AN IRISH CHILDHOOD IN ENGLAND: 1951 The bickering of vowels on the buses, the clicking thumbs and the big hips of the navy-skirted ticket collectors with their crooked seams brought it home to me: Exile. Ration-book pudding. Bowls of dripping and the fixed smile of the school pianist playing "Iolanthe," "Land of Hope and Glory" and "John Peel." I didn't know what to hold, to keep. At night, filled with some malaise of love for what I'd never known I had, I fell asleep and let the moment pass. The passing moment has become a night of clipped shadows, freshly painted houses, the garden eddying in dark and heat, my children half-awake, half-asleep. Airless, humid dark. Leaf-noise. The stirrings of a garden before rain. A hint of storm behind the risen moon. We are what we have chosen. Did I choose to? -- in a strange city, in another country, on nights in a north-facing bedroom, waiting for the sleep that never did restore me as I'd hoped to what I'd lost -- let the world I knew become the space between the words that I had by heart and all the other speech that always was becoming the language of the country that I came to in ninteen fifty-one: barely-gelled, a freckled six-year-old, overdressed and sick on the plane, when all of England to an Irish child was nothing more than what you'd lost and how: was the teacher in the London convent who, when I produced "I amn't" in the classroom turned and said -- "you're not in Ireland now." -- Eavan BOLAND