Year: 2014

Goff Oil: Seven Breaths

/ The Wombwell Rainbow / Leave a comment

At thirteen, he was lucky

not to be goaded down Goff oil, spithole: steps to cellars outside

in playground lads hawk up spit goff on you laugh at you

Holgate comp black blazer tie pristine he was unlucky to have same name

as Cock of school so gangs would face him, one lad poking him in chest

 ‘Cock of School, cock of School’, till stepping back he fell backwards over gang lad crouched down onto wet, damp gravel to their echoing laughter.

At Sixteen listened to Led Zep, Rush at their houses now he was sat at front of class while teacher out of room they threw screwed up paper, pens, rubbers, board rubbers at him

via WordPress for Phone http://goo.gl/j6Fzhf

Reinvent Remains

/ The Wombwell Rainbow / Leave a comment

Reinvent remains.
As Security Guard
protect valuable rust, walk redundant coal Washers
who’s decaying steel Washers frame a site a village.
observatory to some guards,
ancient paths across compound.
bomb sites after a war, wpid-img_20140428_100650.jpg
adventure playground’ for kids throw stones at unused Washers. A guard shouts ‘Oi! Bugger off.’
Accuses them making wasteland useful
An art gallery: artists,
photograph pencil record outline, display remains. wpid-img_20140428_100603.jpg
pits filled in.
Soon bulldozers remove inappropriate make an industrial estate.
spoilheap remains
invented as an ordinary hill. Every year while it grew
ancient footpaths raised.
Redundant miners and their dogs haul upwards now stare down at flatroofed units
potential industry.

via WordPress for Phone http://goo.gl/j6Fzhf

Family Historian (Author Unknown)

/ The Wombwell Rainbow / Leave a comment

We are the chosen. In each family there is one who seems called to find the ancestors. To put flesh on their bones and make them live again. To tell the family story and to feel that somehow they know and approve.

Doing genealogy is not a cold gathering of facts but, instead, breathing life into all who have gone before. We are the story tellers of the tribe. All tribes have one. We have been called, as it were, by our genes. Those who have gone before cry out to us: “Tell our story”. So, we do.

In finding them, we somehow find ourselves. How many graves have I stood before now and cried? I have lost count. How many times have I told the ancestors, “You have a wonderful family; you would be proud of us.” How many times have I walked up to a grave and felt somehow there was love there for me? I cannot say.

It goes beyond just documenting facts. It goes to who am I and why do I do the things I do. It goes to seeing a
cemetery about to be lost forever to weeds and indifference and saying I can’t let this happen. The bones here are bones of my bone and flesh of my flesh. It goes to doing something about it. It goes to pride in what our ancestors were able to accomplish. How they contributed to what we are today. It goes to respecting their hardships and losses, their never giving in or giving up, their resoluteness to go on and build a life for their family. It goes to deep pride that the fathers fought, and some died, to make and keep us a nation. It goes to a deep and immense understanding that they were doing it for us.

It is of equal pride and love that our mothers struggled to give us birth, without them we could not exist, and so we love each one, as far back as we can reach. That we might be born who we are. That we might remember them. So we do. With love and caring and scribing each fact of their existence, because we are they and they are the sum of who we are.

So, as a scribe called, I tell the story of my family. It is up to that one called in the next generation to answer the call and take my place in the long line of family storytellers. That is why I do my family genealogy, and that is what calls those young and old to step up and restore the memory or greet those who we had never known before.”

