‘101 High Street’ by Denise Bennett is another of the poet’s verses inspired by real events in Portsmouth’s history – in this case the Second World War. Its power lies not in ferocity or high emotion, but in the reserved tone and the remorseless accumulation of human detail in a heartbreaking tale. The poem is typical of the poet’s deep feeling for human dignity and belief in the value of human life. It is quoted here with her kind permission.
101 High Street
101 High Street Portsmouth, a Confectioners’ shop, just in front of the cathedral, was bombed by the Luftwaffe on January 10th 1941.
What Jericho has happened here?
This bombed house, broken home;
walls tumbled into the garden,
teetering chimney pots,
hole in the floor, the exposed hearth
where the clothes hung to dry –
one lace curtain-rag guttering
from the window frame
like a whisper of white smoke.
A blue stone-ware jug still standing.
What Joshua commanded the trumpets,
called the screaming Dorniers
to ignite the basement where
people sheltering burnt to death?
Fourteen died here, one a baby –
Peter, aged eleven months, identified
by his father only by a single blue bootee.
What was it the German pilot said
when he came years later to visit? –
We were instructed not to attack
the cathedral, it was a landmark.
No one told him about the families
huddling at the bottom of the sweet shop;
neighbours, children, husbands wives:
Isaac, Gertrude, Richard, Winifred…
A plaque on the green marks their lives.
Denise Bennett was born in Festing Road Southsea and has lived locally all her life. She had her first poem accepted by her school magazine, The Hot Potato, when she attended John Pounds School, Portsea. As many people know, John Pounds was a pioneer of education for ragged children in Portsmouth. Denise has an MA in creative writing and is a widely published, prize winning poet. She was awarded the inaugural Hamish Canham Prize by the Poetry Society in 2004. Denise has three excellent collections: Planting the Snow Queen (2011) and Parachute Silk (2015) and Water Chits (2017). She has also written a sequence of poems about the loss of HMS Royal George which foundered off Spithead in 1782, with the loss of over 900 lives. In 2010 she co-edited the wonderful anthology, This Island City: Portsmouth in Poetry with Maggie Sawkins and Dale Gunthorp.
Local history often inspires Denise’s work and many of her poems are about specific areas in the city. Denise is the stanza rep for the Poetry Society the secretary of the Portsmouth Poetry Society. She has been a long time member of the Tongues and Grooves poetry and music club, and often reads her work in public. She has taught creative writing for Portsmouth College, as part of their adult education programme, for twenty eight years, and runs poetry workshops for Portsmouth City Museum and Portsmouth libraries as part of Bookfest. She continues to run poetry workshops in community settings and also facilitates two writing groups for Havant U3A. In 2014, she was involved, alongside local artist and photographer, Jacky Dillon, and other local poets, in a photography and art project, England Remembered about the First World War. This culminated in a presentation at Art Space in Brougham Road, Southsea. In 2019, as part of the Dark Side Port Side project, the digital walking trail called Sailortown she made a poetry film, Blossom Alley which can be heard here. Denise continues to find much inspiration for her poetry in the city.
If you have any comments, queries, or suggestions about any of the map entries, please contact the Map Director, Mark Frost: mark.frost@port.ac.uk