Webbed Feet, No Wires. (A Hampshire Childhood)

Webbed Feet No Wires

“Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more;
Or close the wall up with our English dead.
In peace there's nothing so becomes a man
As modest stillness and humility:
But when the blast of war blows in our ears,
Then imitate the action of the tiger;
Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood,
Disguise fair nature with hard-favour'd rage;
Then lend the eye a terrible aspect;
Let pry through the portage of the head
Like the brass cannon; let the brow o'erwhelm it
As fearfully as doth a galled rock
O'erhang and jutty his confounded base,
Swill'd with the wild and wasteful ocean.
Now set the teeth and stretch the nostril wide,
Hold hard the breath and bend up every spirit
To his full height. On, on, you noblest English.
Whose blood is fet from fathers of war-proof!
Fathers that, like so many Alexanders,
Have in these parts from morn till even fought
And sheathed their swords for lack of argument:
Dishonour not your mothers; now attest
That those whom you call'd fathers did beget you.
Be copy now to men of grosser blood,
And teach them how to war. And you, good yeoman,
Whose limbs were made in England, show us here
The mettle of your pasture; let us swear
That you are worth your breeding; which I doubt not;
For there is none of you so mean and base,
That hath not noble lustre in your eyes.
I see you stand like greyhounds in the slips,
Straining upon the start. The game's afoot:
Follow your spirit, and upon this charge
Cry 'God for Harry, England, and Saint George!' “

Norman ‘s nostrils would flare like a double- barrelled duck gun when any of the young’uns tried to be smart. Norman had officially left school at fourteen, and probably had not attended much before that but he knew his Reading, Riting and Reckoning well enough especially when his books were not made from paper, but of the sky, the woods, field and meadows and his music the song of the inhabitants therein, and the rain put-puttering on the mangy felt of his old bowler hat.

His scrimshaw grin as he straightened up from dibbling his row of beetroot, or cutting rhubarb, or whatever job he was given in the market garden side of the farm which employed him as a labourer, stretched his back which had been doubled over for half and hour, was a village monument on which every poacher’s technique since the Domesday book had been etched. He would reach into one of the dozen pockets in his navy blue overalls and pull out his snuff box, tap it and snort a copious pinch up each of the black holes.

In those days , studying for A levels and working as casual agricultural labourers, Jeremy and I could never think of the ‘before Harfleur’ speech without giggling and referencing Norman as the type of stout fellow most likely to imitate the action of a tiger and stick two bow fingers up at those Frenchies at least once in every century since the bells of Crondall Monastery first called the Brothers to Prime and Norman's serf ancestors to plough their strips and do their boon work for the Lord of the Manor down the road in Dogmersfield.

Now, 30 odd years on, so many things recall the old poacher/keeper (for the dividing line is oft blurry) to mind, I think of him nearly every day. I suppose I loved him but did not realise how much, or how much influence he wrought on an impressionable youth, until many years and many miles have intervened.

Fortified with the snuff, Norman would look at the sky and give a weather forecast for the day, calculating on how to organise the list of jobs we had been assigned by Alf "an’-when-you’ve-finished-a’doin’-o’thaaat, yew start.." White, one of the brothers who now ran the farm for Old Man White, their formidable father. Norman would take in the movement of every bird, down to the last sparrow and jenny wren, and recite in running commentary the almanac of bird movements and nest building schedules according to week, month and weather for each year since circa 1936. Meanwhile we would be told to continue the job we were on amidst grumbles about lazy students with ‘nuffin better a do thaaaan larning bout poncy stuff an smoke pot at taxpayers expense and larkin' about'. I doubt Norman ever paid any tax, but Alf must have done, and serve the miserable bugger right.

Norman was 69 years of age then, back in the mid 1970s. Jeremy liked to tease him. Jeremy lived in a very big posh house, but he was a nice boy, too intellectual for his own good. He was a year older than me. The physical and dirty farm work was a life saver for him, it gave him confidence, made him strong, not just the work, but the workers. He was gangly and spotty and was going to Cambridge University. By the time he did, he had filled out, had a healthy outdoor tan and held his head and shoulders square at the boys and girls who once found him an easy target to bully. Working on the farm made him change his chosen course to research on the diseases and parasites of oilseed rape, which was to take over the English Countryside a few years into the future. That is all another story for another day. This is about Norman.

