WHATEVER YOU DO, JUST DON’T, a collection by Matthew Stewart

Matthew Stewart’s Whatever you do, just don’t, seems to me to be a book about change, specifically about how we cope with it, politically, in terms of his trying to earn a living as an Englishman in the Spanish wine trade following Brexit; and personally, in the changes that come with the passing years – we may live in another country, children grow up, parents grow older, the places we inhabit alter, sometimes fall apart.

There is an intimacy to it that’s pleasing. While I don’t want to fall into the ‘narrator is the poet’ trap, these do appear to mirror his life, so might be considered as personal pieces. Roughly, the first section, Britanico, deals with domestic life in Spain, the second section is a fun tangent, a dozen pieces on the players of Aldershot FC in the 1980s, the third, Family Matters, deals with the exile’s relationship with his parents in England, and the fourth, Retracing Steps, is centred on a return to old haunts, now changed.

I think the collection is best summed up by the final two lines of the book from the poem Sussex By The Sea – How much has really changed? How much have I?

The poems drew me into them slowly. It took me a little time to absorb their depth, given they are short, observant, precise, deceptively relaxed, often gentle in tone, and range between a sense of sadness and the need for amusement and fun.

The high point of the opening poem, Los Domingos, (Sundays, if you need the translation), is the nod to what (presumably) his partner has given him – ‘you’ve taught me to relish silence/ in the slow, shared sliding-by of minutes‘. It captures perfectly the Sunday afternoon relaxation with elderly close family members, in this case it seems to be parents-in-law, where nothing needs to be said, ‘where muffled westerns blink on the telly‘, where the narrator anticipates his mother-in-law repeating the same old story until the poem ends with the moment the quiet is replaced by excitement and noise when the TV is turned up for the Real Madrid game at the Bernabeu Stadium.

Vamonos (Let’s Go) is another affectionate poem centred on a visit to parents (in law) and how long it takes to leave as the language changes from the polite ‘Let’s be off, then‘ to, by the final verse, the curt ‘Let’s go’. – ‘We reach for coats,/ grab the huge potato omelette/ your Mum’s made us, and hurry home’.

Another in these intimate sketches is an observation of the linguistic code adults use when we want to put a stop to a conversation because the children might be listening to something we deem not fit for their ears.

This section is a fond examination of the act of settling into another country – adjusting to the different sounds of the language, to driving on the ‘other’ side of the road – ‘groping for/a quick change of gear/ as if for something left behind‘ – and adjusting to a different collective memory of war, as in Britain ‘the war’ usually means 1939-45 whereas in Spain, which was neutral in WW2, it means the Civil War of 1936-39. Also somehow there is a sense of a deepening of a personal relationship – ‘blending old plots with new./ Like my story with yours./ And yours with mine.’ And again, ‘Our hesitant fingers meet‘.

There are also poems to a son, who is growing up in this ‘new’ country, but who is, in part at least during the process of adjusting, stranded between the two. This sense of between two worlds extends to the father who can’t shake off the preoccupation with the problems of work even while enjoying playing (in this case Crazy Golf) with the son. The section ends with the son leaving for university and the discovery of an old football under a rug in the boot of the car. The father wants a kick-about, the son wants to get moving. One wants to delay change, the other to embrace it.

I enjoyed the diversion into the twelve pieces about Aldershot footballers of the 1980s, each short poem devoted to an individual member of the team, plus one substitute. The idea of change is still present, if a little oblique. Football in the ’80s, in the pre-Premier League era, was light years away from today’s high profile model when even players of modest talents earn more in a week than ordinary folk can hope for in five years.

The players on offer in Stewart’s lovingly recalled ‘team’ are not, never were household names, unless you happened to be on the Aldershot terraces at the time and suffer from a similar obsession to his. It’s unfortunate, perhaps, that the good poem about the goalkeeper Tony Lange had me shouting at the page, given that he reports that Lange was sold for a club record fee to Wolves, where he failed… and omits to mention that Lange was in goal for my beloved West Bromwich Albion in the League One play-off final at Wembley in 1993 – and kept a clean sheet! (When he heard through another poet that I had whinged about this, a message came back that Lange was last heard of as a railway announcer at Chichester Station. This prompted an editorial idea that he might have added an extra verse to each of these memorials to say where they’ve ended up.)

Playing for Aldershot, whose highest ever league position was eighth in Division Three, was never going to make any of these men a national celebrity, but it’s a reminder that they meant so much at the time to local folk, that a football club can and often is a focal point for a town, even if it’s not one of the giants of the game. Stewart knows, too, that Aldershot’s story was changing even as these heroes played. Within a few years, the club had gone bust, was reinvented under the name Aldershot Town and had to fight its way back from the lower leagues.

The third section, Family Matters, begins with a poem. Grecian 2000, about the trials of a son and an ‘older’ dad who felt the pressure to dye his hair a ‘trumped-up auburn‘. The son is embarrassed by him, lays aside the efforts the father made to take him kayaking, swimming, roller-skating, teach him a two-handed backhand at tennis, and instead prefers to use the sneering, vindictive power of youth – ‘I learned to mention his white hair/every chance I got’ – and the father rather sadly, perhaps defending himself in self-deprecation, pleads that he prefers the term ‘ash blonde’.

