‘Irene’ is amongst the most powerful of Denise Bennett’s poems, dealing as it does with a deeply distressing World War Two story in Portsmouth. On the night of 5th December, 1940, the Luftwaffe dropped a bomb on 16, Cowper Road, Portsmouth, killing the six Wilkinson sisters and their six month-old brother, Tony. Irene, aged 12 was the only survivor. Casualty statistics often serve to desensitize us to the realities of wartime experience. Poems like this one, picking out a particularly extreme example of the reality of aerial warfare for many thousands of families across Europe, work in the opposite direction, by personalizing, narrowing down, and asking us to engage. As is so often the case with Bennett’s work, the use of small but telling details contributes immensely to the impact of the verse. The poem is quoted here with the kind permission of the poet.
Irene
1928–2018
She never talked about it,
that last night
at 16 Cowper Road,
before the bomb dropped.
Lucy had just put the kettle on,
their married sister Lily
had popped in after shopping,
parked the pram in the hall.
They all sat chatting,
drinking tea in the front parlour
mourning the death of their mother;
Mary and Ivy were knitting,
the baby sleeping.
She never said how long it took
the squad, scrabbling bare-handed
to dig the bodies from the rubble;
how Kathy had died
in the ambulance beside her,
Nellie, days later, in the next bed –
or how Tony aged six months,
blown over a mile,
across roof-tops, was found dead
in a bed of nettles.
It took nearly a week
to find and identify him.
Just one small bump on his head.
She didn’t remember the siren;
only the silence, the explosion,
the darkness.
She never talked about it
her daughter said.
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.
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