The Lost Souls of Great Rissington

Tags

Fry's Five Boys chocolate, Great Barrington, Great Rissington, Lest We Forget, quatrain, Remembrance Day, shrapnel, St John Baptist church, villanelle, Windrush, World War1

Photo by Candia Dixon- Stuart

A re-blog from 5/11/16

 

I visited the church today as I wanted to somehow commemorate five

brothers who were all killed in World War 1.  Their youngest brother-

Percy Soul- died of meningitis after the war.  He was the sixth son.

Apparently some villagers were annoyed that Mrs Soul received financial

‘compensation’ for her five sons’ deaths in service.

Unbelievable!

Later she moved to Great Barrington.  She had three daughters who must

have been traumatised by the loss of their brothers.

I kept thinking of Fry’s Five Boys chocolate, for some reason and I checked

that it was in production when the boys were young.  It was.  I hope they

were able to enjoy this childish luxury as they ran around the fields,

scratching their names on the beams of a barn.  Maybe not, if they were

relatively poor.

(Photo by Kim Traynor, 2013.  Own work of enamel sign.)

It was freezing cold today.  Inside there were wall monuments to others

who had died – centuries before.  One girl had only been 19 when she

expired.

There was a little trapped wren inside and an aspiring organist who

arrived for a practice.  I don’t know how he could have attempted to play

with cold hands!

Anyway, I went home and thought I’d try a villanelle.  The rhymes are

limited, but there are 5 tercets- one for each brother, maybe.  It ends with

a quatrain, where the rhyme feels a bit anti-climactic.  But then, maybe it

suits the content… All ready for Remembrance Day.  Let’s Not Forget.

The Lost Souls of Great Rissington

So, she wouldn’t stand for God Save The King,

though all five sons lay down for him and died.

For each life she pocketed a shilling.

The candle in her window kept burning,

watched by a girl who’d never be a bride.

And a mother and three sisters crying

was no salve for the sharpness of Death’s sting.

Over the cow-common, The Windrush sighed

and, in a drawer, telegrams were yellowing.

The candle guttered- a Soul was leaving.

The Roll up yonder couldn’t be denied.

No bugler registered this sibling.

In a village barn there is a carving-

names of hopeful lads which emphasised

desires for immortality.  Living

in a peaceful hamlet?  No, perishing-

even a twin had no one at his side.

While some entrenched neighbours were gossiping,

lethal as shrapnel and more exacting.

(St John the Baptist Church, Great Rissington

Photo by Jonathan Billinger, 2007)

Local Hero

Tags

9th Dunbartonshire, Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, Blighty wound, Clyde, Clydebank, gas attack, Kilpatrick, King's Shilling, Picardy, shrapnel, Titan Crane, Wilfred Pip Squeak, Ypres

Robert- gassed at Ypres.  Lived to 90s

Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders

My hero.

 

Photo- Stephen Sweeney.  Titan crane

 

The trench gaped to receive him at last,

over seventy years since he’d escaped its maw

at Ypres.  Other bombshells had been cast:

his daughter’s death at four; her hair as straw-

hued as bales bedded in Picardy barns.

She’d waited for him in the nether tier,

between the pewter Clyde; Kilpatrick tarns –

close to where he’d toiled as an engineer,

in ruts of rusty shipyards, hail or thaw.

 

I stroked Wilfred, Pip, Squeak in childish awe;

loved the sepia photo of Five Bobs;

marvelled that only one of them came back

to supplement the King’s shilling with jobs,

where the main goal was to avoid ‘the sack.’

It was little better than digging graves.

I used to ask him how he’d survived the gas.

He said he’d run away from its green waves.

I asked him to recount how lads would burn, en masse,

lice from their tunic seams with candle flame,

until they heard shells crack.  Then and I unrolled

his trouser leg, amazed he was not lame,

with that lump of shrapnel, which was pure gold,

as a Blighty wound, taking him away

from the Front line, to Palestine.

 

The cranes, his guard of honour, now gone too.

 

 

.

 

 

The Lost Souls of Great Rissington

Tags

Fry's Five Boys, Great Barrington, Great Rissington, Percy Soul, quatrain, Remembrance, Roll Up Yonder, shrapnel, tercet, villanelle, Windrush, World War 1

A re-blog from Sat., Nov 5th last year.

