(1)Oh, I wish I’d looked after me teeth,
And spotted the perils beneath,
All the toffees I chewed,
And the sweet sticky food,
Oh, I wish I’d looked after me teeth.
I wish I’d been that much more willin’
When I had more tooth there than fillin’
To pass up gobstoppers,
From respect to me choppers,
And buy something else with me shillin’.
(2)When I think of the lollies I licked, and the liquorice allsorts I picked,
Sherbet dabs, big and little,
All the hard peanut brittle,
My conscience gets horribly pricked.
My mother, she told me no end,
‘If you got a tooth, you got a friend.’
I was young then, and careless,
My toothbrush was hairless,`
I never had much time to spend.
(3)Oh I showed them the toothpaste all right,
I flashed it about late at night,
But up-and-down brushin’
And pokin’ and fussin’ didn’t seem worth the time – I could bite!
If I’d known I was paving the way, to cavities, caps and decay,
The murder of fillin’s,
Injections and drillin’s,
I’d have thrown all my sherbet away.
(3)So I lay in the old dentist’s chair,
And I gaze up his nose in despair,
And his drill it do whine,
In these molars of mine,
‘Two amalgam,’ he’ll say, ‘for in there’.
How I laughed at my mother’s false teeth,
As they foamed in the waters beneath.
But now come the reckonin’
It’s me they are beckonin’
Oh, I wish I’d looked after me teeth.
(5) Identify at least one feeling in the poem and explain how it is created? In the second and sixth paragraph there is a feeling of regret created by emotive sentences such as "if I'd known I was paving the way, to cavities, caps and decay, the murder of fillin's, injections and fillin's, I'd thrown all my sherbet away" and "oh I wish I'd looked after me teeth" and words like I wish I, and I wish I'd been.
(4)Explain the meaning of the poem.
This poem is about an adult reflecting on their childhood and how they neglected their teeth. The author, Pam Ayers doesn’t tell us if it is a man or woman in the poem, so we assume its Pam talking about her childhood. As she's sat in the
