Ian Gouge

By the time Ian Gouge went to university he had already lived in seventeen different places - houses, pre-fabs, flats, rooms of one sort or another - and all within the environs of the same two towns: Portsmouth and Gosport, on the south coast of England. No single location more than four miles from the next, between some you could have measured the distance in hundreds of yards. If you put a pin in a map for each, the resulting image would look like the aftermath of a rather well-played game of 'pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey'. A number of these accommodations had been emergency refuges provided by the Local Authority to stave off homelessness; two the 60s/70s equivalents of 'sofa surfing'. But in reality, every single residence proved temporary. Exactly at a time when a child needed security, the very notions of 'home', 'family' - even 'love' - were being challenged, their meanings redefined, shaken to their core; experiences which scarred both an upbringing and the future which followed it.In the major thread of "The Homelessness of a Child", the poet reflects on that childhood, explores its events and repercussions. Inevitably it is both a passionate and dispassionate retelling, the latter a result of the detachment a young boy would learn to adopt in order to protect himself from the chaos of the world he was forced to inhabit.

We often encounter difficulty when trying to reconcile our memories of events with what actually happened. In the almost inevitable mis-match, our mind plays tricks on us, and what we have recently learned and how we have recently lived gets in the way and colours the past. Pressed to recall his own life, the challenge of juggling myth and reality is dangerously fraught for Luke - especially given the story of his remarkable emotional high, and the catastrophe which followed it."If there was one thing I knew about Luke it was that he liked certainty and closure; he hated loose ends and from what I could see they upset him. But looking back now, is that really true? I mean, did I really think that at the time or is it just me seeing into the heart of it, now that it's all too late?""Is that just me saying it now, remembering it the way in which I have chosen to remember it, providing a gloss, an overlay, in order to give the impression that throughout it all I was calm and in control?"