A couple of poems later, in Full Circle, the relationship is explored further, when the son suddenly hears in his own voice echoes of his father… ‘I’m shocked to catch myself/ singing the same jingles/ and terrace chants as him,// imitating his tone,/ adopting his cadence.’ It’s an acceptance, albeit almost reluctantly, of love.

The mother is remembered with a more straightforward fondness, in Touch-Typing, when she tries to go back to work at the age of sixty-one and inevitably finds the ‘new world’ overwhelming. Change again. As in Banana, the mother’s story of hardship, perhaps in the war, when food was short and such an exotic fruit was rare and precious.

I thought the pared-down, nine-line Paper Clip one of the highlights of this section, when the parents are putting their lives in order now the years are advancing and the temporary nature of our existence is only too evident.

Heading For The Airport contrasts the life of the busy son with that of the aged parent, who hovers on the doorstep in a dressing gown ‘with a halo of wispy hair’. The son is too preoccupied with checking his flight because the taxi is late to remember ‘our goodbye wave’. It’s a poem about guilt, about neglect.

By the time of The Drinks Cabinet, the parents are dead and all that’s left is the responsibility of the tidy-up. The cabinet in question contains memories, some fond, some not so. Memories ‘Of a grandmother’s sworn-by remedy/ for a nasty cold.// Of a first visit/ from some posh prospective daughter-in-law. My only quibble with this one is that the last line isn’t necessary because it lays on too thick the point made in the previous line. There are one or two other lines here and there where I’d be brandishing my red ink editor’s pen, but that’s true of most things I read (including my own…). I remember being obsessive and arrogant enough as a student way back when the earth was flat to declare solemnly that John Milton was guilty of over-writing in Paradise Lost. Or was it Lycidas? So it goes.

By contrast, the six-line Opening The Box that follows on naturally from The Drinks Cabinet, on the same theme of finding stuff when you have to clear out your parents’ house, is perfect. It’s so clean a piece of writing I’ll quote it in full: ‘The music box tinkling a final note,/ its lid opens with a puff of dust.// A pair of 5d London bus tickets/ inside, torn and brittle to the touch.// Nobody left to say why they were kept,/ where they started, where they once headed.’

Similar pieces follow. The Aristocrat Of Pipe Tobacco is a lovely poem about how stuff is handed down the generations, without any specific thought, in this case a tobacco tin that once belonged to his grandfather, and was then reused by his father for ‘discarded Allen keys, rigid lumps of Blu Tack, dried-out biros’, which the poet dumped and he then used it for memory sticks… and now his own son has his eye on it. For what, we are yet to find out.

I liked the idea of Numbers, a poem about just that, but again had the red pen out. This time I’d have deleted the final two lines and left it hanging. Just my opinion, obviously. Then the whole poem would read ‘The combinations for bike locks./ A girlfriend’s ring and shoe size.// Landlines, postcodes and dates of birth./ The reg on Múm’s old Escort.// They wake me at the strangest times./ I whisper them to myself… ‘ No need, for me anyway, to add the wrapping-up of ‘let their echoes flow through my head,/ holding on against the ebb.’

The last section (and I’m not commenting on every poem in the book), Retracing Steps, is as it suggests a revisiting of places once known. In the moving Aveley Lane, he walks in the lane of the title, using place names ‘Langhams Rec’ and ‘the Bourne stream’ to hand it some intimacy, and then develops it as he looks through lit windows to see ‘new’ people living in the houses where his friends used to be. Again, a minor quibble is that I don’t think the last two lines add anything to what has already been suggested in the previous eight, but others will prefer it the way it is.

In another one, Gostrey Meadow, he sees a father taking a photo of a wife and son, the latter getting in a mess with an ice-cream. He remembers taking a photo of his own family in that spot, with his son getting in the same kind of mess. The only difference, he says poignantly, is that the trees on the bank of the river were smaller then.

He returns to the Brexit dilemma/nightmare in a neatly done six-line poem (that might have been seven by splitting up the last two lines, giving us a pause between ‘Everything’s changed.’ and ‘Everything’s wrong.’ Brexit is still present in the next two pieces, but then he returns to the theme of things that can’t be thrown out, habits that form in our youth that stick with us, in the excellent Farnham Library Card, which begins ‘After decades in my wallet,/ you still survive my monthly cull/ of receipts and jotted numbers.’

Which takes us to Sussex By The Sea, where I began. It’s another reflective piece on how change affects a landscape, and therefore us, when we, as the section title says, retrace our steps. It’s a sad poem, a nod to the passing of time and the impermanence at the heart of all of our lives, yet ends with a note of resilience. In spite of the changes that have affected everything, the gulls, the sea, the seaside bungalows, and the poet himself, are all still there.

I enjoyed Whatever you do, just don’t more on the third reading than I did on the first, which is the sign of a book I’ll dig into again. It should be pointed out that Stewart has another full collection The Knives of Villalejo from 2017 (Eyewear) and two pamphlets from Happenstance, Tasting Notes (2012) and Inventing Truth (2011). I don’t know if they’re still available but they might be worth seeking out. He has, of course, been writing good poetry for longer than that. We published a poem of his, called Clenched, which was typically tight and precise, in iota 68, back in 2004.

Whatever you do, just don’t – Matthew Stewart (Happenstance) £10.