Night trains started out while musing on the late night echoing of freight trains very close to where I lived at the time. Naturally it developed twists and turns and self reflection along the way.
Not really dark, but definitely beyond the flippant and comic observance of other poems of mine.
This next piece was capturing a slice of my life around the early 80s.
I had mates with bands and I was nighttime taxi driving so days were for sleeping.
The Paradise Club stands for many previous and future name changes to the same late, late, early, Kings Cross nightclub. Some I remember: The Manzil Room, then Springfields.
Clover memories.
My mum, Clover, was a complex and interesting woman who deviated wildly and wilfully from the standard path of a British child of Empire.
Born into a military family in India, worked at Bletchley house in WW2, married a Welsh rugby playing medical student in the great euphoria at the end of the war. Had babies while he studied and played rugger. He took a while to graduate. She had babies in Wales, looked after a senile father-in-law, and on yet another cold, rainy miserable Welsh winter’s day convinced Dad to emigrate to Australia.
Blah blah middle class doctors wife, four kids, twenty odd years into the marriage – meltdown. Details not important. Mid fifties, divorced, two adult boys out of the nest (making their own mistakes), two teenage daughters just finished school. Discovered politics, modernity, hippy philosophy, dope, sexual freedom.
Out of the city suburbs, north to late seventies “alternative” lifestyle communities.
Lived it large, got old, died.
hugh wade 
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