Reluctant to get back to cutting and trimming endless boxes of rhubarb for Collier's wholesale fruit and veg merchants in Aldershot, Jeremy tried to get Norman to launch into one of his stories , or educational dissertations on how to eat for free by poaching grub for the pot from the surrounding farms and estates. Norman could tell you how it was done years ago before the war, and how the techniques had progressed now that ‘fings ‘aaaaad changed, you’.

‘I saw a flock of Canada geese on my way to work this morning, Norman,’ he said.

‘Aye?’

‘Aye. They was all perched on the telegraph wire down by the canal, you’.

We had got into the habit of speaking in the local accent and dialect, working with what his mother called peasants much to the disgust of our families and teachers should it slip out at home or school, which of course it did, elocution lessons wasted an’all thaaat.

Norman sucked on one of his black -and –yellow tooth stumps with a sort a slurping noise and nodded wisely.

‘C’mon then , we gets this job’n done and we c'n go up the yard for some tea an' lardy cake be ten o’ clooork’

Next day a'rtnoon we were hand-hoe-ing the weeds from the rows of young leeks. Norman raised his eyes to the sky.

‘Yew see your Canada geese asleep on the telegraph woires laasst night , Young’un?’

Norman turned to Jeremy, stuffing snuff up one of the demi-culverin muzzles.

‘Yes, yes, I did,’ Jeremy replied, ‘It was an amazing sight, absolutely amazing’.

‘OI bets it was,’ Norman drawled, ‘Yew takes me a photo, Young’un.

Daft bugger. You thinks I fall for thaat, doo yew? Webbed feet no wires, Boy, webbed feet,no wires.’

Rime

Today, it rimed.

Not Forgotten, Never Forgotten- 7th Anniversary of the outbreak of Foot and Mouth disease 2001

Seven years ago today we heard the words that freeze the blood, strike dread into the bones of any countryman.

"A case of Foot and Mouth Disease has been confirmed..."

The link takes you to 'Fields of Fire', -articles, poems, diary entries about the 'other' horror of 2001. Please, if any friends, or indeed casual passers by or even enemies, come through this blog, take a moment to have a look at these pieces-

http://www.warmwell.com/jan1fof.html

This poem is one I wrote in 2005 for the anniversary, after driving though lands that were silent in that Spring, Summer and Autumn 2001, and we wondered if we would ever see an animal grazing the fields ever again.

AFTER THE FOOT & MOUTH

WAS NEARLY FORGOTTEN

Fat sheep drift apprehensively
against dry- stone walls

('Sheep by the wall means storms on the way'
Countryman's Law still rules okay.)

the sheep shelter
in shallow hollows
horizontal sleet turns to snow
paints white stripes
in furrows of ploughed fields

ice motes gather in the wind
hard as lead shot
group to zero in on target
define boundaries of medieval strips
reveal shapes of lost landmarks
no longer recognised
on elevations that present eighteenth century
aspects
of the Grand Estate

(The Stately Homes of England
the family pile in flames
the scions live in the stables now
Preserving their family names)

A timeless steeple broods
Sat squat on middle-aged spread of greystone girth
Solitary, predatory,
it presides
over snow-sketched ground-plans of its defunct hamlet
drawn on a magic slate
or in a mason's sand box.

The church
hoards Black Death bones
bowed and twisted
under the yew bound acre
symbolically divorced

In space
in spirit
from the unfaithful departed
down the road

their sale boards proclaim
desirable country residences
blank glass sides of barn conversions blink
milking- parlours developed into luxury duplexes
with multiple parking for shiny 4WDs
in the new-old village
sans Post Office, bus, school, pub

and mud.

And the sheep, heavy with unborn lambs,
press in dirty fleecy drifts,
spoil the pure new whiteness of the fields.

Hefted in their atavistic memory
are burning pyres of wholesale slaughter
and the tenacious survival
of a way of life.

******************************************

The Laughing Sailor

The Laughing Sailor

Life was beginning to get like an amusement hall penny cascade again this week.

You know the form, you push the coins in the slot trying to time them to drop just so and a domino effect causes the teetering pile to tumble into the hopper- or one or two at least, and you immediately put them back in. In reality, they get pushed to the top of the pile, underneath the pile, down the side tube, into the back of the machine never to be seen again, and the pennies hang over the edge impossibly balanced, taunting and teasing, until you go for more small change and just as you step away, there is an avalanche and several urchins appear from nowhere, scoop the pennies up and vanish back into the flashing lights from whence they came.

