WHERE WERE YOU subtitled What were you doing on?

        They joy of writing poetry is that you never know when a poem is going to come along demanding to be written.The following poem was written over twenty years after the event it describes and I have no idea as to why the seed suddenly grew,as it was written nowhere near the anniversary of the tragic event in question.It first appeared in my second collection of poetry"DEAR TOM". Published in 1988 when I was writing pieces which have now been published in "THE FARMHOUSE  TREE."

     Now seems a suitable time to let it see the light of day again.

            WHERE WERE YOU?  subtitled WHAT WERE YOU DOING ON..........?

I was standing by one of the refectory tables,

"Sanctify O Lord this food to our use,

And us to Thy service for Jesus Christ's sake.Amen"

My mind wandering as it always did through grace.

Will I look old enough to get into the pub?

Will my girlfriend?

Will Utd win their match?

Will it be orange squash or lemonade?

Will the sandwich filling be meat paste or marmite?

Please don't let it be anchovy.

Most importantly will there be cream buns?

I remember the housemaster standing by the door.

Usually he couldn't wait to leave the dining hall,

But that night he  continued to stand there fidgeting

And fiddling with the buttons on his jacket cuff

Before making his announcement.And all of us wanting to eat.

Through the door a glimpse of the food trolley.

Row upon row of green and blue plastic beakers.

And are those buns on the bottom tier of the trolley?

Perhaps there'll be seconds.I love cream buns.

".....,.President Kennedy has been assassinated!......"

Today I cannot even remember the date,

The day,not even the month,not even the year?

But I do remember there  were cream buns,

And seconds which nobody wanted.

SPRING RITUAL A POEM WHICH BECAME PROSE IN THE FARMHOUSE TREE.

                                     SPRING RITUAL.

Quite a few  of the prose pieces began life as poems when I went around the country from Lands End to Cumbria giving poetry and prose readings.Not quite the other end of the country! I thought readers who have bought my book might like to see the original pieces.

     This one is a memory of baking and bouquet days when I was a little tacker! Jealous of the attention mum and dad were giving each other.This inspiration the picture it conjured up was used by MARTIN HESP when he did his superb article in the WMN one Saturday back in September.

                                                 SPRING RITUAL.

The lane was a boundary line

Over which I was not allowed to cross.

An ancient track between two tracts of land,

Our fields and a neighbour's field and copse.

In the hawthorn hedge a tangle of bracken stalks,

Woken by the vibration of hoof on stone

A sunlit slumber of basking  slow worms  slithering

Away from the lumbering-echo-creak of ash and iron.

White sweet violets in a secret single clump. 

"Whoa boy!You sit there and hold the reins."

His rough fingers  fumbling with the short stems,

Head bent,drinking the perfume in deep gulps.

In the kitchen the aroma of potato cakes and buns,

A tiny bouquet  on the black oil cloth.

A wrap around embrace of overalls and apron,

A small shape thrusting against the boundary.

Flour-fleck-petals floating down on my tousled head;

In the hawthorn hedge a gentle stirring in the grass.

Information from back cover of THE farmhouse

From the back cover of THE FARMHOUSE  TREE:

Memories of a farming childhood without electricity,when gran's five-pound-note Christmas present would buy almost half a mile of liquorice bootlaces over ten thousand aniseed balls,three hundred Mars bars or weekly copies of the Dandy and Beano for eleven years!

   A time of village characters charming warts,knocking in fence posts with a clenched fist,cutting a Christmas cake with a mallet and chisel!eating cheese with maggots in and requesting  a baked sparrow pie.

   A time  of sex education on bullpen and field  and when a pig's bladder made a super football.

    A time when an aged maiden aunt knew everything cost an arm and a leg,money didn't grow on trees,the love of it was the root of all evil and curiosity killed the cat........

THE FARMHOUSE TREE.

The FARMHOUSE TREE is published this Friday 25th October by Jayde Design Publishing.It can be ordered from any bookshop..the ISBN NUMBER is978-0-9575764-1-4.It costs £12.99.

     It can also be ordered direct from the publisher by sending a cheque for £12.99 made out to Jayde Design and sent to JAYDE DESIGN,21 HONOR OAK ROAD,HONOR OAK LONDON. SE23  3SH.

    The price includes postage and packaging and is the same as the shop price.

           

     The book  has taken 36/7 years from the beginnings to the completion.it has been a labour of love and tells the story of a 1950's childhood in the small North Devon village of East Knowstone.   It has been a painful book to write in places,but the finished version includes humor,sadness and pathos.Some of the pieces have appeared in the Western Morning News,the local daily of the paper of the  West country.These pieces have been extended and there are many unpublished pieces.

     Philip Bowen Head of Content on the paper has written the foreword,and the esteemed  novelist Michael Moorcock has provided the introduction.

