Home Front Alice Pitman

Mr Home Front has started writing poetry. Initially, I could not have been more disturbed to learn he had taken up flower pressing. Or brass rubbing.

The old cynic is not generally known for displays of emotion. When he does show his feelings, it is always mildly shocking. There was the time our dog Beulah died and tears filled his eyes when I returned from the vet with just her red collar. He also blubbed when England won the Ashes in 2005. And his lower lip quivered during Richard Burton’s rollof-honour narration at the end of Zulu. Come to think of it, he was teary-eyed at our register office wedding, too – but that may have been prompted by despair.

For a long time, he was coy about his poems. He wouldn’t show them to me or anyone else. I think he thought I would make fun (as if ). When I asked him why poetry, he gazed wistfully into the middle distance and said, ‘I’m becoming increasingly aware of my own mortality and want to make sense of the world.’ ‘Oh,’ I replied inadequately.

Every Saturday for the past month, he has been disappearing upstairs with a cup of lemon and ginger tea and a poetry-related explanation.

‘Off to polish a tricky stanza,’ he’ll murmur. Or ‘Not too happy about my latest – I feel it’s too derivative of Auden…’ It all sounded rather unconvincing, the sort of thing a man might say as a cover-up for something else. Was he playing away from home? (‘Don’t be stupid,’ said Betty. ‘Nobody’s that desperate.’) Or was it shady shenanigans with the criminal underworld? He always likes to boast about his friendship with a group of former Mancunian gangsters, one with the moniker The Squeaky Pedal (the noise his bicycle made when he cycled off