No. 5 · U. A. Fanthorpe
Half-past Two
A small boy is kept in detention until half-past two, but no one has ever taught him clock time. Forgotten by the timetable, he slips out of measured time altogether, into a place the adults cannot follow.
The poem at a glance
Fanthorpe taught English for many years, and the poem watches school through a child’s eyes with a teacher’s guilty knowledge. The boy has done ‘Something Very Wrong’, so wrong he has forgotten what it was, and his teacher, dashing off, forgets to release him. Left alone with a clock he cannot read, he escapes into a timeless world of smell, sound and touch, until the teacher scuttles back and slots him into the schedule again. The real subject is two kinds of time: the child’s time of events and feelings, and the adults’ time of numbers.
Methods that matter
Language: a world told in a child’s words
The famous portmanteau coinages, ‘Gettinguptime’, times for kisses and for being told there is no time, run words together the way a child hears them: time is not numbers on a dial but a string of familiar events. The capitalised ‘Something Very Wrong’ and the teacher as ‘She’ reproduce the vast, vague scale of adult authority. Crucially the poem is in the third person: an adult voice remembering, which is why it can be both funny and quietly sad.
Form and structure: fairy tale into escape
The opening line, ‘Once upon a schooltime’, splices fairy tale onto timetable, warning us that this is memory shaped into myth. The regular three-line stanzas tick along like the school day, but when the boy drifts free the syntax opens out, repeated ‘Into the…’ phrases spilling over the line breaks like a mind floating loose. His return is a single brutal verb: the teacher ‘slotted him back’, a piece slotted into a machine.
The clock, personified and unreadable
The clock has ‘little eyes’ and ‘two long legs’, a creature the boy can see but not understand: he ‘couldn’t click its language’. The metaphor makes clock time a foreign tongue adults speak and children must learn. Freed from it, his senses expand to fill the silence, hearing even ‘the silent noise his hangnail made’, an oxymoron that captures how enormous small things become when time stops policing them.
Key quotations
| Quotation | Method | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| ‘Once upon a schooltime’ (l. 1) | Fairy-tale allusion, portmanteau | Myth and timetable collide in one phrase: childhood memory has already become legend, and time is already strange. |
| ‘He couldn’t click its language’ | Metaphor, onomatopoeic verb | Clock time is a foreign language: the boy is not stupid but untranslated, locked out of the adult code. |
| ‘the silent noise his hangnail made’ | Oxymoron | Outside clock time the senses swell: an impossible phrase for an experience ordinary language cannot hold. |
| ‘into the clockless land of ever’ (final stanza) | Coinage, ending | The escape is renamed a country: the poem ends wistful, since the grown narrator can never quite return there. |
Compare it with…
War Photographer (the classic pairing): both present someone alone in a challenging situation, and both use rigid, regular stanzas as a cage around an experience that will not stay ordered, a child outside time, a man undone by what his darkroom develops. Poem at Thirty-Nine: both find enormous significance in small everyday events, a detention, a father’s cooking, seen again through adult memory.
Think it through
- Is the escape into the ‘clockless land’ a punishment gone wrong or an accidental gift?
- Why does the boy never get a name, while ‘She’ and ‘Time’ earn capital letters?
- The poem is comic in places. Where does the comedy tip into something sadder?
Towards the exam
Practice question: Compare the ways the writers present challenging situations in Half-past Two and War Photographer. Plan three integrated comparison points (voice, structure, imagery), write for forty minutes, then take it to the marking desk.