Triple Trounced by Louise Nicholas
She left school at fourteen but when our mother’s mind
wasn’t Webster’s Dictionary, or Miss Manner’s Book
of Common Courtesy, it was a Letraset jumble of letters
that spent part of each day falling in and out with each other:
- three-letter words beginning with ‘a’,
seven-letter words that housed a ‘z’,
four-letter words with no need for an ‘e’.
On rainy days, the Scrabble board emerged
and we’d no sooner placed the three-letter
Nip-and-Fluff word we’d spent ten minutes excavating
from a dictionary already bloodied with our desperation,
- than she would trounce it
with a ‘j’ on a triple-letter
or a ‘z’ on the double word.
When she reached the finishing line,
she’d look back at us – trailing our degrees
and advanced diplomas where she had none –
see that we were held to ransom
- by four ‘a’s
or a ‘v’
or a ‘u’-less q
and not even try to stifle a smile.