Author: Unknown

via WordPress for Phone http://goo.gl/j6Fzhf

Clock

/ The Wombwell Rainbow / Leave a comment

Once it took a regular twelve hour shift to walk around with a clock in Grimethorpe.
A low paid security guard of N.U.M. remains: ripped floor-tiling, dust piling up like unused coal.
You had to find the key to fit the clock to record the time you found the key to account for your existence, the evidence collected.
A set of other keys echoing their jangle into empty spaces unlocking the door out to a wasteland of rooms without walls or ceilings
so you could see a cold October sky abuzz with stars and the coke plant behind its steel fence working up a head of grind and industrial lights.
You had nowt to do but waste your time, kick up weather worn tiles of old floors, to look forward to going in, losing the fresh air from the plant, to climb creaking stairs and reenter
the security guards room where Bill ogles Mayfair and the unattainableJasks why you’re back so early, didn’t you realise soon as you get back sooner he’s out
call you ‘Dumb Shit’, take the clock and keys and leave you to the room at Three o’clock. His tales of the steel industry that let him go will remain with you .
.
You will remember this as you sit supping coffee in the Grimethorpe Activity Zone, as you wait for people to attend your jobsearch room, as you listen how the building you guarded will be called the heart of the Village.

via WordPress for Phone http://goo.gl/j6Fzhf

The Barnsley Writer Gander

/ The Wombwell Rainbow / Leave a comment

‘ the person who assiduously endeavours to become a good poet, cannot do otherwise than become an elegant and accomplished scholar’

John Burland, a Barnsley Chartist teacher, poet and journalist.

An occasional blog on Barnsley writers from 19th century to today. Barnsley has a notable writing history. It was one of two towns to produce the earliest dialect Almanack. It produced a few commemorative poets who supported their local area. Barnsley has John Arden, Barry Hines, Donald Davie, Ian McMillan, Andrew McMillan, Joanne Harris, Milly Johnson. I will be looking at each in turn, not in a dry, academic fashion. My views are solely mine. I want to see what each writer has to say about the town and its characters. Perhaps, discover common threads, that run like the linen industry through their words. I will be looking at usual suspects: Barry Hines, Kes, John Ardens ‘The Workhouse Donkey’, Donald Davies ‘The Wind At Penistone’, @ImcMillans ‘The Er Barnsley Seascapes’ and a few you may never have read

As with all towns and cities in the Nineteenth century Barnsley underwent great changes. Moving from a major linen weaving town to a mining one. The Barnsley writers of the day reflected this.

The Childhood Tree

/ The Wombwell Rainbow / Leave a comment

Age makes a difference

he says, remembering when their posse went too far with an old tree.

Posse were a gang called after U. S. Rappers who took it from cowboy films.

Posse found it down Lovers Lane, overarching the canal: too full to flow ancient bedsteads, glossy wheel trims.

Over a fag scratched their names

in its bark, shinned and slung a rope round a branch overreaching the water

competitions seeing who dare swing furthest without getting wet.

Then fatty had a go. Expected happened, limb snapped

 

told his mother he’d slipped in a puddle when we’d a drought a week.

Later, some of them, like him and wife courting down canal, would boast these cracks. Even then looked sorry for itself. All wrinkly and scabby wounds.

 Still, some of them, sap bleeding allover, hacked their names

 ‘LUV’

imbetween or arrow through heart.
 
Then fatty Wayne overreached

with a joyride. Took
collectors Chevvy dumped, set it alight.

 Bugger had it too close!

 angry now.

His childhood tree went up.

Lately, him and wife, take steady strolls by water find younger couples carving Lovers hearts in wood remains.

via WordPress for Phone http://goo.gl/j6Fzhf

Industrial lights

/ The Wombwell Rainbow / Leave a comment

are going out all over as I stand on one side of the Dearne and look over to where I patrolled the night before.
North Gawber colliery on the one side, Amco plant on the other. Where the lights are less I can see the other.
Tall concrete and steel warehouses, night workers. Unlike mine repair shops you can hardly hear their hammers and their welding on your walk outside, for another hour and a half, before a twenty minute break: get your coat off, note time of arrival, pray it’s not a dodgy biro,e quick slurp from your flask before out again to renew intimacy with Siberian cold.wpid-img_20140428_100616.jpg

 

The winter evening before stood sentry on the frozen cracked concrete edge of North Gawber pit I saw Willow bank , the only known site in South Yorkshire for plants with the weird names Frogbit and Whorled WaterMillfoil fall away to the Dearne.

