China Syndrome
Carolyn Garwes
I sent my mad grandmother
six white china horses.
I didn't know her address so I wrote
very carefully on the brown paper
in my biggest letters 'TO GRANDMA,
CARE OF THE LUNATIC ASYLUM,
OXFORD, THE WORLD, THE UNIVERSE'.
Of course, the parcel was returned
to my boarding school.
All the white horses were broken into pieces
like (I poetically imagined) my grandma's brain.
Hauled up before Matron, no sympathy offered,
just what a silly little girl I'd been,
I cried twice once for my lost grandma
and once for my lovely horses.
I loved my mad grandmother.
I was born in her big bed.
My first clear childhood memory
is her safe lap and bosom
under a brown linen dress.
The dress had little china buttons
shaped like harebells all the way down
from its collar to its hem.
I learned to count on these buttons
and to recite my colours
fawn, pink, blue, mauve, yellow, fawn, pink, blue.
And later we went for walks down leafy lanes
and she taught me poems about baby donkeys
and songs about bees in cowslips bells
and we'd dance along singing merrily, merrily.
I kept my mad grandmother
company in her big bed
when I came home from school
the first holiday after my granddad died.
Of course, we didn't know
she was my mad grandmother then.
My doll China Mary was tucked up between us.
China Mary had painted eyelashes
and a china head and curly brown hair.
She'd been to the Dolls' Hospital to be mended
after she'd fallen on her head and broken it.
My grandma squeezed me too hard in the night
in funny places and called me Harry,
over and over, weeping.
I was scared and shouted for my mother.
We visited my mad grandmother
in her new house the next time I came home from school.
I waited with my mother outside locked doors
and there were long corridors of lino
and all the mad people who thought
they were Napoleon (my brother said)
and finally, my grandma sitting on a bed
in a brown dressing gown, not knowing who I was.
My mother said she'd had some special medicine
called easy tea which made her forget things.
Then she threw her teacup at the nurse and smashed it
and called my mother lots of rude names.
I thought my mad grandmother's head
could be fixed like China Mary's.
But, like Humpty Dumpty and my china horses,
it couldn't.
