The Letters
William Bedford

It was William who gave me your life,
your communist brother writing the truth,
his letters Yorkshire prose ‘wi’out disguise’,
typed so I’d know, ‘nowt fancy or made up’.

You lied. ‘Telled stories’. ‘Fantasised’, the sour
neighbours said, not seeing owt true or wise.
In William’s letters I heard the factory siren,
the steam pump pumping at the end of the street.

‘She had a holiday, I seem to remember,
a few days from home to get over the flu,
staying with relatives who lived in the dales.
‘I reckon that did for her. Showed her summat better.

She never settled after that. Told folk
she grew up in the country.’ Told me that too.
The girl from the tenements, dreaming another life.

William Bedford left school at fifteen to work on the east coast fish docks, fairgrounds and farms before moving with his family to an American nuclear rocket base in a remote area of north Lincolnshire. His new collection of poems, The Fen Dancing, is due out from Red Squirrel Press this March.

William said of the poem: “This is from a sequence titled The Redlit Boys which attempts to capture something of my mother’s 1920s childhood in the east end slums of Sheffield.”

Well Versed is edited by Jody Porter.
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