60. Seven Snapshots From the Album of a Sea Policeman

...being the final and most recently created poem of the sixty

I have largely avoided including more recent poetry in this series of sixty. My intention was to use up a whole backlog of poems that I had been holding on to for a long time, having made the decision that if no-one else was going to publish them, then I might as well do it myself. I have broken this self imposed rule a handful of times. I couldn’t resist putting A Shameful Thing on the site shortly after I had completed it . I felt that it would be a difficult piece to persuade anyone else to put out, and it fitted in so well with the other pieces I was posting around that time on a loose theme of male sexual misbehaviour. What’s all the Fuss about Coal? is another recent piece, but this had been justifiably rejected by the publication which it had been created for, and I didn’t feel it was suitable for anywhere else but here. Thousands upon Thousands of Books was a one off, written and posted in the same week, just after I had visited the re-read warehouse in Doncaster. Sadly, that warehouse has now had to close down, which is a real tragedy, not Just for Jim and the people who worked there, but for the people of South Yorkshire and beyond who benefitted from their work, and for everyone who values old books.

Every other poem of the sixty was written before I started the project, most of them before the pandemic. I just added the accompanying essays. This final poem is one that I not only wrote during the past year, but one that I actually had published too, on the excellent online journal Stone Circle Review.¹

Seven Snapshots from the Album of a Sea Policeman is a fitting poem to end this sequence of sixty. It brings me back, full circle to the very first piece that I put on the site, East Yorkshire Stinks of Shit, which was also the very first poem that I wrote as an adult. Both Snapshots and Shit have their origins in the remote Holderness coast that I regularly visited in my childhood. My parents had a caravan on a site in the village of Easington, about five miles North of Spurn Point, where the River Humber flows into the North Sea. For a year or two in the early 1970s we would cycle there the 16 or so miles there as a family almost every Friday night, and cycle back almost every sunday afternoon from March to October. It was, and still is, a magical place.

I wrote the piece as a response to a prompt from Paul Brookes, who produces the excellent Starbeck Orion site on Substack as well as a website, the Wombwell Rainbow, which contains a wealth of interviews, articles, reviews poems and prompts. Paul was using lines and snippets from Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood to encourage his readership to create a poem a day for the month of November 2023 I probably completed about two thirds of them, and I felt that some of them were quite good. For a while though I considered them outside of my canon, and felt able to submit them to places without feeling that I was risking anything. And thats how the Sea Policeman got out.

I have just searched online for the Sea Policeman quote from Milk Wood, and I can’t actually find it. Was it Alfred Pomery Jones the drowned Sea Lawyer? Was it Police Constable Atilla Rees, the copper who nocturnally pissed in his own helmet? Or was it the Sea Captain - Captain Cat (who also has his own Substack page courtesy of Alex Oliver) Whoever it was, the idea of a Sea Policeman captured my imagination.

A lot of that imagination came from my love of the wonderful 1940 Flann O’Brien book The Third Policeman, another enthusiasm that I shared with my Dad. We had probably only picked it up because the writer shared the same name as us. It is a marvellous surreal story of crime, remorse and adventure set in rural Ireland. It features some marvellous characters such as Martin Finnucane, the King of all one legged men, and a couple of strange, bicycle obsessed coppers, Sergeant Pluck and Policeman MacCruiskeen. In the book we learn about the theory of atoms, which explains how men can be turned gradually into bicycles and bicycles into men.²

As for the third policeman - he remains a mystery³

Are policemen father figures? I think that they are, even though I have now reached the age where most policemen I see seem like children to me. Policemen enforce rules, they represent authority, provide guidance on doing the right thing and punishment for those who don’t. They are fascinating figures in fiction from the Sweeney⁴ and Columbo to Ted Hastings in Line of Duty, from Shakespeare’s Dogberry to Conan Doyle’s Inspector Lestrade. Not to forget Knacker of the Yard from the pages of Private Eye. I have written a number of Policeman poems since The Sea Policeman. Someday they will see the light of day, possibly even on this site.