      There are 210 pages and photos from my childhood.I would like to blog more frequently but running a one and a quarter wild life garden with six award winning garden ponds takes up a fair bit of time when I'm not writing my Country notebooks  and page articles for the WMNEWS.Look out for my article on 30thOctober on BAMPTON FAIR from my 1950s childhood with its freak shows.....Tattooed Lady,Snake Lady,RAT LADY and THE MIDGET HIGHWAY MAN.

   Another blog again soon.

HOBNAIL BOOTS PART TWO

One January night the first snowfall of winter,in a blizzard-blitz unheralded,bombarded my farmhouse tree coating the courts and fields in its cold white mantle.In the morning we went to the corrugated iron roofed hayshed,tar-coated in July by summer visiting gipsies  encamped on moorland where villagers held commoner's grazing rights.

      Watching him kneel and with his iron hay-knife,the blade fifteen inches long,honed to a silver sharpness,slice out a wedge of summer with which to feed his five Red Ruby steers.Watching his shoulders heave and shudder with the strain,hands plunging the blade deep into the stack releasing the scent of sun filled summer days.In a blast the sweet intoxicating aroma awakening memories of tossing grass stalks high into the air,of turning cartwheels and rolling in the windrows raked ready for the sweep.

       And all through the harvest  his hobnails tramping forward,turn and back again.Turn,forward and back again.

         The summer bundle roped and carried on his back.Trudging through snow to the middle of the mead to stock haughty with a head toss of impatience.Half stumbling by his side,eager to keep up.Small impressions of my Wellington boots almost level with his prints.

        The cattle fed,we turn and head for home.Carrying me piggy- back.Almost losing his balance with the exertion and my weight.Dropping me into the stack,breathless.With a laugh his finger pointing at two sets of footprints outward bound,but only one set returning.

         For several weeks after his death the hobnails remained in a corner on the stone flag floor inside the door where he had cast them off that afternoon.When last we'd stepped out together,I covered and filled his prints in the mud,but I could never fill his boots.Always the follower,never the farmer.

THE PAIR OF HOBNAIL BOOTS.

My father was the custodian of my farmhouse tree.He was born in it and he died in itDuring the sixty two years he was only away from his own bed for seven nights,when he was away on his honeymoon.

     He was a gentle man finding beauty in the flowers and birds of the hedgerow.The following piece is about his hobnail boots and is in two parts.Part one today.Part two next time.

                                                   HOBNAIL BOOTS...PART ONE.

Inside the farmhouse tree back door,crafted in the carpenter and wheelwright's shop,seldom bolted with the iron bar forged in the smithy; both buildings opposite front court,a pair of boots.Leather hobnails soled with studs carefully tapped in to form a pattern plus iron toe pieces and horseshoe iron heels.Leather protected by the coats of dubbin regularly applied-wax,oil and tallow to water- proof and soften.

      To make me chuckle with delight,he'd perform his party piece.Striking his heel on back kitchen stone flag floor,careful not to slip and slide; sparks in a shower- spit of tiny petal flames.

       Leather laces looped through eyelets.An old one saved,his fingers knotting and threading it through a conker,the hole bradawl bored.Oven baked for the playground championships.

        Marching along the road.The two of us playing at soldiers.Chest out.Shoulders back.Swing those arms.Left,right,left,right.His boots clicking out the rhythm.The Sargent major leading from the front.Left,right,left,right.Squaaaad halt.Stand at ease.Stand easy.

       Through the gate into Lower Orchard where cider apples grew on lichen coated branches bowed down by weight and age.Filling hessian sacks,stored overnight in the stone built primitive pig sty.Stacking them against tree trunks to be carted back to the pound house in the afternoon.

           Striding through lank tussocks,his legs a pair of geometrical dividers,his hob nails leaving indentations into which I placed my sandalled feet.Step out,pull up the other foot.In sunlight razor- sharp,the robin's autumn song serenading the footsteps of the follower as the two campaigners return to their base camp.

THE FARMHOUSE TREE.

Many years ago,more than I care to remember I was a little tacker on a North Devon farm in a little village called East Knowstone.The next village,a mile away...Knowstone,was known as "town" because it had a pub,church,chapel and a village shop.

      I called my farm THE FARMHOUSE TREE because it was as old as an oak tree and the rooms and outbuildings were the branches.No electricity.No mains drainage.No mains water.Water pumped up in back kitchen from a spring in Higher Orchard field,crystal clear and ice-cold.Brought to the farmhouse tree through hundreds of yards of lead pipe,laid in the early part of the 1900s.

    I lived in my farmhouse tree with my mum,dad,aged maiden aunt and two imaginary friends Jim and Derek.And of course the shire horse Charlie,the power behind the farm.I had a great life in a time which  has stayed with me ever since and which I now attempt to recapture in my writing for the local paper the WESTERN MORNING NEWS  which covers the whole of the South West of England.TOBE CONTINUED.....