In Nevill’s Johnson’s photograph of Hanover Lane

we see people out for a stroll or a chat on the corner. 

Women tired of having too many children, 

men at a pub door still looking sober. 

Inside the bar someone has to keep order:

no singing until the old soldier comes in, 

his battered harmonica wailing The Red River Valley.

In the house that catches the evening sun 

one floorboard is ready to collapse

and between two family portraits there’s a generation gap. 

A balladeer’s banjo once hung in the hall of Number One.

Neighbours heard him strum 

the chords of Hand Me Down My Bible.

And where are they now, perhaps dying of age

or already gone  – those in the photograph, on their way

or coming back; that young girl hurrying

into the foreground and out of the frame

on a day when it all seemed idyllic on Hanover Lane.