Barbican Young Poets 2019-20

They hid his heart in a whale, then made him eat the blubber

My grandfather despises whale meat. At school in the 1940s, he was forced to eat the blubber as part of wartime rationing. Whale blubber is rich in fatty acids, but rubbery to the bite. He talks about this often, at mealtimes, or whenever food is not to his liking. This is a reminder of all he has suffered in his long life. He has similar reservations about pasta (which I won’t go into).

As a child, whenever he spoke of this, I imagined a great whale stretched out on a huge Victorian dining table, its sad, sloping jaw tied shut. My shrunken grandpa sat among a hoard of little boys in grey shorts, clamoring and banging on the wood. All of a sudden, a gong would sound. The children would pick up their knives, plunging into the thick grey hide, tearing out hanks of sudding flesh. Lunch was served. The boys would chew till they couldn’t swallow any more. Wiping their lips, they’d look sorrowfully upon what they had eaten, by now, a carcass pocked and lumpen from their blades. The body had one huge dead eye, facing heavenward, clinging on to leftover visions of the waves.

I have never touched the depths of the sea, but I know the feeling of water. My grandfather lost his father to the Second World War. A military hero, he drowned whilst rescuing men from a torpedoed ship, near Greece. His children were never officially told that he had died. They wondered why he didn’t come back. My grandfather’s childhood was wordless waiting. Death sat quietly among them at dinner for many years. A ghost has the power to congeal gravy, scorch pans, and worst of all, choke the throat, so that swallowing is painful. Grief cannot be fed by such mundanities. Silence sustains it.

So, when my grandfather speaks of gnawing that blubber, with such disgust on his wrinkled face, I wonder if he is thinking of that same ocean that killed his father, in which whales swim and hold their breath. It is as if for a lifetime, he has carried a whale inside of him, hiding in his aging body, folding itself inward to fit. And I think perhaps a lonely whale song is not so different to the sound of an old man wailing into his pillow, for a father he could not speak of. And so, he chewed.

About Annie Hayter

Annie relishes poetry that reckons with the queerness of looking. A London Writers Awardee, she’s performed on Radio 3, at Brighton Festival, Verve Poetry Festival, Walthamstow Garden Party, and FRINGE! Queer Film & Arts Fest. Her work has appeared in TimeOut, The Log Books, Bedtime Stories for the End of the World, MAGMA. She was shortlisted for the Cúirt New Writing Prize, for ‘The Great Lives of Pope Joan’, a faux-hagiography. She teaches English and has run workshops with Crisis, Headway East London, Writerz and Scribez, and Spread The Word.

Instagram: @hannieayter
Twitter: @malarkeyme

Sound design by Alfie Morgan-Flower.