Shell Cases

September sweeps in, the relentless year rolls on. Summer is almost spent and there is a tang of autumn in the air. A new school term is underway, the football season is getting into gear and in the jewel of the north it's 'switch on' week-end. Blackpool Illuminations light up the promenade and Britney Spears ("Baby One More Time", heaven help us) is in town to top tonight's big gig on the headland. She's probably gyrating and miming to her set as I write - thankfully the house on the strand is just out of earshot.

It's also the time when your Saturday Blogger's thoughts turn to a holiday in the Greek sunshine, a strategy to hang onto warm days for a while longer. Rhodes beckons. This, then, will be my last post for a couple of weeks. Its allotted theme is shells.

I've conjured mentally with a number of ways that I could go with it - and you can almost guarantee that I'm not going to take the obvious route, especially as I only wrote about cockling a fortnight ago. The nearest we're getting to shells of the maritime variety is the photograph below that I took of a case of beautiful shells in dusty Crete a couple of summers ago.

As we approach the 100th anniversary of the end of World War One, I'm sure we'll be reminded once again just what a cataclysmic event it was in European history, one of the deadliest conflicts of all time. Over ten million soldiers were killed in the fighting, along with two million civilians who were simply 'collateral damage' of the military offensive. On top of that another six million civilians died as a result of malnutrition and disease across the war-scarred territories of central Europe during the four years of the campaign. Over and above the eighteen million dead, there were another twenty-three million who were wounded. The numbers are simply staggering!

Regrettably it was followed only two decades later by an even more deadly sequel. In fact there hasn't been a single year in the last half-century when there wasn't a war being waged somewhere on the planet.

I've written several poems about the First World War and I'm adding to the number here with an oblique take on the week's theme. It was often said that the dead were the lucky ones; whereas for a percentage of the twenty-three million 'undead' who never properly recovered, their lot was an almost unimaginable suffering, living on as permanent victims of the war. It used to be called 'shell shock'; it's labelled post-traumatic stress disorder these days - more generic, more euphemistic.

I say 'almost unimaginable', because of course we make attempts to imagine it, in order to try and understand and empathise with the predicament of people who were exposed to horrors way beyond the comfortable pale of our own experience; and to suggest by the weight of words why such atrocities should never be allowed to happen again...

Shell Cases
Hold the line. Hold the line.
It will soon be medication time,
a numbing pill in a candy shell.

Once the awful shaking begins,
that's when you know.
Behind the hollow eyes
are scenes replayed
that have unminded
all these brave and honest souls.

This was a doctor, over there
a ploughboy and beside him
a blacksmith and two clerks.
The one who just stares at the floor
was a schoolmaster before the war.
Lawyers and labourers rub shoulders,
the majors and the miners
are neighbours in this new estate,
all cursed alike by warlike fate,
no larks for these good people anymore.

Hold the line. Hold the line.
This is retribution time,
the bitter pill of a living hell.

Truth to tell, although
they inhabit a common nightmare
yet they are disparate still,
for none would ever dare to share
with what sensibility they retain
the secret that unites them:
disgust, despair, and above all,
the toll of quite unhinging terror.

If you had known them then,
you would not know them now,
slow, scarred, vulnerable men.

They mill around in pain,
these human husks,
silently sick with the shock of shells
spat out at speed.
A constant rain of percussive seeds
has shredded every nerve,
has blown their very brains.
Most wish that they were dead indeed.

Hold the line. Hold the line.
It will soon be medication time.


Thanks for reading. Be kind to each other, S ;-)

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Teddies and Other Animals

Mojo mark 1

When I was teaching I bought myself a cheap, soft toy monkey who was destined to be a dunce for the rest of his life.  The six year old children in my class decided he should be called Mojo (to go with the polar bear called Polo who already lived in the corner of the room) and set about trying to teach him the basics.  The idea was that Mojo sat on my lap, looking happy but gormless, whilst I fired a series of questions to the children gathered around me.

“4 add 1?”

“2 add 3?”

“Can you sound out ‘pet’?”

“What does ‘dog’ start with?”

And so on.

Mojo was supposed to try and answer before the children, by whispering in my ear.  Needless to say, the children were desperate to beat Mojo, whose answers were invariably ridiculous.  The result was the children had a lot of fun, learned their sounds, added up their numbers, and Mojo remained oblivious to his own ineptitude, smiling inanely from my lap and receiving a lot of sympathetic comments along the way.  He always held a special place in my heart.

I took early retirement from teaching the same year my grandson was born, and somehow (I wish I could remember how) Mojo became Rio’s favourite soft toy.  Except he wasn’t just a toy, he was much more that that.   He was a supreme comforter and as time went on, became part of the family.  Rio moved around a lot in his first few years, between his mum, his dad and us, his grandparents, and wherever Rio went, Mojo was being dragged along too.  There was no chance of sleep without Mojo for Rio to rest his weary head on.  We all had a lot invested in that monkey.