So it seemed that the metaphorical pennies were piling up in my head. Things to cope with, things to attend to, decisions and meals to be made, the trivial and the life changing butting up and tangling together in a game of naked and baby-oiled Twister. It felt that something had to give, but somehow it didn’t. It wasn’t tidy, but hung in there, precariously, like sanity.

In the Penny Cascade, cheap watches, cigarette lighters, key rings and other flyblown faded tat lie on top of the crust of pennies. Pound notes, (when we still had them) five pound notes, even a tenner in the 10p machine, quiver seductively with no chance of falling down into the hopper. People shove their pennies in the slot, desperate to dislodge these useless items they could buy for the amount of pennies they feed in, but would not dream of wanting to possess except if they can only just win it..just..another few pennies... landing edgewise on the tray...tipping... in the right place should do it… just as the pushers go back ..hold their breath as they go forward... push the coin down to the next tray... move the crust of balanced pennies fractionally forward where they stay. But one falls on the next bay into the scoop completely unconnected to the action in this one.

A couple of years ago we were at the North Yorkshire coast for some filming and stayed on for a few days’ holiday in the Moors. I had some business to attend to and my friend decided to pass the time in an amusement arcade on a restored pier, in a resort which looked as if it had been left behind in some glorious golden age summer sometime between the fin de siecle and the Great War.

When I had done what I had to do, I braved the Golden Nugget and its flashing lights and sirens , having swallowed a couple of paracetamol hoping to stave off the migraine it would surely give me, I tracked him to the Penny Cascade. Which of course these days takes 2p coins, but look like the old pennies, except smaller, and Britannia does not rule the waves on the reverse.

‘Just get rid of this change’ he said ‘then I come.’

I stood back and watched. At the other side of the machine an older man bent double squinted upwards at the overhanging coins. Tongue poking from the side of his mouth, frowning, he fed the machine with his coppers as if they were gold sovereigns.

My friend spun his coins into the slot, coin for coin dropping into the hopper, which he fed back in. I wished the machine would stop giving them back to him. The other man scowled each time one rattled into ‘our’ tray

.

The scowly man at the other bay ran out of coins and made his wife go for more, which she returned with in a plastic cup. A ‘token ‘ dropped into my friend’s scoop. The other man was livid and kicked the bottom of the machine , making sure that the old woman attendant in the change kiosk could not see him. I doubted she would have cared that much, even though a big flashing notice exhorted players ‘Do not hit or kick or tip the machines’. She was reading a Mills and Boon paperback, her catsbottom lips puckered.

‘Go get an attendant’ my friend ordered me. Obediently I trotted off after a blonde girl with a name badge that said Ludmilla. I explained that my friend had won a token and needed the machine to be opened so that he could chose his prize. She smiled and replied, ‘moment please. I come very soon , Just I must fix this bandit.’

I smiled back and returned with the news that Ludmilla would be there shortly. Meanwhile, the man banged the machine with his fist and snatched the token that fell from the hopper as if it was the alchemist’s stone. He ran across the arcade, grabbed Ludmilla’s arm and dragged her to the machine which she, eyebrow raised at such enthusiasm, opened. The token could be exchanged for

1- a small plastic model of a collie dog.

2- a packet of bubble gum

3- a key ring with a pea whistle

4- a blue furry dolphin

or you could save it and win more tokens for more valuable prizes, such as furry octopuses, Corgi cars and princess purses. The man chose the collie dog which he proudly displayed to his wife , looking sideways at my friend with a glint of triumphalism in his eye.

My friend asked me what we should have. By this time my indulgent amusement had given way to incredulous embarrassment, not to mention impatience, and I forced open his hand which grasped the precious token prised it from his fingers and gave it to an astonished woman with a child in stroller who chose that fortunate moment to be passing.

.

‘Get something for the little girl with it,’ I said, magnanimously.

The man opposite looked at me with murder in his eyes.

My friend feverishly fed another five pennies into the machine and two plinked into the hopper with a desultory plonk. He scooped them up triumphantly.

‘Okay, we go now. I win.

‘How much did you win? ’

’a fluffy kitten.’ He produced a plush toy from his pocket and thrust it into my face, and 4 pence.’

‘How many pennies did it take you to win that?’

‘£4.37’

‘Niki, you are wearing a money belt with £2000 in cash .You could have bought the kitten for 99p.’

