The Aylesbury Poetry Club and the Emergency Potato

The first audience I met on my Aylesbury round was a potato wearing a bow tie. It sat on a garden chair outside a bungalow, facing a lady who was reading aloud from a notebook.

“Too much feeling?” she asked it.

I stopped with a bucket in each hand. Neither bucket offered an opinion, so I said, “Seemed about right to me.”

The lady looked up and grinned. “Excellent. You’re considerably more helpful than Bernard.”

That was how I met Mrs Fenella Pike and her emergency audience.

I was there to clean her windows for KP Window Cleaning. She was preparing for the first meeting of a little neighbourhood poetry group. Six chairs stood in a semicircle on the lawn, with cushions, a plate of flapjack and a jug of squash arranged nearby.

“I’ve spent years writing things in notebooks,” she told me. “Thought it might be nice to hear somebody else for a change.”

She said it casually, but she straightened the same cushion three times while I got my equipment ready.

By the time I’d finished the front windows, the sky had turned the colour of an old dishcloth. Mrs Pike checked her watch. Then the gate. Then her watch again.

“They said half past,” she murmured.

A single enormous raindrop landed on Bernard’s head.

Then the weather stopped messing about.

Mrs Pike grabbed the flapjack. I collected cushions under one arm and rescued the notebook with my free hand, which left me trying to open the back door with an elbow. I’m still learning plenty about window cleaning, but I can confirm elbows are rubbish at door handles.

We got everything inside except the chairs, which were already beyond worrying about.

Her little sitting room had enough space for us, but not six wet visitors and their coats. The dining table was covered with a half-finished jigsaw she was doing with her grandson.

“I could ring round and cancel,” she said. “Perhaps a group was a daft idea.”

Just then, someone rattled the garden gate.

A tall man in a yellow raincoat stood outside clutching a biscuit tin. Behind him was a woman sheltering beneath a golf umbrella with a folded camping chair under her arm.

“Poetry?” the man called hopefully.

Mrs Pike’s face brightened, then fell as she looked at the dripping lawn.

That was when I noticed the greenhouse.

It wasn’t enormous, but its central aisle was wide and clear apart from several empty plant pots. There was a long wooden staging bench down one side. More importantly, it had a roof.

“Could we try in there?” I asked.

With her permission, I carried the empty pots into the shed in my spare bucket. Finally, a proper reason for bringing one bucket too many. The man in the raincoat helped wipe down the chairs, and the woman produced a second folding seat from her car.

Three more neighbours arrived before we finished. Nobody seemed remotely disappointed by the change of venue.

I was invited to stay for the first poem. Rain pattered overhead while Mrs Pike stood beside a tray of seedlings and read about her father teaching her to whistle. Her voice wobbled at first, then steadied. When she finished, the applause sounded wonderfully loud beneath the glass.

She sat down smiling, properly smiling now, and passed me a flapjack.

Bernard had the best seat, tucked safely between two tomato plants. I’d dried his bow tie with a clean cloth.

For an emergency audience, he’d had a very good afternoon. So had I.