Millbank

Mill Bank

At last the water flows to Abbey Mill.

It is summer.

Early in the morning an apricot sky

Greets the new day..

Mist rises from the Severn Ham.

The sun’s disc rises to reveal

Morning Mill Bank. 

Flowers open and Mill Bank prepares for another day of visitors.

For Mill Bank is pretty,

Amazingly pretty.

When Mill Bank was first built, 

The random roof lines weren’t for tourists,

People just wanted some shelter from rain,

And warmth from the chill of a cold winter’s night.

But the cottages are beautiful!

Artlessly, accidentally, built into artful shapes.

Today, in the warmth of the sun, they bask in loveliness,

Their innocent beauty is wrought from the labour of long-forgotten men.

Built by artisans, not architects,

They created this picturesque row.

On summer mornings such as this,

Flowers delight the outsides of the cottages.

Poppies and daisies and baskets of flowers

Adorn Mill Bank.

The Alleys and Courts

The Alleys and Courts

In Tewkesbury when the rain comes down, 

Floods sometimes flow up into town.

There’s a tiny risk that you might drown.

The three main streets are on less low land,

So the houses on the streets are dry.

Small cottages were built 

Behind the houses on the streets,

So the cottages stayed dry.

Ways  to the street from the cottages are “Courts”

Some of the Courts join the streets at both ends.

These passages linking the streets are called  “Alleys”.

They’re too narrow for horses; we walk single  file,

The sounds of our footsteps are heard all the while,

As we pass down dark passages which go back for years; 

We travel through time back to Mediaeval years.

My Uncle Tom

My  Uncle Tom

My Uncle Tom worked in a shoe shop called Frisby’s, 

Which is thirty feet from the Cross.

He fitted boots for all sorts of feet.

That was his job and he was good at it.

By 1916 he wore Army boots

In the Royal Field Artillery.

While he drove along the banks of the Somme.

Could the pale blue sky and the white hoar frost

Remind him of the January Avon?

He drove his ammunition cart, full, to the Line.

That was his job and he was good at it .

The last thing he heard was a faraway gun.

His comrades buried him with due honour.

In less than a year when the Germans drew near,

A shell cratered the grave of Uncle Tom.

His remains were scattered on the banks of the Somme.

But his name is carved on the Tewkesbury Cross,

About thirty feet from Frisby’s

Tewkesbury Poems

Start of another book?

I've been playing around with another book about Tewkesbury.  This one will have some poems in as well as some photos.  I'd love some feedback on whether you think they work or not.

The Severn Ham

Soil, Silt, and Sand

From Central England

Borne by rivers formed by rain and snow.

Each year the waters overflow,

and grasses grow, on the soil, silt and sand 

This land they call “The Severn Ham”.

It’s quiet on the Ham, away from the town.

Buttercups bob in the balmy breeze. 

You can hear that breeze in the mowing grass,

 The grass where  lovers sigh, crows caw, and plovers dance.

Three Rivers meet at the Severn Ham:

The Severn smells of the sea at high tide,

and the silver leaps of the salmon. 

The Swilgate Brook which brooked an army over five centuries gone,

no longer smells of blood.

The sleepy Avon lined with Brummy anglers,

Smells of coarse fish, the wriggle of eels and elvers,

And sleepy, summery, Midland towns.

Tewkesbury lies flat as the horizon,

only broken by the Abbey tower.

I feel totally gutted -please read :( A very brave soldier

Henry John Waylen was my grandmother's brother in law.  He was a gardener.  In 1914 at the outbreak of the first world war, he was sent to the Western Front. with his local Regiment, the Glosters . After a year or so, he was transferred to the Greek front line at Salonika fighting the Ottomans.  In 1916 he was sent home with TB and he died in his early thirties in 1917 in the same week as his father.  His mother died in the same year as well. 

He was honoured to be given a military headstone,(it only took a hundred and one years to do it!)  and one of my friends agreed to be present at the installation.  I couldn't go for two reasons.  I live in Australia, and the Commonwealth War Graves Commission didn't tell me - they just sent me an email.

It's no big deal, but I would love a decent picture of his headstone, and as he was a gardener, I am sure he would have appreciated it if you could leave a flower on his grave to show he is not forgotten,

Like millions of other soldiers, he would have gone through unimaginable experiences and been scared witless,day after day.

So if you happen to be near Tewkesbury Cemetery, please, if you can, put a flower from your garden on his grave on my behalf.

He deserves so much more than a bare tombstone and an email.

Thanks.

John

If you are not Australian, but want to visit us “down under”, here are a few pieces of information that may stand you in good stead.

First of all, don’t call Oz and NZ “down under”.  You wouldn’t like to be called “up over”.

Because we live on the opposite side of our planet, the Earth appears to spin in the opposite direction to the northern hemisphere.  This has the effect of apparently making the stars and the moon appear to be upside down.   The sun still rises in the east and sets in the west, but it travels via the north, not the south.  This makes our sun travel anticlockwise.  This may disorient you to start with.  We have our galaxy on our side of the planet so that on a clear night you will see far more stars than in the northern hemisphere.  There is a constellation called Crux Australis.  This is not Latin for “Australian Crooks”, but rather “Southern Cross”.  And yes, the water does go down the plughole in the opposite direction, but please don’t try it during a drought.