He shrugged the shrug of a man who knows no matter how much he explains, you will never understand.

‘I did not win the goldfish because I did not play for it.’ He said, a propos of nothing.

We went out into the September sunshine, walked along the pier. I felt slightly dizzy from the contrasts between the dark corners, coloured chasing lights, the sun shimmering on the sea, hooters, clangers and the incessant squall of gulls. Looking down through the slats to the water sloshing around the pier supports made me feel sea-sick. The foamy wavelets swished the pebbles back and forth over the beach. Seaweed lay like electric cables on the tideline.

‘Hey, look at this old machine. Give me a penny. ‘

As a child, I had loved the laughing sailor at the entrance to the pier at Southsea. ‘Please can I have another penny Dad’ echoed down the years. This shabby relic was probably no shabbier than that Sailor in his glass case was then, but children do not see the shabbiness, only the magic. This sailor seemed vaguely sinister as he rocked and laughed, the bisque lips curled over unnatural teeth, the paint grey and chipped. How it never frightened children, as an adult, I found hard to imagine.

He pushed the coin into the slot. The Jolly Sailor rocked and his mouth opened, teeth bared he laughed. And laughed. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. AAHHAAHHAA. It shook manically, it cackled like a maniac. The mechanical movements were uncannily human, but in such a way as might be produced by dead flesh and bone like a ghost of a drowned man wandering underwater on the wreck of the "Mary Rose". We stared , partly in horror, partly in fascination. The unblinking eyes, painted wide open gazed back at us, then the eyeballs rolled from side to side daring us to smile, to laugh back at the stuff of which nightmares are made.

‘Personally,’ I said, taking his hand rather nervously ,‘I preferred the one where you pulled out the cold smooth silver coin tray, put the coin, I think it was sixpence, (a real treat) flat down in the space made for it, pushed it in with a smart snap and the elephant glided round on the track into the hole in the rock , his tail twitching, and came out of the other cave with a white box on his howdah, which he tipped into the mine and it fell down on to the shelf into the sunny world outside, into the hands of children, or specifically the child that was me. That elephant could be depended on to deliver. That elephant did not mess you about. That elephant kept its promises. That elephant’s gift was truly treasure from the Jewel in the Crown, from the mines of King Solomon.

Standing like Canute against the tide of stress and work, thinking of the Jolly Sailor in his glass case grinning for a penny made me smile. There are worse things than making mistakes or not getting through on schedule.

Rising Sap

10^th February 2008

So on the first day the sun has shone at a level that strikes the crystal hanging in the kitchen window, and bounces rainbows to dance around the walls like demented fairies, Lisa reminds me of Victor Jara and a time when life was for living, when life was about caring and fighting for what was right. Of course we were limited as to how we could do that, and our sincerity questioned and often ridiculed. Nonetheless, even with the hindsight of 30 or so years, we did what we could even if it was pathetic and futile.

It was all there, then, stretching forward and all we had to do was open our minds, our hands, our mouths and possibly our legs. We were young and ruled a future that would be well on the way to Socialist Utopia, because, well, we held the key to the book of knowledge as if it were a five year diary in a girl’s bedside locker in the fifth form dorm. To know was to effect. To think was to do. It was all so simple. No, it was not simple at all. It was horribly angst ridden, cold and painful, and in many ways being on the fringes that were not ‘cool’ fringes then has left huge cultural and intellectual gaps in the scrapbook that is my life.

It is hard to find something new to say about Spring, rebirth, renewal, all that cliché shit that never gets expressed well enough, except by Shakespeare, Marlowe and T.S.Eliot, maybe. Musically , certainly Debussy captured it uniquely . Chaucer had it , but then he was there pretty much first and the rest of us poor wretched wannabe writers, poets and artists have to scratch about in urban parks and pseudo bucolic mud ruts for contemporary explanations and descriptions of something that never changes; viz: Rising Sap.

It doesn’t stop me needing to try, though, because although it happens every year, it still comes as a surprise, a revelation almost. The sudden realisation that my eyes function as if cataracts have been removed, (or with less a hyperbolic metaphor, as if the very grimy lenses of my spectacles have been rinsed and polished) or no, not my eyes, I have far too much sophistry to see anything other than through a cynical filter that is nicotine or jaundice yellow, it is the sun itself, the sky, the very air that one day appears to have been scraped clean of grey scum and smut and grease to sparkle like dew on daisies on a merrie morninge in May.

