Dorothy Coates

Dorothy Coates was a neighbour who lived in the block of flats where I grew up in Southport. The building had a large garden which she took on as her own and she devoted every Sunday to work with the plants. Looking at photographs of my childhood, I can see how the bare lawn where I took some of my earliest steps grew into a mature garden by the time I reached my teens.

She was a small lady but forthright nonetheless and I remember hearing of an angry exchange with another resident whom she caught taking flowers from the border. The other lady was insisting that her late husband would be spinning in his grave if he knew she only had artificial flowers in her flat, to which Miss Coates replied that it would be good exercise for him.

Dorothy Coates

Dorothy Coates brings lavender buds
To sew into sachets with ribbons and bows
Written directions, birthday girl wishes
She'll not stay for tea, she has gardens to grow

When the faithful go by in their Sunday best
Bearing souls for an hour of devotion
She's tending her church by a chapel-grey fountain
A choir of foxgloves peals with emotion

Evergreen lady, kneeling, discerning the flower
That is worthy from a tangle of weeds
Embracing the earth with a prayer and a promise
A tulip, an internal logic, a creed

The watering can bows its head with a drizzle --
The drought never ends -- over seedlings in rows
A cycle of life at the altar of nature
A dandelion weeder, a dibber, a hoe

And she strides from the turn of a century onward
The seasons replace her in a stop-motion show
Miss Dorothy Coates is a memory suspended
In the amber of autumn's afternoon glow

November 2022