Tooting Idyll

This work includes two sequences, both set in London. The title poem in the collection focuses on a south London terraced house in Tooting Bec inhabited by two male lovers (one a C.O., the other to become a soldier) coping with the world in 1939 and the threat of war. In 1984 the same house is occupied by a man and a woman with an adopted child and another adoption fixed. The fate of the wartime lovers is implicit in the second part; the future of the 1980s couple is made explicit in the third, from the perspective of a female friend after the VE commemoration of 1995. "Mary Chay", the second sequence, focuses on a murder in Victoria, seen from many viewpoints (including those of the police, forensic laboratory staff, suspects, neighbours, witnesses, passers-by, a shop assistant, and a cross-dressing man who encounters the victim on her last day).