There were more daisies mingled with the crocuses than the prescribed 13 that you need to step on to know it is Spring. There were pansies and primula, campanula and pinks in showy gardens. On the Swathe, snowdrops ghosted in shady places and daffodil spears poised to unsheath golden flames like a Jaffa weapon through the Stargate, defying physical time. It has been like this before, I remember it in my shaky greenstick legs, but not this century. People walking around in shirtsleeves in February, compelled to clean things in public, to open windows, fling bedding and blankets over railings to soak up the sunshine, polish windows to let it into winter -shabby rooms. Lovers kissing on park benches; holding hands as they walk slowly through cherry tree avenues heavily pregnant with blossom buds waiting for the splitting day. Scented air recalls rarefied sex and purified principles.

I remember days of demonstrations, posters, graffiti, slogans, clenched fists ; days numbered and punctuated by spray cans, of art of the Revolution, the colours of the Revolution; the Revolution that was in the heads of the young and hopeful, the Revolution that is always in the heads of the young and hopeful. Pogo-ing to Rock Against Racism, eating ethnic foods from Cuba, Chile, Africa; wearing ethnic clothing batiq and tie dye, hairy , embroidered half-cured skins with suspect smells, talking talking talking planning planning planning to the music of the people in a polyglot of languages no one understood anymore than they understood (fully) the issue but they understood the message. They understood this was right and this was wrong and that it must be protested by anyone who could protest in any way they could protest. Preferably actively. It must be supported in any way they could support it. Preferably actively. Even better direct action.

How we wanted to be heroes in those Seasons of the Sun, among the nodding daffs of Hyde Park, the dusty plastic orchids on the windowsills of Kilburn, the Morris Dancers of Rotting Dean, the Folk Singers of Camden Crypt, the fund raisers of King Street and Cotton Gardens. How can the privileged be working class heroes, how can the unoppressed be martyrs? How can you show solidarity with the tortured, the censored, the murdered? Those who take up arms against the oppressors, those who are imprisoned, those whose lives are broken and whose blood runs in the sand and street dust, that stains the rivers and the snow?

We marched, we wrote, we talked, we sang until we only knew the world music. We painted and we covered our walls with poster art from every country, and our furniture with cloths of every ethnic pattern and fabric. We rejected contemporary consumerism, We lived in collectives, Kibbutzim. We tried to know what it was to suffer. We failed.

And all of this, looking back, on such a day rare in middle age, that whips the blood into an effervescence of longing and enthusiasm to grab life by the balls and twist in until it howls, happened not in an aura of grey skies and rain, although that is how it probably was in reality, but in the white gold aura of perpetual Spring, throbbing guitars; throbbing, pulsating sap ready to explode and wash away the tyrants and the running dogs of capitalism. The sun through the window, the name of a man brave and broken that echoes from 30 years ago, with songs that will never die.

The sap rises but leaks away through my (metaphorical) broken bones and severed arteries, pools in the pit of my stomach. I am blinded by the sun and the music, the songs of dead men and by useless tears.

Tilting at Windmills

Knabbs Ridge Wind Farm




Photos by Ca ne fait rien


http://www.walkingenglishman.com/leedsharrogate20.htm

http://www.yes2wind.com/

http://www.army.mod.uk/royalsignals/rsa/harrogate/index.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Menwith_Hill

http://www.harrogate.gov.uk/harrogate-3297

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=512176&in_page_id=1770

The Pylons

By Stephen Spender

The secret of these hills was stone, and cottages
Of that stone made,
And crumbling roads
That turned on sudden hidden villages

Now over these small hills, they have built the concrete
That trails black wire
Pylons, those pillars
Bare like nude giant girls that have no secret.

The valley with its gilt and evening look
And the green chestnut
Of customary root,
Are mocked dry like the parched bed of a brook.

But far above and far as sight endures
Like whips of anger
With lightning's danger
There runs the quick perspective of the future.

This dwarfs our emerald country by its trek
So tall with prophecy
Dreaming of cities
Where often clouds shall lean their swan-white neck.

Tilting at Windmills

We first noticed the Knabbs Ridge Wind Farms not dominating Nidderdale and Blubberhouse Moor against January brownfields and February brittle skies yesterday, when we went on a bimble about around Fewston Reservoirs, John 'Gaunts Castle and the other ancient landscars in the Washburn valley three miles or so up the A59. Skeleton trees amongst the other skeleton trees, more visible, evidently, than when the leafy hedgerow and the mighty oak and beech, the Forestry Commission spruce and the windbreak ridge scots pines obscured the vistas with their own splendours during the rest of the year.