In a Linnean species name, it is unfortunate that “australis” is the word for “Southern”.  If you want to name something specifically “Australian” we use “novaehollandiae” which translates as “New Holland-ish”, (New Holland being one of the old names that the Dutch used when they discovered Australia almost a hundred years before Captain Cook).  Or else we just say it’s Aussie!

Australian life is seldom like that of “Home and Away” or “Neighbours”.  Edna Everage is a man.

Sydney has a gay Mardi-Gras.  Many of the participants are not gay, they just like the freedom once a year to dress outrageously – and good on’em, which is Australian for “well done”.  Also, the Mardi Gras (Shrove Tuesday) procession is always held on a Saturday.

Nobody that I know of in a posh restaurant will give you a menu, and then ask whether you have chosen your meal.  Instead, except in all but the most exclusive restaurants a young man or woman will come up to you, give you the menu, and say, “I am Wladislav, I am your waiter for today” - “Dya know what you want?”  When you choose, it will be written down and the waiter will say “No worries” This is Australian for thank you; I understand; of course; we, of course, can accommodate you, as for instance, “May we have whole roast crocodile roasted in its skin” will elicit “I’ll just check with the Chef – Yes, no worries!”  In the trendier parts of our cities, “no worries” may be replaced by “good choice!”.  It may be of help to find out where the waiter/waitress originally comes from, but only if you speak their language.  And as you leave the establishment at 3.30 am, after the meal of the Century, Wladislaw will probably farewell you with "Have a good night!")

Most Aussie taxi drivers are honest god-fearing people.  They do not cheat on you like European taxi drivers do.  It’s just, as Chinese migrants, they do not know where they are going in the large foreign city, which they are just beginning to call “home”.  On two separate occasions I have had taxi drivers who have not known the way from the Airport to the main railway station.  They asked me for directions!  (Since GPS, this is less of a problem).  ALWAYS sit in the front passenger seat of a taxi if it’s vacant –  it's good Aussie etiquette, and it might help with the navigation.

Barbeque is nearly always spelled BBQ.  Do not try and pronounce that with your mouth full.

Australian lamb is the best in the world, no joke.

Please do not call the indigenous people “blackfellas” or “abbos”.  It is disrespectful. 

Captain Cook discovered the east coast of Australia in 1770 for the United Kingdom almost exactly a quarter of a millennium ago.  The Normans invaded England about a millennium ago, and the birth of Christ and the Romans were about two millennia ago.  Stonehenge was built five millennia ago, and the rock paintings at Lascaux in France about sixteen millennia ago.  The oldest Australian indigenous rock paintings are over three times their age, over an unimaginable fifty millennia ago.  The oldest civilisation in the world.  That demands awe as well as respect.

And finally,( for this bit of the story only), the “First Fleet” carrying the first colonists including the first Governor of New South Wales, arrived in Botany Bay on 26^th January 1788.  Literally, only two days afterwards a very unexpected ship arrived flying the French flag. 

(To think that if he had been only three DAYS earlier, we would have had the Marseillaise as a National Anthem, and the Sydney Tower would be a different shape)  The ship carried the Comte de la Perouse, who was also on a world circumnavigation.  He and his officers dined with the British officers, and they exchanged mail “for home”.  His officers included botanists zoologists anthropologists and people with other interests, to gain the maximum knowledge from one voyage.  Many of them were successful applicants from the Ecole Militaire in Paris.

Sadly, La Perouse sailed north a few days later, and was never seen again.

Not one of them survived.

Because he failed the interview, a Corsican student  named Napoleon Bonaparte was never picked to go on the Expedition.  He did survive.  He also went to the Southern Hemispere to the island of St Helena.

Tewkesbury Floods

Tewkesbury Floods

In Summer I played in the mowing grass

Among the buttercups, the cornflowers and daisies,

I heard a chaffinch make its call.

In the hedges with briars and elm trees so tall 

They seemed to be crowned with white clouds, every one, 

While I warmly basked in the Gloucestershire sun.

Moving on . . . now the elm trees have gone.

Killed with disease . . . just a few linger on.

A plain, flat and featureless, save one great tower

That’s all there is until you look lower

And see the town, and three rivers that flood.

(The Swilgate once ran ruddy with blood)

For nine centuries now, St Mary’s has stood

Proud on an island just clear of the flood,

For the builders knew precisely just where the land

Was best to let the huge Abbey stand.

Just above levels of flood and of tide

The Abbey stays dry with no water inside.

Five hundred years ago townsfolk designed 

Half-timbered houses and similar kind

In higgledy streets, down piggledy lanes

Dwellings were built just above the floodplains.

The Abbot and townsfolk continued to keep

An eye on the waters so they didn’t run deep.

Our shattered last Century was scattered around

So that cars, trucks and tarmac covered the ground.

More people!  More houses!  Oh! Why don’t we build

The houses in suburbs - where flood land was tilled?

Now, when it rains hard, we sandbag the doors.

“There’s mud in the kitchen and dirt on the stairs.

But last year was worse, you can tell by that stain

On the wall”.  But alas, every year, homes are flooded again.

No cornflowers are left in the mowing grass high,

The Abbey looks down where I played, and men sigh.

For hundreds of years, old Tewkesbury was dry

But now, every winter, the water comes by.

And the blind men, the deaf men continually cry

“The water comes by

But we don’t know why”