Tootles the taxi and other rhymes

Today is National Poetry Day,

so I bring you some excerpts from Tootles the Taxi

by Joyce B. Clegg

illustrations by John Kenney.

 A trip to the pillar box at the top of our road

was my first solo outing.

It felt as though I had walked miles.

The responsibility of posting that letter weighed heavily.

 The verse that is missing from my edition  goes:

I'm Billy the baker's van,

Painted bright red;

I carry the sugar buns,

Pastry and bread.

I take all the orders

Round to each door,

And all of my customers

Come back for more!

We had just such a van calling at my primary school,

and the baker, clad in a brown overall, carried

an enormous wicker basket full of loaves.

He called me Lucinda which I found

simultaneously flattering and worrying.

The bread at home, two white bloomers,

was delivered by Michael on his bike

from O'Brien's the grocer.
The sugar buns were collected from the corner shop 
at the bottom of the road.
That was my second solo destination
and I had a to buy a pot of strawberry jam.

 We didn't have a car so an inordinate amount of time

was spent waiting for trolley buses.

I have never had such cold feet again.

I remember the high banks of filthy snow at the kerbside

during the winter of 1963.

Our first milkman had to pull his trolley

which was a battery assisted cart.

I asked him to name a new doll and he said,

'Why not call her Mary Ann?' so I did.

 Learning to ride a bike was an all or nothing business.

No training wheels, no helmet, just

a swift push on the bumpy driveway

down a steepish slope and a messy crash

into a rhododendron bush.

Later I used to cycle round the block.

A girl called Pamela West waved from across the street

 and invited me to tea.

I said I would have to go home and ask.

When I got back, she had disappeared 

and I didn't have the nerve to knock at the door

of her large and silent house,

so I went home again.

A trip in a taxi was a rare event

and certainly not a casual jaunt for lone children.

A man called Wallace was sometimes booked 

to take us to the station when we went on our annual holiday.

The luggage had been packed in a huge tin trunk 

and sent ahead of us to one or other seaside hotel,

sometimes Cornwall, often Bournemouth.

This meant dressing in very odd clothes until we left.

Goodness that sounds antediluvian.

In fact we may well have stayed in school uniform

as the boys here and in Just William always seemed to do.