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Poem Of The Week: The Only English Kid By Hannah Lowe

The Only English Kid

When the debate got going on ‘Englishness’,
I’d pity the only English kid – poor Johnny
in his spotless Reeboks and blue Fred Perry.
He had a voice from history: Dunno-miss,
Yes-miss, No-miss – all treacly-cockney,
rag-and-bone – and while the others claimed Poland,
Ghana, Bulgaria, and shook off England
like the wrong team’s shirt, John brewed his tea

exclusively on Holloway Road. So when Aasif
mourned the George Cross banner swinging freely
like a warning from his neighbour’s roof —
the subway tunnel sprayed with ‘Muslim Scum’ —
poor John would sit there quietly, looking guilty
for all the awful things he hadn’t done.

Hannah Lowe’s poem effects a neat reversal: the boy who finds himself on the wrong side of history by an accident of birth is a ‘minority’ in a class of multicultural plenitude, a white English fugitive rendered newly pliant by the circumstance of inner-city diversity.

Beautifully construed, ‘The Only English Kid’ is consonant with the heavily ironic tone of many of Lowe’s sonnets in her astonishing collection, The Kids. Her use of half-rhyme and changeful but often regular metre brings focus to her observations, adds weight to a natural insight honed on several years of teaching experience at an inner London sixth-form. The fact of her own complex background - she is white and of mixed race – lends a further layer of depth to her poem and her work, that is well directed by her simple but profoundly affecting use of language.

That Lowe’s perspective is fond yet cynical, sympathetic but without sentiment, is a measure of that insight: fully cognizant of an urban demographic turned full circle, the poet enables both defiant bravado – the ‘rag-and-bone’ cockney, the tea brewed ‘exclusively on Holloway Road’ – and the shamefaced guilt ‘for all the things he hadn’t done’, in the final telling sestet. And in the end, perhaps Johnny is learning to identify with those he might otherwise condemn.

‘The Only English Kid’ is taken from The Kids, published by Bloodaxe Books (2021), and is reproduced here with the kind permission of the publisher.

More information here.

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