My mother was a staunch member of the Women's Institute in the village where she lived the last thirty-five years of her life. This poem is about an incident that took place at about the same time as the Watergate scandal in the United States. <br /> <br />She flicks the switch, the room is bugged. <br />She smiles to think the girls she’s hugged <br />will have a chance now to reveal <br />opinions that they would conceal. <br />She wonders (and she hopes and fears) <br />what secrets await her curious ears – <br />when she goes out to make the tea <br />she knows that gossip will flow free. <br /> <br />With their hostess in the kitchen, <br /> the ladies turn to open bitching, <br />tear apart her sense of style, <br />her ever-patronising smile, <br />her way of knowing everything, <br />her hair-style and her parenting, <br />the way she thinks she’s really cute, <br />God’s gift to the Women’s Institute. <br /> <br />When she is once more in the room <br />the meeting’s decorously resumed. <br />When they have left, with thanks and smiles, <br />and she rewinds the tape, she finds her guile’s <br />rebounded badly. As she listens <br />I see an angry teardropp glisten. <br />I ask her, “Mum, will you resign, <br />and let them hear the reason why? ” <br /> <br />“Oh no, ” she says, “I’ll beat those witches <br />now I know they’re perfect bitches. <br />I know that none of them could be <br />a perfect secretary like me – <br />they’ll never know they made me cry, <br />those harpies of the W.I.! ”<br /><br />Janice Windle<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/my-mother-double-you-eye-gate/
