’t Iain.

Late one afternoon
returning to the Scout camp from a hike
(it seems we’d lost the rest of our patrol)
he made us do a three-mile detour
along a country lane. I counted telegraph poles

to deal with weariness. When I complained he said,
with all the authority of his extra year,

‘Scouts do things the hard way.’