We came from our own country in a red room
which fell through the fields, our mother singing
our father’s name to the turn of the wheels.
My brothers cried, one of them bawling Home,
Home, as the miles rushed back to the city,
the street, the house, the vacant rooms
where we didn’t live anymore. I stared
at the eyes of a blind toy, holding its paw.
I know I have just typed up the first stanza but part of me wants to cheat and leap ahead as the next line contains one of Carol Ann Duffy’s most famous and memorable declarations in all her poetry: ‘All childhood is emigration.‘ I think if I had to ask Carol Ann Duffy just one question, I would ask her whether nowadays she would apply that line to the whole of adult life too?
‘All life is emigration.’
It does have a certain resonance and truth.
For we do live in an increasingly mobile world where ‘home’ is often a short term drop in centre, monitored by the need to make money and ‘thrive’ according to the media’s latest images and values. We may feel throughout or lives that we are moving ‘away’ in order to ‘keep up’. If the poem plays on both the poet’s origins geographically, then it is also suggestive of our original origin and home: the womb! If the womb represents unconditional natural safety, so the poem also implies that Duffy’s first home as a child was sacrificed to widening horizons, as the family removed themselves to a new, more ‘edgy’ place.
The ‘spaces’ of childhood are returned to again and again in Carol Ann Duffy’s poetry and her later poem, Stafford Afternoons collected in Mean Time, further explores the changing, sometimes alarming vistas of childhood.
When the poem opens, Duffy and her family are on the move. The recollected disruption of relocation is related through the thwarted sadness of the narrator, who remembers the ‘red room’ as being an essential component of this reluctant farewell. If Duffy is describing the vehicle she travelled in, or the removal van itself, then the effect still seems haunting and even sinister. I cannot think of the ‘red room’ without recalling the young Jane Eyre’s terrible incarceration in her Aunt Read’s house, where madness and hysteria threaten to engulf the defiant child heroine. I also think of H G Wells’ , ‘Red room’ in his story of that name, where again, the room is synonymous with acute anxiety and suffering. Both rooms represent profound psychical disorientation. Surely Duffy is playing with this emotional idea in her poem ‘Originally’?
Duffy’s poetic reconstruction of a major childhood life change, reveals her adult thoughts about the original move. She is investing a particularly emotive and literary lexis in her poem, showing how her later readings and learnings gave her the language to make sense of and to represent her earlier experience. This is highly significant.
Duffy is likening the trauma of her childhood’s dislocation to that of Jane Eyre’s imprisonment in the ‘red room.’ She feels acted upon and subsequently powerless. Hence her need, even years later, to write about the relocation. Writing for Duffy, reorders her world, restabilises her ‘lost way’ and thus she can regain agency and autonomy. I feel this applies to her love poems as much to those about society and culture. Finding the lanaguage to voice her voice seems to me on of her major concerns. Little wonder consequently that resurrection recurs in so many of Duffy’s poems.
The use of enjambment before the verb ‘fell’ continues the idea of dramatic change. The narrator is on a linguistic and emotionally destabilising helter skelter and the poem runs away with the idea as she remembers their journey away from what was her ‘home’. It is as if the bottom has fallen out of her life. She is about to lose her way! In this I am reminded of Dickens in his ‘homeless’ narratives in the collection of sketches entitled The Uncommerical Traveller.
Exile has made her a writer.
Maybe if all childhood is emigration then writers oddly benefit from such a sense of estrangement or dislocation too? Do people write or create because they are happily comfortable?
Why, I wonder, is mother ‘singing ‘ father’s name? Is this a sign of good natured family fun? Is she singing because they are a joyous family unit, making the most, Mary Poppins’ style, out of their fears for their new future?
Or is there something rather ironic about the mother perhaps mocking the father’s name through singing it? Is the move necessitated by his job and so they are all victims of male authority? Or is it collusion? Adults versus the kids? Who is part of the community and who remains outside?
This poem does centre on the 1960s and I can keenly remember moving schools several times, as my father followed his career . This was accepted as being the way, even if like Duffy, the rest of the family were more than happy where we were living.
Duffy’s poem here has an echo of Larkin’s Whitsun Weddings. We have a vivid sense of literal movement and the way that speed or velocity by car or by train causes visual blurring, as the scenes rush past us. Tears combine with motion and unsettle us.
Memory itself is evoked in Duffy’s opening stanza, She gives one of her brother’s a short, intervening perspective where he longs for home like the poet Robbie Burns. It is as if by dreaming his home, he can unfix the certainty of the move.
Carol Ann Duffy’s final image is superb, especially for me as someone who had to hide my favourite Teddy Bear in my satchel at school each day as he was banned! A student asked me about symbolism on the weekend and this is a perfect example of the simple image working its heart out!
For the toy is blind. Battered by much play and much love perhaps. It may even have belonged to Duffy’s mother? The child poet feels blind too. Where are they going and what will happen there? Blind faith and trust are encapsulated in the blind bear!
The ‘paw’ offers the child comfort. It is stoically true. Unlike the adults perhaps for all their jollity and collusion. It is affecting as it is not a human hand and the child has to resource herself here to deal with the upset and fear around moving. The child reminds herself of how to be brave when she is sad.
But the child has to be resourceful as she is lonely. Perhaps this is why Duffy so vividly evokes this past event. Lonely in the middle of a crowded car with her family; for all trauma reminds us that we are essentially alone and that we have to develop resourcefulness in order to thrive!
There are times in our lives perhaps when we like Duffy are still metaphorically holding onto a blind bear’s paw!