Poem of the week: The Maid’s Tale by MR Peacocke

The Maid’s Tale

I hadn’t been in service that long. Such a morning!
I dodge out a minute, hoping no one will notice,
needing to get away from all that racket. Oh my!
You never seen so many roses in bloom at once,
thickets of them, white, crimson, stripey, alive with bees.
So I pull just one, the smell’s heavenly, and nip back
in case I’m punished. I asks the lass in the pantry –
well, she stares at me and says It’s the wedding, stupid!

Then I sees Maisie, who’s mostly kind, with tears running,
crying He’s made it through! and there’s Tom groom, he says nowt
but he’s holding a big rosette. Cook’s clutching her chest,
squealing Mercy! It’s turned out perfect! – and I must say
it smelled good but I couldn’t make head nor tail of it.
So in the end I goes looking for the Housekeeper
and there she is, red and bouncing with her sleeves rolled up,
quite scary she is, but I curtseys and begs to ask.

She says Oh my lawd it’s the resurrection, silly,
so will you hurry up with the breakfast, where’s the eggs?
so I’m dashing outside again – and there’s this old man,
sitting on the mounting block, thin as a bone he was,
muddy all over and his eyes tight shut, but smiling.
Smiling and breathing. Then it comes to me, it’s all right!
And I’m happy. Happy as a birthday, can’t tell why.
I just drop my rose in his apron and fly back in.

MR Peacocke (also informally known as Meg Peacocke) is a nonagenarian English poet who has recently published a collection of impressive new work, The Long Habit of Living. Peacocke has her own distinctive voice and vision, but in the intriguing monologue that is The Maid’s Tale, she demonstrates how effectively she can work in a voice unlike her own.

The speaker introduces herself and her situation immediately. She is newly in service, a housemaid, but also, as the title implies, a “maid” in the old-fashioned sense of the word – a virgin, and very young. There is something going on in the grand house in whose hierarchy she has a lowly role, and she is prompted, by the “racket” and the need to escape it, to the small rebellion of slipping outside and stealing a rose. The gorgeous proliferation of the flowers described in lines four and five (“thickets of them”) mirrors the vitality in the house, and may be a clue of some kind to its nature. Such abundance has both an earthy and an unearthly quality. But, for the time being, the narrative is firmly on earth, and “the lass in the pantry” tells the maid brusquely, “It’s the wedding, stupid!”

This is a convincing explanation, and so the narrative proceeds, building small additional details of the occasion without undermining the mystery. The plot thickens, like the roses, with the different characters adding oblique snippets of commentary, or, like Tom, significantly saying “nowt”. Maisie’s tearful exclamation is the most revealing: “He’s made it through.” This turn of phrase might imply that the bridegroom is the survivor of a war, and the social ambience could hint at the first world war. “Never such innocence again,” as Philip Larkin said. The old order, in this reading, appears to the main players to have been gloriously restored. At the same time, the maid’s deferential but persistent questioning may suggest otherwise, and that rigid class structures are showing hairline cracks.

The maid’s dialect – working-class, northern – underlines this possible transformation. It’s a style that contributes a great deal to the richness of the narrative. Peacocke uses enough vernacular colouring to make its expressive effects delightfully present, but not so much that there’s a slide towards the parodic. Veerings of grammatical direction such as tense-changes help propel the excited rush of the tale.

The maid is so fully involved in the living moment that she doesn’t question the “scary” Housekeeper’s explanation (quickly followed by a scolding), “Oh my lawd it’s the resurrection, silly / so will you hurry up with the breakfast, where’s the eggs?” Now the narrative puts on a wonderful spurt to the finishing post, as the maid responds, “so I’m dashing outside again – and there’s this old man, / sitting on the mounting block, thin as a bone he was, / muddy all over and his eyes tight shut, but smiling.”

This last stanza is a magical piece of writing, and it still contrives to keep us guessing. Perhaps the old man is indeed a war veteran or refugee, possibly blind, and aged before his time. Perhaps he is some kind of nature god, or Green Man. Perhaps he’s the risen Christ, and the poem is a re-telling of events described in Mark 16, translated to a different historical period. Whatever kind of resurrection has been witnessed, earthy or unearthly, there is an almost uncanny radiance and energy to the last stanza, and the maid’s response is as unexpected as it is somehow beautifully appropriate: “I just drop my rose in his apron and fly back in.”

You can enjoy some more of MR Peacocke’s poems here.