Finding My Father (The 1901 Census).(Poem)

 
The House 
 
   I am trying to fit you at four months, 
   your father, a draper's traveller on his awn account, 
   your mother, your brother David who was twelve, 
   also Samuel Silverman, a tailor, 
   his wife, their three children and the boarder, 
   Woolf Chonen, a boot machinist--I 
   am trying to squeeze all of you into 
   that small house, 87 Nelson Street 
   in the parish of St Philip Stepney, London. 
 
   Ninety years later among the re-built 
   and re-numbered buildings I found 
   a clutch of narrow terraced dwellings 
   which hadn't been felled by the twentieth century. 
   Peering into the dim of a bald brown room, 
   I made out its black range. Everything tallied 
   with the one up, one down and basement, 
   ...