Rippled by snow, the cover’s blue
rose into crests. At nine, he drew
it from the sideboard drawer. Scrubbed, late
tea cleared, grey blanket smoothed, he wrote
every load. Farm lorry driver,
he noted tonnage, crop name, date.

‘Led wheat from Bole.’ He still said ‘lead’,
from Shires he harnessed at fourteen.
Round as a rook’s cocked eye, as neat,
his blue print flashed. ‘Peas.’ ‘Sugar Beet’.
Bole’s fields stretched huge, grew ton on ton
of much-sprayed food, which we still eat.

He never sprayed his perfect rows,
flared leeks, first beans, double-dug, hoed.
We took for granted the hot scent
of carrot-tops. Our mother bent,
scrubbed clay, as his own mother would.
Home-rooted, yet how far he went,

steered Bedford lorries through the deep
after-war snows down London streets,
asked milk-girls where the markets were,
crawled the Snake Pass, stars high in air,
brought Christmas clementines in crates
from grateful, drunken wholesalers.

‘End of an era’ he wrote on
his carboned pages, handed in
his last load (wheat), was briefly stunned
that managers let four decades run
unthanked; yet could not mourn too long.
Potatoes waited. Spring’s new sun.

But he wrote truth, for centuries
of land work turn to offices.
My daughter’s London bus will go
up the bombed streets he drove in snow.
His wife fell sick. Again, he rose
at four, worked with the old, dark flows,

the ploughboys’ day. He dug quick rows,
then baked his own potatoes whole,
hung each scoured pan back on its hook.
Aged eighty, he became a cook,
his best work, till heart’s overload,
but never wrote it in his book.