Ugborough 1870-1930
Peer down the big end of the history-scope,
At the sepia memory-cards from Raphael Tuck.
Add the quick flesh, dusted away long since,
From the County Register's bones.
Peer through the fog of the years
At the faces of forebears long turned away to their God.
The Jubilee Conduit, white and new, stuccoed like sepulchres,
With cast "wrought iron" pinnacle, roughcast, and ogee roof,
Hunches, a squat dwarf, in the dusty square.
Out clank the buckets, with human attachments,
Women who gossip forever in slow Devonian tongue,
While the children whoop and shriek as they play at tig,
And snatch at Tom Tiddler's ground and giggle and gasp.
Deliberate tread of the constable, with firm-placed heel
And curving rolling sole, follows diagonal tracks,
Never quite friendly, never entirely at ease
With a switch in his hand for the unguarded lad
To remind him who's to be boss.
Morning advances; the early cowdabs, flat and slack,
Buzzed over by ginger flies, dry, set, turn up at edges.
Out in the fields the warble flies chew holes in the living hides.
The village of noise is heard. Everywhere buckets,
The creaking of pumps and swish of the standpipes,
New (and so 'andy, my dear!). Hear the zipping of planes;
The sliding of peels in the oven; chop chop
Of the butcher dividing a sheep,
Rhythmical anvil-ding, the wheeze of the bellows
And roar of the coals, the frightened horse dancing;
The hiss of the iron on hoof or in cold water tub.
Hear the creak of the turning ropes in the ropewalk,
Or concerted heave as the smoking tyre drops on the new-made wheel.
Smell cowdung and singeing flesh at the branding,
Or burning of horn and hoof, or sly creeping stench of the sewage,
The hint of yesterday's beer, the triumph of new-made loaves.
Talk to somebody's smile and smell caries and armpits,
Or the gin, the lavender water or pink in the buttonhole.
Everyone smells, that's sure, even if only carbolic.
Run to the milkwoman's door with your jug,
For skimmed milk, and drink it (be quick!) before it goes off.
Keep in the goodness and spit out the flies.
See the envy lurk in the eves of the toddlers
Sent out by the poor with sugarlumps tied in their noserags
To suck till they've walked out of sight.
Racing your leaf-boats down along Lutterburn,
Eat bread- and- cheese plant or nibble the sorrel,
And wait for the time to pass. Till the sky turns dull
And the tolling bell calls a coffin up to the churchyard
To a painful grave hacked out of shillet
To share with the centuries' dead; And that's another one gone.
Polished rice in the stonecracks tells of a wedding,
And howls of babies soon follow, at the cold wet cross on their brows.
Parson, authoritarian, taps out his path with a cane,
Turns, and looks at his flock on a Sunday
Uncertainly drifting to church while bells fill the air with bangs.
Inaccurate trebles breathily slide through the canticles,
Over the confident basses, and the organ's clatter and wheeze,
Pumped by a gangling, giggling, thoughtless hobbledehoy
Who forgets his task at the end of the sleepfilled sermon
(On sin and the subject's duty and the need for additional cash).
The panicking gasps of the bellows fill up the time of line one,
And the vicar glares in unrighteous clerical wrath.
Pennies and buttons fill the accusing offertory bag,
And the sheep shuffle home, relieved to be free,
Totally unsurprised to find that they're unstirred by God.
Three miles through a maze of lanes on Monday to market,
Snorting, squirting and sweating, the cattle unwillingly follow the road.
Boys in oversize caps block lane-ends and gateways,
Cursed by fathers and uncles for faults not their own.
The fatalist auctioneer's monotone tonguetwist
Drags the sale to a close, and the cattle do General Post.
The fields howl with cries of cows for loss of their calves,
And the slaughterhouse crunches as poleaxes strike.
Blood flows in the village from pheasants and fowls,
From rabbits, from sheep and from pigs, for this is the land of the knife.
In the distant silence of farms the cocks slash each other,
And badgers and bulldogs fight for the right to an empty cask.
The aristos curse and shriek as they hound the otters and foxes.
Small boys tear at the birds' nests
And laugh as they stamp on the eggs and chicks.
In cool fascination the little girls watch
As the kittens twitch in the pool in a stone-filled sack.
And so in a narrow world the children mature,
Taught copperplate writing, and scripture, and capes and bays,
Till the time when the capes and bays of the Empire
Will call them and unfilled bellies will drive.
So distance and war will remove the men from the village
And make them no more than names on a grey granite cross.
The spinsters and widows live on, and gossip, and starve,
And go down to respectable deaths
In a village of empty shells.
Now see the blinds drawn down on the windows of shops;
Hear the silence in workrooms
And the fruitless tolling of bells that call the long absent to church.
Poem by J H Newman 1870-1930