It is thirty years since U. A. Fanthorpe published her first book of poems, Side Effects, when she was forty-eight years old, though no one now need think of her as a late developer. In the time since, she has published eight volumes, stood for election as Professor of Poetry at Oxford, and been touted as a candidate for Poet Laureate, but she has not been so tightly bound into the established order as this or her polite demeanour would suggest: she gave up teaching at Cheltenham Ladies College, for instance, to do unskilled work in a Bristol hospital.

"Father in the Railway Buffet", which appeared in the TLS on February 27, 1981, is a typically measured release of certain private tensions.

Father in the Railway Buffet

What are you doing here, ghost, among these urns,
These film-wrapped sandwiches and help-yourself biscuits,
Upright and grand, with your stick, hat and gloves,
Your breath of eau-de-cologne?

What have you to say to these head-scarfed tea-ladies,
For whom your expensive vowels are exotic as Japan?
Stay, ghost, in your proper haunts, the clubland smokerooms,
Where you know the waiters by name.

You have no place among these damp and nameless.
Why do you walk here? I came to say goodbye.
You were ashamed of me for being different.
It didn't matter.

You who never learned to queue?

U. A. FANTHORPE (1981)

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