11:00: Baldovan by Don Paterson

• 11:00: Baldovan by Don Paterson focuses on two young boys taking their first unsupervised bus journey, initially filled with excitement and childlike anticipation.
• Paterson uses their adventure to explore themes of change and growing up, with playful imagery like counting coins and dreaming of sweets.
• The tone shifts to unease and surrealism, as the journey becomes metaphorical and the world around them feels unfamiliar and threatening.
• They return to a transformed home, where comforting figures like their mother and sisters are absent, symbolising lost innocence and altered reality.
• The title of the poem, 11:00: Baldovan, reflects its concerns with both time and place. 11:00 is also significant, as it might allude to the 11th hour before the apocalypse.

You can read 11:00: Baldovan by Don Paterson on the Scottish Poetry Library website.

The poem is written in two line stanzas which work to establish tension that builds up bit by bit as the poem moves from the ordinary world into a nightmare.

The first five stanzas form one sentence. They portray the two boys being excited about their adventure.

The fifth stanza is confident in tone, suggesting the speaker is in control. This is juxtaposed with the onset of insecurity. This uncertainty then leads to the frenzied apocalyptic atmosphere of the rest of the poem.

Stanza six starting with the word "However" is pivotal. Despite the apparent confidence, the boy is "obscurely worried". After the initial "what if" questions, the poem escalates into horror as the bus lets them down "in another country".

From this point, the structure drives the poem on towards a crescendo. This contains call-backs using the technique of anaphora.

The fact that every stanza begins with "and" mimicks a child’s breathless description of features of a familiar world - building sites, the sweet shop, the bus, the sea - that have now become warped and obscure. Indeed, the last seven stanzas of the poem form one sentence, as if this frightening vision has run away with itself.

The final line ends the poem with a sense of finality:

and our sisters and mothers are fifty years dead

This emphasises the boys’ vulnerability and isolation in the alien, adult world to which the "wreck" of a bus has returned them.

Base Camp. Horizontal Sleet.

Two minor sentences open the poem. Their effect is to create drama, as if the boys were reporting on the beginning of a significant expedition.

"Two small boys" confirms their age and vulnerability on such a quest. We learn they have "raised the steel flag of the 20 terminus" as if they have reached the top of a mountain and are stating their claim.

This is an adventure to them. Even though the next stanza reveals they are only going to Hilltown, this is a key moment for them as they are going:

for the first time ever on our own.

The words "first", "ever" and "own" emphasise this.

The speaker talks with a young boy’s swagger as he goes on to consider his "spending power". He lists his coins with a sense of pride. The poem is clearly set in the past (possibly the 1960s), as "shillings", "tanners", "florins" and the other coins mentioned are no longer used.

What the coins all have in common is that they are small change. Their value as money is much less than the attention the boy gives them. But to him these "thick cogs" that "chank together" in his pocket are meaningful and promise great possibilities.

The simile here ("like thick cogs") suggests these coins are integral to the success of his day, just as a cog is to the mechanism of a machine. The use of the onomatopoeic"chank" suggests their weight. This combined with reference to "blazonry" and "bald kings" suggests that they give him status as he ventures into adulthood.

Stanza five is short and to the point:

I plan to buy comics / sweeties, and magic tricks.

There is a tone of confidence and authority here. There is something poignant about this for older readers. Looking back on our own experience, we realise these are ephemeral concerns that take centre stage in the life of a young person who hasn’t seen responsibility or much challenge.

These stanzas form one sentence. They contrast with what has gone before.

The word "However" introduces the turning point in stanza 6.

The speaker’s previous confidence is waning and is replaced by insecurity:

…I am obscurely worried…

The adverb "obscurely" suggests he doesn’t understand why. It is also a more adult word - contrasting with the childish tone of stanzas 1 to 5. Possibly the speaker is growing up.

This anxiety is not completely new. The phrase "as usual" confirms this.

…matters of procedure, the protocol of travel…

Here again adult phrases are used. It seems that it is things that suggest the responsibilities of the adult world, such as when to press the bell on the bus, that unnerve the small boy.

The proud confident tone from before is now reduced to secretive insecurity:

…whispering, Are ye sure? Are ye sure?

The repetition here emphasises the uncertainty and doubt. The use of "ye" returns us to the language of the boys as children. This juxtaposes with the adult language around it and reflects the image of small boys out of their depth in adult surroundings.

Worrying gets the boy nowhere:

…the bus will let us down in another country…

It is as if he has no control and can’t do anything to stop it. The metaphor another country implies a foreign place that is unfamiliar to the speaker. This image signifies the poem’s transition into a metaphorical world.

This strangeness is continued in Stanza 10. He looks out onto the wrong streets. Again his ideas sound childish. The subsequent transferred epithet in streets that suddenly forget their names intensifies this sense of the surreal. It is as if the external is in control of the boys.

Stanza 11 opening with "and" shows that Paterson is using the technique of anaphora - with the word repeated at the beginning of each verse to the end of the poem. This creates pace and an increasing sense of drama and panic. A lack of punctuation compounds the feeling that the boy has lost control of his situation and his speech is running away from him.

