Timothy Winters by Charles Causley

The first time I met Charles Causley's Timothy Winters, I was in my first year at secondary school, a large split-site comprehensive in Cornwall. The first two years were based in the old Victorian Grammar School building, but it had been overflowing long before it became comprehensive, so English lessons took place in ancient 'temporary huts', beside a patch of scrubby grass known as the paddock, and just about big enough for lunch-time football games .

It was in one of these classrooms, with the fug from thirty eleven-year-olds steaming up the windows, making slow waterfalls of condensation, that the teacher read:

Timothy Winters comes to school
With eyes as wide as a football pool,
Ears like bombs and teeth like splinters:
A blitz of a boy is Timothy Winters.

I thought I'd read a lot of poetry. My bookcase had several anthologies aimed at children, and I'd read some AA Milne, Kipling, Tennyson, Blake, Christine Rossetti, Longfellow, Belloc, Robert Louis Stevenson, even a bit of Keats and Shelley. But this was the first time that I'd come across a poem that was about something real. I had no idea what a football pool was, but in my head I was standing at the edge of that paddock, and now it was hollow, a deep crater full of dark, cold water. 

I knew that boy. He'd been at primary school with me, in my class. In fact, he was at school with me now, but in another classroom. He wasn't called Timothy Winters, but I knew him, that dirty, pinched-face boy whose 'britches' had holes in them so you could see he had no underpants. And now I was understanding more:

Timothy Winters has bloody feet
And he lives in a house on Suez Street.

Suez: war, bombs and planes, conflict and crisis. I knew about Suez, because one of my father's favourite tales was of how, when he was in the army, he got appendicitis in the troopship on the way. And now I knew what Timothy Winters' home life was like. War, crisis, conflict. This was real, this poem was about someone I knew, and it was making his life even more real to me.

And there was no help, no one to 'take his cup away' from him:

The Welfare Worker lies awake
But the law's as tricky as a ten-foot snake,
So Timothy Winters drinks his cup
And slowly goes on growing up.

And so he did. Charles Causley never knew what happened to his Timothy Winters, but I know what happened to mine, and it wasn't good. 

Causley once said 'If I didn't write poetry I think I'd explode', and I am so glad he wrote this one. If he hadn't, I would not have had that mind-exploding experience one grey day in the '70s, when I found out that poetry could make real things even more real.

You can hear Charles Causley reading Timothy Winters here at The Poetry Archive.