Many people don’t like the turbines. They accept the need for renewable energy sources, for green fuel, that something has to be done about climate change, but they do not want to see the turbines. They object to the visibility of the wind farms springing up over the English countryside. Perhaps they regard them in a similar way to the pylons in Spender’s poem, marching across ‘areas of outstanding natural beauty’. They certainly do not want them in their own back yards. I wonder idly to my companion as we lean on the fence making faces at the inquisitive and nervous sheep ( nervous of us, that is. The sheep appear to be unfazed by the stick insect ballerinas , arms outstretched over them like angel-shepherds) if the objectors would rather an opencast mine, or the bad old days of black lungs and choking towns, and wheezing emphysemia. I am sure they would like the dubious alternative of Nuclear power, provided of course that it was 'manufactured' well away from them and did not affect their property prices.

I would not mind one of these moving sculptures in a field next to me any more than I would mind a picturesque old corn mill, sails creaking and groaning , the millstones grinding, outside my bedroom window. In fact, as he pointed out, the view from our bedroom window includes the big white 'Prisoner' -like spheres of the sssshhh listening station up the hill, but these must be in a bit of a dip, otherwise we should be able to see them too. Which would be quite nice.

Anyway...

The turbines, to me, enhance that beauty, in the same way as the architects of the 18^th century enhanced the views across the land with their Palladian mansions and landscaped gardens, follies and managed parks and woodlands. Man’s hand on the landscape has changed it for better or worse since man first stood on his own two feet. When monetary greed is not the driving force, and artistic and altruistic motive is, man and nature can work pretty well together.

There are many images to describe these turbines ,”graceful” being the adjective most commonly employed almost to the point of cliché. Their slender white towers soar tapering upwards, their silver blades sweep , cutting the currents with aerodynamically shaped blades, shapes taken from nature itself. The gulls wheel and circle on the same wind currents that turn the sails. The eye is drawn upwards and peripherally outwards, recalling the effect of the perpendicular arches created by the masons of the great medieval cathedrals who brought heaven closer to the world of men. The spinning windmills lift the spirits to climb and soar as if our heels have mercurial wings attached. It is not only a spiritual experience, it is almost physical also, almost as if the structure has come alive and whipped you onto its shoulders leaving gravity to the box-people.

Alongside Knabbs Ridge runs a Roman Road which continues across Blubberhouses Moor. Man has been changing this particular landscape since the Bronze age. It is one of the most beautiful places in the world, and conservationists wish to keep it that way. The contradictions and ironies here strike us as something of a paradox.

If we do not build these stunning but alien and vaguely sinister cyborg-angels to harvest the wind and provide energy which does not destroy the planet, by our own greed for commodities dependent on fossil fuel energy which is destroying the very air we breathe, the water that sustains the whole of life, planet Earth and the sky above it and us miserable creatures scratching around on it, we must find some alternative form of energy that does not destroy the whole environmental structure , not just the décor of it.

The objections to the Knabbs Ridge Wind Farm seem to us even more ironic. Pan the camera around and the ever mulitiplying ‘golf balls’ of the Spy Base provide a Sci-Fi type backdrop to the wind turbines. Look back down the road and there is a convoy of heavily armoured military vehicles rumbling up the arrow-straight Roman troop road from the British Army training base.

Even Don Quixote might have been a tad confused about which windmill to tilt at first.

Soap Opera

Saturday February 2nd 2008

It is snowing intermittently. Not enough to hide all the ugliness. Not enough to cover the sludge with thrown down filter tips mixed in like toffee nuggets in a fudge brownie served with the ersatz mud coffee you made in rusted paint pots and stirred with a stick down by the creek when you were a kid , that sloshes in the gutters and banks up like dams so the drains overflow. Not enough to smooth out the deadness of early February and endow the nodding snowdrops with that ironic hopefulness they should have.

Despite the snow showers, the sleet that whips down the backstreet , the Lithuanian boy is cleaning the BMWs. His hands are red raw; he pulls his hat down over his ears and tucks his scarf into the front of his jacket. He leans over, stretching to reach into the bottom of the engine, exposing such an expanse of bare skin that I hear echoes of old people’s admonishments half a century ago to “ tuck in your vest before you get a chill in your kidneys”; almost feel rough hands ramming scratchy woollies down the back of my pants.