Along with the boys, the reader enters an almost dreamlike state where reality has morphed into nightmare. Paterson lists the elements that should appear in the boys' planned day - the man in the sweet shop, the boys’ surroundings and the bus. But each feature turns against them:

• the man doesn’t know the sweets they ask for and is aggressive
• the man calls for his wife, as if to mock the boys
• the bus the boys travelled on becomes a "charred wreck"

Does this image of destruction suggest the bus is damaged by its journey through time? It could imply that what is secure and familiar is destroyed by change.

Returning to change

Like the children who visit Narnia or Marty McFly in Back to the Future, the boys return "at the point" they "left off". But now they and their own world have been altered. Paterson describes how "all the houses are gone". This conveys a strange futuristic landscape.

…and the rain tastes like kelly and black waves fold in…

Again there is surrealism in the rain having the taste of "kelly" – the Dundonian word for sherbet. Ordinary rain has been made sweet, fizzy and unnatural.

The fact that the "black waves fold in suggests" that the sea is a solid fabric or covering - something with the potential to smother, just like a nightmare.

The boys themselves have also changed:

…our voices sound funny…

This implies that the boys have grown up - have their voices broken? The use of "sound funny", which is again childish, tells us that they don’t understand what is happening to them.

The whole purpose of these stanzas could be to convey the confusion and trauma that surrounds growing up – the loss of innocence and security.

The final stanza juxtaposes two alarming images -

• the black sea encroaching "very slowly" on the familiar "Macalpine Road"
• the loss of nurturing figures:

…our sisters and mothers are fifty years dead.

The sea could represent change itself, ever-present, working "slowly", so that you wake up one day to realise you are suddenly on your own. The "fifty years" emphasises how quickly time can pass, which jars with the "slow" process of change.

Life is elusive and bewildering: one minute everything is familiar and secure; the next you are facing a "charred wreck" of what was. Paterson seems to suggest that all the while you are not in control: you are picked up and set down in new territories frequently – that is what it is to be an adult.

This is a central theme in the poem as it begins with "two small boys" getting the bus on their own for the first time.

The literal bus trip becomes a metaphorical journey into another world - a world that is unfamiliar and frightening. Paterson explores the confusing experience of growing up and how it can destabilise even the most assured child.

The boy starts in command over his limited world as he counts his money and envisages the sweets and comics he will buy. This is quickly replaced with insecurity when presented with more ‘grown-up’ tasks like pushing the bell on the bus and paying the right money – things he obviously hasn’t done before.

This is a nervous child, as he admits "I am obscurely worried as usual" – small things have the potential to throw him off course.

The nightmare that follows explores the new feelings and experiences of adulthood - where people are no longer friendly, don’t understand you and where you are suddenly placed in situations to fend for yourself.

The final image is one of sheer isolation as the speaker has lost his sister and mother and must face the approaching "black" sea by himself.

While Paterson explores the difficult transition between childhood and adulthood in 11:00: Baldovan, he takes the theme further by examining change in itself and its impact on our lives.

After the initial journey into adulthood we will come home to a world unrecognisable, where our loved ones are gone and we are left remembering the "charred" remains of an old familiar world.

Life is presented as a series of changes: there are sudden twists and turns that essentially mean that you never "make it home again". This means the boys must assemble new constructs and securities in the light of changing experiences.

The process of time also comes into play here. Paterson implies that time can go very fast and you can suddenly realise you are alone in the world that once provided you with nurture and support.

At first glance, 11:00: Baldovan is quite different from the other Don Paterson poems on the set text list. It does not explicitly describe a parent-child relationship. However, it has many links with the other poems.

Change and first experiences

In 11:00: Baldovan, Paterson describes "going up the Hilltown / for the first time ever on our own."Waking with Russell also focuses on change and a first experience in Paterson's life - he becomes a father for the first time.

Childhood and loss of innocence

The theme of childhood is important in many of these poems. However, most of these poems explore the loss of innocence too.

Doubt and uncertainty

In 11:00: Baldovan, the speaker is "obscurely worried" and whispers "Are ye sure? Are ye sure?" to his friend. He furthers this confusion with reference to "the wrong streets and streets".

In Waking with Russell, the speaker says: "the true path was as lost to me as ever". The use of the word "lost" emphasises the lack of certainty or clarity that Paterson had before his son was born.

We see some of this uncertainty and confusion in Why Do You Stay Up So Late? too: "I don’t know, and I’ve no pool to help me tell". Like the boy who seeks reassurance from his friend, Paterson relies on his son to see the "dull things" in a new and surprising way.

In The Swing the speaker struggles to find meaning in the loss of an unborn child. While his lack of religious belief tells him there is "nothing here", still he feels a sense of his daughter's presence through the act of pushing the swing that she will never sit in.

There is a sense of uncertainty in The Circle, in which Paterson compares his son's attempt to paint a perfect circle, with the imperfection of life and the universe. He focuses on how painting and existence itself can go wrong, suggesting both that this reflects the uncertainty and fragility of life, and that it is this imperfection that creates interest and meaning.

The central image of The Thread again reflects how uncertain and fragile life is, but that this thinnest of connections is enough to bind us to each other and to give value to being alive.

Revise 11:00 Baldovan and other poems by Don Paterson with interactive quizzes for Higher English.