 

(Photo by Jonathan Billinger, 2007.  St John the Baptist Church, Great Rissington; Wikimedia Commons)

 

I visited the church today as I wanted to somehow commemorate five

brothers who were all killed in World War 1.  Their youngest brother-

Percy Soul- died of meningitis after the war.  He was the sixth son.

Apparently some villagers were annoyed that Mrs Soul received financial

‘compensation’ for her five sons’ deaths in service.

Unbelievable!

Later she moved to Great Barrington.  She had three daughters who must

have been traumatised by the loss of their brothers.

I kept thinking of Fry’s Five Boys chocolate, for some reason and I checked

that it was in production when the boys were young.  It was.  I hope they

were able to enjoy this childish luxury as they ran around the fields,

scratching their names on the beams of a barn.  Maybe not, if they were

relatively poor.

(Photo by Kim Traynor, 2013.  Own work of enamel sign.)

It was freezing cold today.  Inside there were wall monuments to others

who had died – centuries before.  One girl had only been 19 when she

expired.

There was a little trapped wren inside and an aspiring organist who

arrived for a practice.  I don’t know how he could have attempted to play

with cold hands!

Anyway, I went home and thought I’d try a villanelle.  The rhymes are

limited, but there are 5 tercets- one for each brother, maybe.  It ends with

a quatrain, where the rhyme feels a bit anti-climactic.  But then, maybe it

suits the content… All ready for Remembrance Day.  Let’s Not Forget.

 

The Lost Souls of Great Rissington

So, she wouldn’t stand for God Save The King,

though all five sons lay down for him and died.

For each life she pocketed a shilling.

The candle in her window kept burning,

watched by a girl who’d never be a bride.

And a mother and three sisters crying

was no salve for the sharpness of Death’s sting.

Over the cow-common, The Windrush sighed

and, in a drawer, telegrams were yellowing.

The candle guttered- a Soul was leaving.

The Roll Up Yonder couldn’t be denied.

No bugler registered this sibling.

In a village barn there is a carving-

names of hopeful lads which emphasised

desires for immortality.  Living

in a peaceful hamlet?  No, perishing-

even a twin had no one at his side.

While some entrenched neighbours were gossiping,

lethal as shrapnel and more exacting.

(St John the Baptist Church, Great Rissington

Photo by Jonathan Billinger, 2007)

Advertisements

Occasionally, some of your visitors may see an advertisement here
You can hide these ads completely by upgrading to one of our paid plans.

Upgrade now Dismiss message

Evil Couplings

Tags

Blackburn, counterclockwise, Dangerous Woman, DNA, dockyard confetti, etymology, evil coupling, flange, gimlet, internal fixation, Jahannam, jam, Man United, Manchester, Manchester Arena, Mancunian, nuts and bolts, Ormskirk, Preston, retronym, Rochdale, Salford, Salman, screw loose, shrapnel, suicide bomber

(Manchester Arena: Image by Pitt-yacker at

Wikipedia)

 

In Hope Street they manufacture nuts, bolts…

The company is even called ‘Nail It.‘

(Man United usually does just that.)

Salford, Manchester, Blackburn, Ormskirk,

Rochdale, Preston – all ‘nuts and bolts‘ places.

Their people are frank and they don’t quibble

over distinctions between flange and jam.

They vote ‘righty-tighty; lefty loosey.‘

At weddings there’s no ‘dockyard confetti‘

and shrapnel is small change in a pocket.

They know their hardware inside out and don’t

excuse idiots who have a screw loose.

They expect ‘Salman’ to mean a ‘blessing’:

that’s what the etymology suggests.

But they can differentiate as well –

‘Dangerous Woman‘ is just a concert

and not a female suicide bomber.

When someone with internal fixation

and tensioned beyond proof starts to behave

in a counterclockwise manner, they know

that it’s not about connection, coupling,

conjunction.

But they had no time to crack

a nut who suddenly raised his own head;

someone whose helical rage respected

no one else’s DNA – who spiralled –

blasted into Jahannam’s lowest pit,

not in a blaze of glory, but in shards

of eye, shoulder, thumb, rib neck and hex bolts.

‘Human being‘ needs a modifier.

We need to qualify with retronyms:

‘compassionate‘, ‘decent‘ or ‘evil,’

for we no longer know what is ‘human‘-

neither do straight-forward Mancunians.

Yet their gimlet eyes saw glimmers of it

in the selflessness of those who helped them.