And they say the English are mad. Bubbles float up towards my vantage point, white suds fly from his sponge as he scrubs the spoked alloy wheels with Teutonic vigour , eyes narrowed to glittery slits against the wind as he crouches, cat-like, feral. I am not sure which are snowflakes and which blobs of soapy foam; not sure if I am looking into a shaken snow globe or looking out from one.

Froth gathers in islands, on the road, drifts in the culverts like lilies, glows in the gathering dusk, pretending. Later it freezes without receding, an ice tide in the urban moonscape.

Marsh Vapours

Waiting for snow today out of the sort of lapis lazuli sky that only a severely wind chilled February day can produce. The yellow crocuses are appearing on the Swathe. Last year the white ones showed first. I wonder if there is a reason , why only one colour tests the air first; too much rain, too dry, temperature too warm, too cold, a race to the surface below in the crocus corm world, perhaps. Visions of Persephone with a starter's air horn, on your marks, get set, 'mmmeearrwaugh' .Maybe they have a sort of crocus marathon, where some entrants are the serious competitors and others dress up like emus and flop and bounce, trip and flounce their way to the finish line. Whatever, team saffron have won this year, leaving the white and the purple and the parti-coloured stripy hybrids behind in the underworld.

The wind festoons the branches of the majestic horse chestnut trees far above with plastic bags and street litter until they look less like they are lining a sedate avenue and more like they are dancing in a Mardi Gras parade. It batters the early crocuses into egg yolk lily stars on standing pools.

The news says that the north of England is blizzarded and white outed. Not here of course, maybe later. Snow never happens much here in the sheltered huddle of the town. It was raining with the odd soggy dollop of sleet mixed in as I walked against the wind to the Post Office, pushing my vintage bicycle to which I had strapped the parcels because today's load was too big and awkward to fit in my backpack. Pedaling back, still, it seemed, against the wind, my face was numbed by a hundred acupuncture needles, my mouth frozen into a stretched teeth grin.

Every year in one form or another I write this crocus-on-the Stray shit. It is predictable. It is always the same. In that sameness there is irritation and comfort and the knowledge of another year starting, another season turning, my life plodding on with the odd flashes of colour to use as bookmarks in time.

In the course of my ancestral research Project I have found a line of agricultural labourers stretching back certainly from 1900 to the Domesday Book and probably back to the first time a bloke dragged an auroch antler through the earth and dropped barleycorns into the furrow or kept a beast for meat or milk in the corner of his hovel. Dependency and certainty that the sun would rise in the morning at the designated degree for the length of days, that Spring would come after winter, that winter would fallow the land year in year out ; predictable and necessary as breathing out follows breathing in follows breathing out.

Natural orders were part of my ancestors' lives, until the Great War of 1914-1918 changed the world irrevocably, or at least was the watershed by which we can bookmark those changes. My Great- Great- Grandmother Moore bore 14 children who survived past infancy, nine of whom died alongside her and her husband of some epidemic during the 1870s, one of the many diseases that perennially stalked the marsh which bore them, supported them and took the marsh dwellers back to its squelchy bosom when they died. Other babies died before they were named. As the nature of the naturalness and the nature of the orders changed over the centuries, the resilience and the resignation of the folk closest to the earth appeared to remain much the same. They worshiped at many different shrines over the millennia, but in reality it was the same shrine. They were owned by overlords with different titles over the years, yet fundamentally they were independent of human beings, owned ultimately by the earth.

Her son George survived to marry Elizabeth, who bore 11 children in 13 years. She did not lose one of them until they answered the call to arms and went to smell the earth a short hop from the fields of Kent to the fields of Flanders. Then some of her sons stayed there in the mud , others returned mutilated in mind or body, one or two ploughed a deep and strong furrow into the future but none went back to the Marsh, to the farms. One who survived was Frank, my grandfather. The randomness of fate and survival , who is born and who dies jolts my complacency and ennui.

These are the folk whose names never made it onto carved stone memorials in churches, they are those who are buried in unmarked graves, or graves marked with crude wooden crosses, with Lee Enfield rifles and tin hats, with wildflowers and widow's weeds, a mother's tears ,a sweetheart's despair, or a child's love. They are expendable people, fodder for the cannon, fodder for the Earth.

The same Goddess Earth who ordains which colour crocuses break surface first each year.