(or “mock orange-blossom”)

From my grandmother’s home my parents took
to each garden of their marriage a cutting
of philadelphus with white waxy flowers
and a fragrance of orange.

Fifty years on the railway, my father retired
to the prefab of my mother’s dreams. He wangled
a load of sleepers for a shed that we joked
would outlast the bungalow.

He filled it with tools and seeds and tubers
and a stool for when it rained and blew;
he hung up seeds for the tits and, in spring,
you could hear the cuckoo.

A wren trilled in the cotoneaster,
the sumach uprooting the house was huge,
and the apple tree given by a neighbour
was a greengage.

Lilies of the valley and six-foot sunflowers,
candytuft, cosmos and pansies and roses;
the old mower grumbled over the grass
full of clover and daisies.

In September the harvest of runner beans
filled our plates and the bags
of passers by. Unwillingly we shared the veg
with blight and bugs.

Grandchildren fought in the flower beds in summer,
played hide-and-seek, raised tents on the grass,
ran shrieking from Grandad pretending
to be cross.

Decades later we made a brief detour:
the prefab had gone and the sleeper-made shed:
just a heathland with gorse and brambles; a jet
roared overhead.

A gleam of white and a whiff of scent:
we fought through the thicket that once was home -
and amid the thorns was the orange-blossom
in full bloom.