Tag Archives: Hampshire

New Release

04 Saturday Jun 2016

Posted by in Literature, Poetry, Writing

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Its Own Place Cover

Dixon-Stuart books have just made this anthology available on Amazon.

Candia thoroughly recommends this insightful read to all her followers.

The mind is its own place, and in itself

Can make a Heaven of Hell,

A Hell of Heaven…

John Milton: Paradise Lost, Bk 1.

 

 

All Saints, Steep Good Friday

29 Sunday Mar 2015

Posted by in Arts, History, Literature, Poetry, Religion

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All Saints, Steep

Another re-blog as it is the same season…

Brassie and I set out one sunny afternoon last week,

to savour the fresh air and to visit Steep Church with its

memorial windows to Edward Thomas, the poet.

Imagine our shock at finding one of the exquisite little panes

shattered by vandals-apparently some time ago.

It made me return to my online file and I managed to find

a poem written about these works of art several Springs

ago.

Let me share it with you:

ALL SAINTS’ CHURCH, STEEP-GOOD FRIDAY

It is steep, but we find it after all

with memorial tablet on the wall,

listing old choirboys – Cranstone, Applebee,

whose treble piping trills continually

in shrill birdsong. Death’s head kneelers proclaim

memento mori. We don’t forget name,

or words from the believer whose etched glass

invites us to see less darkly, to pass

through the pain, through the pane, beyond the moss

of an Easter garden, with central cross,

till our gaze follows glaze to Downs and sky,

clouded momentarily by the sigh

of some Hampshire widow, for whom the coat

on washing line; the unsmoked pipe denote

an absent man and yet a spirit nigh,

the daffodils bugling in Reveille.

Thwarted Ambition

23 Tuesday Oct 2012

Posted by in History, Poetry, Social Comment

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Whitchurch Silk Mill

Whitchurch Silk Mill (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Back to Candia and her expressions of thwarted ambition.  Some years ago she and a friend- not Brassica, Carissima or Chlamydia- went to the silk mill at Whitchurch in Hampshire and be-moaned their sacrificed careers.  Her friend had been brought up against a backdrop of weavers and the cotton industry and Candia- perhaps surprising to some who know her- also had childhood experience of living among those who served in factories and the shipbuilding industry.  Lord Denning had also worked his way up in society, to live in the rarefied (?) village where the mill is situated. Though we moaned about what we could have achieved, we thought that we had come quite a distance, courtesy of our education.

WHITCHURCH SILK MILL

(THE TEA ROOM)

No mulberries, no worms, visible bolls.

This is the factory that supplies

those who take silk, like Master of the Rolls,

local Lord Denning and those who can rise

above their circumstances.  We haven’t.

Somehow the rapid mill race passed us by;

we failed life’s test.  So, now we sit, lament

lost law careers, trying to work out why

the Fates have tangled our life threads, greased yarn

of domesticity, snarled warp, woof

and pirned the weft to create our pattern.

Sitting among redundant looms, the roof

low overhead, our conversation weaves,

shuttles back and forth; our run-of-the-mill

cocooned existence slubbed.  This achieves

little.  And yet the vibrant daffodils

on the riverbank are so glorious

that they elevate despondent mood

oppressed by term time’s laborious

routine, family worries, motherhood.

We’re not chained to the bench: we leave by car;

though working class, we have left industry-

two northern lasses who have come quite far,

should we review family history.

We take for granted cotton, silk and wool

(which used to take two hours to spin a yard).

We escaped the tyranny of the spool

and heave no bales.  Our lives are not so hard.

English: Whitchurch - Silk Mill This is one of...

English: Whitchurch – Silk Mill This is one of the weaving rooms inside the Whitchurch silk mill. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)