Most of the scenes in the poem below are things that I actually saw on those long ago childhood holidays in Holderness. Although there was no policeman present when I saw them. The cow that fell off the cliff, the dead seal, the bottles of boozy dregs, the barnacled bicycle, the worn gravestones. I saw them all - and more.

I also once saw a picture of a policeman holding a child’s bicycle in a copy of the Hull Daily Mail. He was holding it out in front of him by the frame. He wasn’t a Sea Policeman and it wasn’t covered in barnacles. I think that he had recovered it from a lock up that he had explored after arresting a miscreant. The grim expression on his face, which seemed to say “How could anyone stoop so low as to steal a child’s bicycle” was just the sort of policeman’s face that I imagine the Sea Policeman would have - Serious, world weary, but in some way noble, and desirous of doing his duty for the benefit of decent, law abiding citizens. Coppers. As long as they are not being used as the strong arm of an oppressive regime, you have to love them. Especially if they approach the scene of a crime with the words “‘Ello, ‘ello, ‘ello. What’s going on here then?”

Seven Snapshots From the Album of a Sea Policemen

I
Crouching on his haunches, 
The Sea Policeman looks into the lifeless eye of a cow
It had wandered too near the edge of the crumbling cliff above
When it fell onto the shingle It must have landed with a real thud

II
He holds the barnacle encrusted frame of a child’s bicycle
Look at his boots sinking into the watery sand
Look closer and you can see the tidemarks 
Six inches above the cuffs of his trousers

III
In earnest conversation with two men next to a small fishing boat
He points to the rope that one of them is holding
The other has a pipe in his mouth
A dense mist obscures the horizon

IV
A family holiday at Scarborough
He stands awkwardly on the beach with his wife and two small children
His eyes are distant - thinking of his beat
The real seaside

V
He examines the contents of a broken wooden crate
Its contents are scattered over the smooth pebbles
Bottles, some smashed
Some intact and containing a greyish brown fluid

VI
Notebook in hand
Licking his pencil
He towers above a couple of crying kiddies
Between them is the partially decomposed remains of a seal

VII
He is standing outside of a stone church,
His helmet under his right arm,
Surrounded by ancient gravestones 
Their inscriptions worn to illegibility by the salt air 


*******


Thanks for reading this edition of Sixty Odd Poems. Now that I have completed the sixty, I shall have to make one or two changes to the way I work. I shall be continuing to post something every week, but it may not always be accompanied by a piece of my own poetry. Perhaps it may not always have any poetry attached at all - although I rather think that It might have to, in order to make the title meaningful. Despite going beyond sixty pieces, I shall be keeping the 60 in the title, because it takes some time to establish a brand. If you like this sort of thing (and if you have read this far, then there must be some inkling of appreciation within your breast) you will be relieved to know that the writing and my choices of what to write about will continue to be somewhat odd. - Not wacky, but odd. 

1. I would recommend submitting to Stone Circle. The editor, Lee Potts (a successful poet himself) usually publishes twice a week, a single poem at a time, and publicises what he posts on social media. The poetry that he publishes is always worth reading, being both thought provoking and very original, and he is always open to submissions. Go for it!.

2. Much of the scientific and philosophical theory in The Third Policeman is explained through footnotes detailing the work of a mysterious writer called De Selby, who has many odd theories on the nature of reality. It is probably this book that gave me my love of footnotes, and caused me to rejoice when I saw the footnote feature on Substack, encouraging me to write lots of footnotes to the articles that I have written here.

3. "Policeman Fox is the third of us," said the Sergeant, "but we never see him or hear tell of him at because he is always on his beat and never off it and he signs the book in the middle of the night when even a badger is asleep. He is as mad as a hare, he never interrogates the public and he is always taking notes.” (Flann O’Brien - The Third Policeman)

4. I always think of John Thaw as “The Sweeney” rather than as Detective Inspector Jack Regan. I know that the Sweeney is a nickname for the Unit that he worked in (Sweeney Todd - Flying Squad), but back in the day, me and my mates all believed that his name was “The Sweeney”