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Note on MAPS.  

When I read once that no maps are true, I halted, slightly amazed, though it’s so obvious. Maps fascinate me: from the age of sixteen I worked as a cartographer in Southampton at the Ordnance Survey for three years. The person addressed in this poem is my brother Bill, who died at the age of 60 in 1995. As kids we used to play on the sea walls of eastern Portsmouth known as The Salterns (from ‘salt pans’), which overlooked Hayling Island across mudflats and marshes. We also mucked about in an unsavoury area we called The Dump, where dustmen tipped the city’s garbage. It was a mountain of refuse which exhaled real heat from cracks in the spongy, compacted trash, and a sort of brown smell. We found all kinds of exotica in these wastes, such as a smudged Bible, which we claimed was an enemy code book (this was in World War Two).

A pillbox is, or was, a concrete chamber, a small fort no bigger than a modern garage, with bevelled slits from which a few rifles could, it was supposed, repel an invasion. Pillboxes were never used, even by the Home Guard. Kids pissed in them. They were very boring.

Alan Marshfield

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