Remains of old forest flank flow of river and misused canal where barges once unloaded prosperity, loaded hope to move away.

What did you know of history then? Wished you knew how to make go faster shifts.

And at night at Amco on the other side you walk along calm as owt, moan what a boring job this is, goalrake odd stones and wham! an industrial light half blinds.
Like a concentration camp searchlight snapped on you’ve been caught escaping, sirens go off and others are woken from sleep and all the massive orange plant, motorway builders still as museum dinosaur bones, stare at you, their metal darknesses deeper
and hear gust shake chains on their fuel tanks whip up shallow gravel round empty temporary huts, echo off discarded plastic wrapping.

via WordPress for Phone http://goo.gl/j6Fzhf

The Rules for Occupation

/ The Wombwell Rainbow / Leave a comment

The rules for occupation: take the military road across the river.

The long stride over flood plain to the other side.

Divide the spoils of the valley into three wapentakes, Three bureaucracies to sort and file your differences.

Unhindered supply lines will provide the frontier: the wall between decency and those that smell.

Roads will provide fast delivery of goods and policing. It is a better surface, for occupation.

 Stories half told, half received.

 Other roads not fully travelled not the recommended destination, but bad precedent.

It will be difficult for the natives

to utter ‘Never again’.

Remember victors decide the doctrine, creed, authorised version.

Alternative histories should always be considered after the camber

of the original and, if possible, absorbed. After all, every home

should have its’ midden. A place to offload the waste of decency.

 Dearne can be allowed uncontrollability within limits decided by our history.

A river can always be drained to provide improved delivery by our convoys.

The Route is decided. No deviation,

 use the terrain with respect to our aims objectives.

Aim: Exploitation

Objective: all the areas resources,

soft and hard targets.

 

via WordPress for Phone http://goo.gl/j6Fzhf

Above

/ The Wombwell Rainbow / Leave a comment

Dearne
rise Coal-age forts in new grass

Grass, new arrival, begins belong, is removed.

 

New buildings rise
locally known as Employment.

Before grass there was grass
growing on clay, above ancient forests.
Grass for long-horned cattle provide milk, meat
to calloused hands.

Quiet Dearne flowed slowly by.

Purchased grass removed
by miners who dig their own graves leaving soil at pitside.

Their own graves built Coal-age forts.
Purchased grass turns yellow
under canvas tents,then is removed for a line of houses all the same.

Miners provide bread family.
Their own grave they dig in shifts with calloused hands.It is hell.

Hell provides for children, housekeeping, gossip, rumour stories.

Hell fills lungs, cakes faces. Hell built Coal-age forts. Hell lives behind redundant eyes.

After funeral, Hell grassed over water clouded.

 

Ochre, iron
spill into Dearne as Dearne flows. inoffensively, by.

via WordPress for Phone http://goo.gl/j6Fzhf

Buried Treasure (1983, revised 2014)

/ The Wombwell Rainbow / Leave a comment

Industry left these hands again, circumstance marooned me here
to endure workhouse stain
accused of idleness.

In damp cellar I worked a loom,
bailing water three times a day,
candles to enlighten gloom
learn from books at my side.

Tiny window for light and air.
Water dropped from eaves.
No drain but my window there.
I did as I was due.

My creed as skilled fancy-weaver
“Give me not poverty, lest I steal.”
Now I bring up blood like fever
do penance in a workhouse.

Too many times the Ship of Linen
has left me like Crusoe castaway
to return God knows how or when.
I thought it I was my  sin.

Workhouse always reproves.
I lose my dignity ;
strip, search, old clothes
in fire, locking of the door.

Barnsleys Improvement Commission promises paved streets, clean water, drainage and sewerage system,
the rich do what they will.

When I get out it’s mine.
Some dying have the gall
To speak of  buried treasure,

Of gold beyond this wall

Barnsley General Hospital was built on the site of the Union Workhouse

via WordPress for Phone http://goo.gl/j6Fzhf