Balaklavas At Alma

Heads bent into the driving wind
we kids cut our way to school.
Along the terraced streets,
past gasworks and factories
and through the courtyards of tower blocks.
My dark blue gabardine mac,
belt done up tight,
covered my shorts, knees and long grey socks.
We marched off to school,
chiselling against the sleet -
all good character-building stuff,
when Nelson Road meant Lord Horatio
and not Mandela.
The late Victorian Alma Road School
was nearer to Crimea than Hiroshima
and still there when I landed,
in the space race.
But the spaceships which interested most
were the flying saucers in the corner shop,
fruit salads and black jacks
and potato puffs a penny a bag.
Then, finally, to school.
The balaklava'd heads converged on the playground
and funnelled in through the prescribed entrance.
A raw day, when the wind blew wet snow
through the dark and ancient outside toilets -
we did not loiter.
The building, designed to impose its authority,
was a quirky affair
with angular features
and dark corners and unused rooms
where ancient ink-welled desks
stood silently in menacing rows.
At least we were out of the cold,
and the charge of this lightweight brigade
continued into the cloakroom
where wet balaklavas were hung on pegs
and left to dry whilst battle raged,
and we will remember them -
those balaklavas at Alma.