On Fathers Day here is a poem I wrote for my father. I wish I could have written it when he was alive to read it. It is his birthday tomorrow. He would have been 93.

Father and Son

My uncle was a communist.

He joined the YCL

My father never joined them

Yet he knew how to rebel

My dad remembered his dad,

A commie to the core.

Last man to be hired

First pushed out the door.

My dad he was a fighter.

He used to scrap and brawl.

I was a disappointment.

I could not fight at all.

Then I passed eleven plus

To go to grammar school.

“My lad won’t be a docker

Like his dad. He is no fool.”

I tried to be a rebel,

Fought my battles with my pen.

Forgot to write my essays.

“Don’t come back to school again.”

So I became a docker

Like my uncle and my dad.

Work was harder than the bookshop

Though the wages weren’t as bad.

The union was powerful.

I was a Trotskyite.

Old commies did not like that.

Still they let me join the fight.

Now my pen was powerful

Writing for the cause.

Victory to the miners!

We’re not bound by union laws!

The reading and the writing

Had opened up my mind.

I was proud to be a docker

But the grind began to bind.

Then at last I went to uni

I came out with a degree.

The dockers weren’t so lucky

Under Thatcher’s tyranny.

And I became a teacher.

I had made my father proud.

And I expressed my pride in him

Before his funeral crowd.

Mike Stanton 18/02/2021