Carol Ann Duffy's Stafford Afternoons: An Analysis Revisited.

How many times in our childhoods are we asked the question: ‘Where are you going?’ And here in Carol Ann Duffy’s evocative recollection of an afternoon adventure, we re-enter the liberating, yet unsettling territory of childhood. Childhood perhaps on the brink of Blakean experience, where innocence is sacificed to worldly knowledge and threat.

‘Only there, the afternoons could suddenly pause.’ The particularity of ‘there’ renders the memory essential and unforgottable. For it is this specific ‘space’ of childhood that had the power to hold back the marching feet of time. We feel this is a summer holiday, where time can be squandered and ‘mean time’ can be forgotten as the child in this space, owns time, is ‘master’ of their leisure. Power is reclaimed over adult organisation and authority. Safety is no longer a priority and imagination can wander, as the  child narrator explores the expansive local horizons, alone.

This is a Romantic poem in the way it endows the narrator with an intensely felt relationship with lost, childhood experience. The simplicity of  gestures such a tying laces and waving at motor cars, manages to convey the complex and enduring ‘markers’ of gentle  ‘trials’ of maturity and daring.

Identity is explored through action and emotion. The imagination feeding images and stories of fear, into the poem until fear becomes literally embodied in the ‘stranger’ in the woods. Fairytales merge into tabloid encounters. Fear thrills and fragments the  security of the  ‘I’ so that time detonates the personal privacy of the narrator and the ‘I’ rejoins the community, gratefully reprimanded and merely scared.

Only there, the afternoons could suddenly pause
and when I looked up from lacing my shoe
a long road held no one, the gardens were empty,
an ice-cream van chimed and dwindled away.

On the motorway bridge, I waved at windscreens,
oddly hurt by the blurred waves back, the speed.
So I let a horse in the noisy field sponge at my palm
and invented, in colour, a vivid lie for us both.

In a cul-de-sac, a strange boy threw a stone.
I crawled through a hedge into long grass
at the edge of a small wood, lonely and thrilled.
The green silence gulped once and swallowed me whole.

I knew it was dangerous.  The way the trees
drew sly faces from light and shade, the wood
let out its sticky breath on the back of my neck,
and flowering nettles gathered spit in their throats.

Too late.  Touch, said the long-haired man
who stood, legs apart, by a silver birch
with a living, purple root in his hand.  The sight
made sound rush back; birds, a distant lawnmower,

his hoarse, frightful endearments as I backed away
then ran all the way home; into a game
where children scattered and shrieked
and time fell from the sky like a red ball.

Comments

More to follow – but how wonderfully does Duffy capture the idea of the endless spaces of childhood and of childhood remembrance in the first stanza? We are there with the ‘explorer‘ child lacing a shoe; aware of new vistas and horizons as we explore our freedom; loomingly aware of the holiday’s epic promise and yet also implicitly the secret danger of independence. The future almost swims before the child’s eyes as she recognises the aloneness of any reflective life. We are like children again with the narrator and remember that breath of separation that we felt away from the  gaze of guardians, almost away from time itself. We can taste the quiet fear too.

All Senses are alerted and alive to this new private relationship between the world and ourselves. It is a pivotal moment like Pip’s at the beginning of Great Expectations, where the literal shape of everything changes and looks unsettlingly new, and with this newness comes responsibility and anxiety.

Duffy’s child recognises that she is now presiding over her own story and this amazes and disturbs: ‘Only there’ she begins her memory. How tenderly accommodating and yet ironically exclusive is this particular ‘space’ of memory?

The second stanza recalls the childhood game of waving at cars. Yet the childhood space has become slightly threatening. The motorway bridge brings with it ‘speed’ and unsettling feelings of rejection. For the temporary elation at freedom brings with it more distinct feelings of powerlessness and impotency. This feels utterly true. We do remember moments of exultation when the world seemed to be ours and then this ownership collapses and our overriding feeling of extraneousness is everywhere.

Duffy reveals the emotional resourcefulness of her child-self when the girl ‘feeds’ a horse to re-ground herself after the complex feelings of rejection in the same stanza. ‘A vivid lie for us both’ astutely aligns the child’s desire for sensory attention AND normality – she wants to be wanted again, with the horse’s natural expectation that it will be genuinely fed. Neither  expectation is literally true and Duffy’s child here exercises the restabilising power of imagination in order to reorient herself after the feelings of panic on the motorway bridge.

‘In a cul-de-sac, a strange boy threw a stone.’

I would love to read a history of the ‘cul-de-sac’! Duffy recognises the literal parameters of childhood play in suburban England. It is also a probable metaphor for memory and even relationships? Thus far and no further say so many relationships in time. So it is here with Duffy’s wandering child.   Once again, the invasion of something disruptive within the world and spaces of childhood is simply yet devastatingly done. Such ‘danger’ escalates as Duffy’s child withdraws into another, less socially prescribed space: ‘ a small wood’ and enjoys the edgy nearly oxymoronic  feelings of being ‘lonely and thrilled.’

The pastoral setting is not a place of conventional respite or healing yet it brings its own magic:

‘The green silence gulped once and swallowed me whole.’

The personification of silence with its supernatural associations offers the relief of invisibility.  Yet Duffy immediately explores the repercussions of straying into this unknown world. She identifies the ‘sly faces’ and the ‘sticky breath’ of this now animated, nightmarish space. Fairytales are alive and dangerous! And it is the ‘rightness’ of Duffy’s talent for recollection that gives representation of this hidden world through the register of dark fairytale. 

And then there is a real bogey man and he does want to harm children. His displayed erection is likened to a ‘purple root’ as again the child has to find the nearest language for its expression. This confrontation with sexual horror makes the child long to hear again all the sounds of safety and community.  Luckily the poem ends with the child making it back into such a world and joins a game with other children in an exaggerated parody of pleasure: ‘children scattered and shrieked’ The alliteration communicates the inutterable relief of being back in a world of normal, communal play. Exultation at escape is both the child’s and ours!

‘and time fell  from the sky like a red ball.’

The poem about revisitation ends on a note of relief -as -near catastrophe. The simile is again pertinent to childhood and yet delivers a highly emotive metaphysical concept that would not have been apprehended in such a way at the time.  Thus we are aware of the gap between the adult poet who has written the poem and the child self who is the subject of the poem’s remembrance. Duffy is emphasising, as she does in many of her poems, the movement from innocence to experience. This movement renders time and the knowledge gleaned through the inevitable passage of time, meteoric and childhood shattering.

One of my favourite Duffy Poems. I find it stunning…probably as being a child in the sixties it just works so well at excavating the past and making it here, right before me…’cul-de-sacs’ indeed!