Lord High Doggerel

Hey, diddle, dicey, Chancy’s on the town

where some like white bread and some like brown.

If you want it buttered, it’ll meet with a frown

‘cause Chancy heads the money ring, approved by the Crown.

Our Chancellor’s a bonny lad; he’s said to be nice.

You might trust him once, but you wouldn’t trust him twice:

his budget is his cup of tea, some say his nest of lice

breeding easy fleas on the Bank of England mice

who won’t stand down

before they flop and drown

when Chancy floods the town

with his frown.  

We’re glad he’s not in Scotland; too many quotes from Hume

would give a touch of cachet in the face of doom

when he snatches at his lineage, the Lords of Boom,

as the money-pile he’s riding on slides down to the tomb

that’s the economic bust.

Will he lust in the dust,

or will he just rust?

Yes, he must.

Oh, no, he won’t; he’s up again! He’s in his proper place

aside of the Prime Minister, aslant of the Mace,

which he thinks he’s ace at wielding when the EU’s on his case;

he shams a market fight, but needs more to save his face

in the resurrection game.

All’s aflame.

Such is fame.

Shame!

So hey, diddle, fiddle, Chancy’s always round the town,

where some snatch white bread and turn away the brown.

They always have it buttered and ignore every frown

as Chancy tweaks the money ring.

All fall down.

Painted Eggs

 


They nest in a basket,

as whole as Faberge’s toys,

a revolution in colour the children

have painted for Easter.

Voices dictate and one demands to eat

infertile eggs boiled hard as ritual.

Beside the tatters of waste my plates

are crazy tondos, mosaic masters’ palettes,

the chaos of icons stripped from screens

in Petersburg, piled ready to burn.

Now, these three are spending their morning

piecing a picture from shattered shells.

Out of Darkness

 

You have it all, so how do You want

them to be, the children who leap

the cracks in the autumn lanes,

their light calls lifting?

It is different for me.

I tripped skew long ago,

away from their game’s dream:

the ache that time when I learned

how my father was lamed and shambled;

I walk with his aid now.

Why do You wait for the first fall

to ground us, root me now?

You were here before we were,

          You were the one who spoke out light,

          watched the flame stream broad

          to Your reiterant stars, innocent and locked.

          We are expiation: Your need to hear Yourself

          the full worlds through; always

          the words blown out on Your breath.

         

          How we are left to come and go –

          white fire thickened and plunged,

          Father’s favour dancing diamond!

As I said, You have it all.

 

Old Battersea 1

 


This is where I was born: Kersley Mews, Battersea, London, in the middle of WW2. Our house was the one on the left half-painted white. My Grandma Sanders had the house next door, the one with prolific vines now hanging across it. She lived there until she died in the 1980s, but my parents moved to a bigger house soon after my younger brother was born, just beyond the church in the distance and about a hundred yards up to the right, in Bridge Lane.

In those days, Battersea was a working class area; so was the Mews, though there were up-market flats in Cambridge Road, over the back of the Mews to the right in the photo, built between 1850 and 1860. We think that the garages served them, the flanking park-side flats and the Kersley Street houses (the latter are found over the back of the left-hand Mews cottages) with hackney carriages and horses. My father remembered the time when the horses began to disappear and early cars started to take their place.

We’d visit my Grandma at least three times a week. If you look at the first floor of our house, there’s a door, the window of which is a half door. My Grandma had one, too. We think that, originally, part of the upstairs to the garages below was used for storage of food and tackle for the horses; bales and bundles could be lowered down from here on pulleys, rather than be carried downstairs.

By my Grandma’s time, the women in the Mews had those same pulleys strung with ropes between the houses; they were used for hanging out the weekly laundry. God help you if you visited on Monday morning just after the wash was pulleyed across the street! You were likely to get drenched as all the women did their big wash on the same day. If, as very occasionally happened, we had our mid-day meal there that day it was cold meat, bubble-and-squeak and pickles. I loved it, much to my chef mother’s unspoken disgust.

The garages were let out to small businesses after WW1, mostly car repairs, a small metal and welding operation, a cobbler and a couple of market traders who still kept a horse and cart. There was one horse and cart left when I was a child and my Grandma’s old ginger tabby, Billy, the fiend of the street, used to make it his business to go and sit with the stabled horse for at least a couple of hours daily. Only after that would he turn up for food and sleep.

The area, of course, has now been gentrified and the Mews cottages cost a fortune. Some of them have been gutted beyond belief in a race to have modern architects ‘re-design’ the interiors. I remember them having quite small rooms and my Grandma refused to part with the old Victorian cast-iron cooking range in her kitchen – great for toast on a toasting fork in front of a roasting fire after my mother had taken us for a winter’s walk in nearby Battersea Park; not so good for the daily emptying of ashes, cleaning and black-leading of the grate. Ah, well, other times, other ideas, I suppose!

Seemingly, all this reminiscing has nothing to do with poetry. But it does. The poem below, "Provenance," is partly to do with those days.

 

Provenance

Down at that place hung a town after the beginning,
every green a water-sheen on the great plain sliced

by the Thames, Thame, Teme, Time, Ten, even,
of ditchly trickles to a wide gush, a-flush near up-West

and the Great Wen, a now astride the glide,
its straddle wide in a slip to a cold sea tipping:

London, eh, that fort or fart of Lun, or Lud, or Lugh,

or Lan, or Lug, or, at a raven’s rasp, Bran, even Vran, 

where stomping Romans pulled in Paul, hung up his

‘Ding-dong, bong-a-dong’ gongers and gaugers away

from titchy Mary down at the ‘eyes’ and ‘seas’ with her

‘Poll, toll, moll, fol-de-loll’ Monday night ringers and dingers,

she’n me both from Batter’s-eye, Patter’s, Batric’s, Patric’s,

Fattrick’s, a slobber of mud and splatter the wrong side of the

Reach at Chel’s-eye, aye, aye, that isle again where Chil,
or Kil, or Childe, or Kel, or Chal, even, or Rich Chuck Cashshit
hung out his silken drawers up-beach of the old stench,
away from the splodging and graft of the dank poor yonder

and me dropped in the Mews when V2s noodled and doodled
loads overhead that flopped atop the rows where even crows
dared not hang out, corpses charred under beam and brick
and bed bugs dead as rats in cholera time, as safe from
pecking and packing as my old Gran and her chant-a-charm,
'In with a wasting war, out with a score, long sore.'