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Draft2Digital
draft2digital
Category:
Action/Thriller
Publisher: draft2digital
Type: Non-Fiction
Pages: 96
Copyright: May 17th 2026
ISBN-13: 9798235277168
Price: $2.99 (eBook)
This mix of poetry and prose tells of my upbringing in the village of Stoke Gabriel on the banks of the Dart estuary, of my early schooling at Hayes Road in Paignton and later in Totnes, also of my before-school work as a milk boy - there my real education - and jobs and so-called career after leaving school and Devon. Most telling poem here is probably 'Education of an Anti-Establishment Man.'
This is a gathering together of material published in various periodicals and stitched together here and there with prose explanations of how such came to be. Very much of a time and place.
Excerpt
True Confessions
True confessions must startle the confessor.
"I love a river," amazed I told a girl with round brown eyes and gipsy-tangled hair: "I love a river."
A grey speckled hour after dawn and we'd just injected methedrine behind a plane tree in Battersea Park: it wasn't, though, of the stonewalled Thames that the speed's pressure of speech had me confessing.
"My river is silver. Sometimes. And it slides between steep wooded banks. Through a countryside of voluptuous slopes. Green rounded hills fall to clear streams, and the fields all fit together with the suppleness of elbows and knees." I stepped off the path to demonstrate, arm bent into crook of hip.
"And each field," I told her, "every small clump of trees, adds its reflection to, draws its colour from, the river below. And from a distant hilltop (I walked there once especially) seen through valley folds, my river looks like five still lakes. Growing up there, of course, I knew nothing of source or mouth. Rumours. My river was as far upstream and as far downstream as I'd been. My river ebbed and flowed. Anything freshwater was a stream."
The speed permitted no lie, nor allowed her dreamy eyes to close on a wrong impression.
"No. It's not a sentimental love. My river kills. It sucks innocents down into its dirty water. It lets crabs and eels gnaw on their phosphoric flesh. Gulls and black cormorants laugh at their sinking. Then it vomits their bloated bodies into a fishstinking creek. My river doesn't babble. My river doesn't make melodies over golden sand, has no musical shingle. My river slurps and it slips and it slithers over bank after bank of grey sewage silt. My river's a real river." (This is all simplification: there were other noises that day – buses in the distance, a toddler on her tricycle irritatingly ringing her bell. And I said more, much more... the emphasis of uncritical repetition. And from here on it is history made story. I had no future then, was still trying to order the past. Which ordering led into the then future.) That wakeless Sunday morning we wandered on, came to a lesbian club where a film was being made of The Killing of Sister George.
I was a chatterbox curiosity. I tired of the lesbians before they of me; and the girl and I went to my room, substituted sex for methedrine. It was not love. I loved my river. That now was knowledge. My river. The one certainty in my unanchored life, it had measured my comforting insignificance with its lunar rhythms.
In bed beside me she talked – of drug highs and paranoias. I decided to go home. Another mistake.
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