16th March 2026

 

supermarket coupon

offering me a dried fruit

fifties slang

© Rachel Green March 2026

Just in Case...

My father lived through the war.

served in the military,

fought insurgents in Malaysia

and the decision he was left with

was always the wartime slogan

of "Make Do and Mend." Our mum

worked in a munitions factory

met him though a forties dating app

long before Turing cracked the codes

They threw nothing away;

clothes unravelled for wool, cut

into rags or sewn up into new clothes, quilts

and curtains for the spare bedroom

and the old seams and finger-lengths of wool

composted in the garden bean trenches.

Furniture stored and stacked,

sometimes broken into parts, 

reorganised, reused, restored

and in the garden, stacks of bricks, tiles;

mounds of soot and fire ashes

and daily walks along the canal banks

fishing out fallen logs for firewood

and discarded bottles to get the deposits

and fresh-laid eggs from the wild ducks and geese.

and in the shed, boxes of tools

nuts and bolts, screws, hardware;

the remains of his father's bakery

and his grandfather's cobbler's bench.

In the land of next-day delivery

and made for pennies by Uyghur slaves in China

I still hear my father's voice:

"That might come in handy."

© Rachel Green March 2026