The inspiration for ‘The Marker’ by Denise Bennett was taken from comments by John Ryder which appeared in an exhibition about Paulsgrove that was curated at Portsmouth City Museum in the summer of 2018. The lines sung by the children in the fourth stanza are from a children’s hymn by Jan Struther (1901–1953). The poem’s central location is Portsdown Hill but it also references the poet’s own experiences of living under its shadow, in Paulsgrove, as a child. The poem is quoted here with the kind permission of the poet.

The Marker

My dad told me that
if there was a moonlight raid
the bombers used the chalk-pit
on Portsdown Hill to guide them.
Turn left to bomb the dockyard,
turn right to bomb the city.

That January night in ‘41 when
the Luftwaffe turned right,
dropped their incendiaries,
light up the streets with raging flames –
did the pilots ever dream how a colony
of prefabs would one day rise up
from the farmland below the hill
to house the overspill
for those who’d lost their homes?

Did those pilots ever conceive
how children like me
would rise up like the flowers
through the chalk dust,
milkmaid, knapweed, red clover,
to play safely in the buttercup field –
or how they would sing in their
newly built school –

Daisies are our silver
buttercups our gold …

How could they imagine
I would live just below the marker
in the 50s – or how
I would hop-scotch,
roller-skate,
go-cart with my brother
down Woofferton Road.

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, corrections, or suggestions about the map entries please contact the Map Director Dr Mark Frost, English Literature Department, University of Portsmouth: mark.frost@port.ac.uk