My abiding memory of Cyril is inevitably wreathed in smoke. Not by the mists of time but usually via a Players No. 6 Tipped which he held constantly in his mouth. He was one of those people for whom a cigarette was something of a permanent appendage rather than an occasional enjoyment, even to the extent of breathing through his fag as he gave one of his detailed accounts about something you were either not interested in or had no connection with.
I can see him now, perched on the dining chair that sat just inside our living room by the door into the kitchen. Grey hair brushed back surmounted a weather-lined face sporting small, thick, round wire-rimmed glasses through which he peered owlishly, the cigarette bounced around his lips, below a thin, wiry body dressed in an old check sports jacket with a grubby green polo shirt underneath leading to gardening trousers and boots.
Cyril could, and would, tell you chapter and verse about people you either didn’t know, or knew about very vaguely. He could be a great repository of gossip but it was rarely the juicy sort about people in whom you were really interested. Mostly he recounted his tasks for the day, which made him sound really busy but, when you boiled it all down, you wondered why he bothered.
Apart from his gardening, Cyril’s other main focus was composing poetry. He was known as ‘The Burton Bard’ and always included this ‘nom-de-plume’ at the end of each poem, although whether this was a self-styled epithet or something someone had once said, I have no idea. Cyril’s idea of poetry owed a little more to William McGonnagal than William Wordsworth but that’s being a bit unkind. He specialised in poems in birthday cards and Christmas cards but particularly birthdays.
When we became added to his significant list of recipients, I always looked out for the verse inside which was carefully and neatly penned and usually had the first letter of each line in a different colour. It usually followed an AA, BB rhyming pattern, generally included truncations of words that only ever used to appear in 19th century poems and hymns (such as “o’er” and “where’r”) and the way each line scanned rather depended on what he wanted to say rather than whether it fitted into the rhythm of its predecessor. Another feature of his poems was invariably a count of the words in the printed verse in the card, and the recipient’s name shoe-horned in somewhere along the way. Nevertheless, he must have spent hours composing and laboriously printing out each poem for the dozens of people he sent cards to and the whole exercise must have taken a big chunk out of his meagre weekly income.
It would have been easy to be sniffy about Cyril’s poems and many people were (and I guess I was probably as guilty as anyone in my youth) but the time and devotion they depicted was something it was less easy to mock. I think we all looked forward to opening Cyril’s card and it was a real concern if one didn’t turn up.
Presents were less usual, which was hardly surprising given his vast audience. For one significant birthday (which I suspect was my 21st) he did give me a brand new Collins’ English Dictionary which has had a great deal of use over the years and still holds pride of place on my bookshelf. This was in recognition of my being a fellow writer, which he clearly wanted to encourage. Mum, whom he held in very high esteem, was the only one who got a present every year. She had once mentioned that she liked Black Magic (the chocolates, not the satanic practice) and this went down in his little book. Thereafter, she always received a quarter pound box of same for her birthday and the poem in her card made specific reference to this (which rather gave the game away!)
Quite how he afforded his hobby, I don’t really know. Cyril had taken early retirement from the Railways when his Uxbridge St. Signal Box had closed with the demise of the brewery railway system. Thereafter, he survived on his small occupational pension for years before his State Pension finally kicked in. This was augmented by a few pounds here and there from gardening and doing odd jobs but there can’t have been an awful lot left to spare at the end of each week. Cyril viewed the cards he had to write as a mammoth task requiring significant organisation and endless hours of toil and I’m sure that was the case. He would never have seen all of this as a hobby, to him it was a sacred duty for which he would toil to his dying day. The idea of ‘not bothering’ for once, for reasons of economy or time, would never have crossed his mind.
Next time, I’ll tell you how we came to know Cyril, about some of his more eccentric practices and about his eventual demise.
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