I can honestly say, one of the worst weekends of my life followed the loss of Mojo one Thursday morning when Rio was seven.  I received a distraught phone call from my daughter.  Rio had been going to his dad’s that night so whilst he was at nursery, Laurey had taken Mojo, in a bag with some clothes, to the house and, finding his dad out, had left the bag in the side entrance.  Somehow, within a few hours, Mojo, the clothes and the bag had disappeared.  If you have never had a child with a comforter – in whatever form - that goes everywhere with that child then you have no idea of the distress caused by the loss of such an item.  Not only was Rio distraught, we all were.  It was like a death, and we reacted accordingly.  The worst part was seeing Rio trying to put on a brave face.  Laurey and I held it all together while we reassured him we were doing everything possible to find Mojo, but when Rio left the room the pair of us dissolved in tears.  When Rio returned he buried his head in his mum’s lap and sobbed.  I genuinely believe he was grief stricken.

I come from a long line of capable women who think that, not only is there a solution to every problem, but that we are the ones who have that solution.  I went into problem solving mode and eventually came up with an answer we hoped would make Rio happy again.  We had researched enough to know that we couldn’t replace Mojo with a newer model.  He had become extinct a few years previously.  I spent a day, searching desperately online for a similar monkey to no avail.  The only answer was to get another monkey and adapt it to look as much like Mojo as possible.  As a competent needlewoman I was confident I could do the job, but as a grandma I knew that Rio would not be fooled.  Only recently he had cried inconsolably and then stood by the washing line as Mojo dripped dry after a much needed wash.  He’d explained that the smell of Mojo was a big part of his appeal and I’d already agreed never to wash him again. 

The original Mojo, on his travels

The new Mojo, pre-op

The new Mojo, post-op

The following day, the new monkey arrived by special delivery and at vast expense.  He had long arms and legs, a bright smile and no ears, whereas Mojo had been short limbed with only the hint of a smile and ears like Dumbo.  I had quite a job on my hands.  What worried me more than the physical transformation of Mojo was the problem of explaining away the newness, the lack of worn fabric on his head and of course, the smell.  I set to work, chopping off limbs, adding ears and altering facial features.  By the time I'd finished Mojo had been reborn.  We were just left with the problem of explaining away the obvious differences.  And this is where Mrs Peacock and the Monkey Orphanage came to the rescue.....

The letter from the Monkey Orphanage

I'm not sure whether Rio, as a bright seven year old, was totally fooled by the orphanage story but Ido remember him telling me, years afterwards, that he'd gone home that day, hidden under his bed with Mojo and cried tears of joy.  As a family we never talk about the loss of Rio's favourite monkey, it was such a traumatic event, but as I look at Mojo now and see how worn he is once again I'm sure Rio would say the 'adoption' has been a great success. 

Long live teddies and other animals, but please keep your eye on them at all times.

The day the monkey disappeared by Jill Reidy

I like to think

The day that Mojo disappeared

He’d decided he was big enough

And clever enough

To set off on his own

That he didn’t need his daddy any more

(For that’s how Rio saw himself)

And he was going on one of life’s big adventures

He took the bag

Peered around the bin

And when the coast was clear

He made a dash

Nimbly climbing the nearest lamp post

And hanging there till the bin men had finished emptying bins

The shoppers had finished shopping 

And the children had gone in for their tea

Then, swiftly, he swung from post to post

Along streets where the dark seeped in

Until he reached some open spaces

Not quite the jungle

But maybe a local park

Where he met up with the other missing toys

Who had fled their owners

For a life of freedom

That’s what I like to think

Thanks for reading     Jill

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Did you know? Charles Dickens.

While researching Charles Dickens, I had an epiphany.  Not necessarily of the most positive nature.  I realised that I am a closet rail enthusiast.  Not the anorak wearing Train Spotter variety, but seemingly I can write about train crashes. While composing the poem for this weeks theme, it morphed and became about an event which Charles Dickens was involved in, and which ultimately formed his personality for the last years of his life, namely the Staplehurst Rail Crash.

This is how my poem has ended up thus far:


Author or Angel?

"The Pickwick Papers" marked the start
of Dickens incredible career,
With the serialisation of this tome,
1836 was the year.
Within a short while he had become
a Literary Celebrity,
famed for his humour and keen observation
of people and society.
Using these skills he managed to include
the essence of acqaintances,
into the characters of his books
bringing form to the story and sentences.
As the years rolled by, to critical acclaim,
this Wordsmith wrote more and more,
loved by the Rich, loved by the Poor,
little did he know what his life had in store.
A champion for the disadvantaged,
the impoverished, the slave,
He stood up and spread the news,
used his position til he reached the grave.
In the year of our Lord, 1865,
he travelled upon the "Tidal Train",
in the scandalous company of his Mistress,
and her Mother, a journey that was in vain.
Heading from Folkestone up to London
the Express hurtled down the track,
but just east of Staplehurst tragedy struck,
It was a journey from which many would never come back.
The replacement of timbers along the line
as it crossed over the low viaduct progressed,
but Human error, wrong calculations,
left inadequate stoppage, the line buckled under the stress.
With the momentum the Loco, its tender,
A van and a carriage made it across,
but the next seven coaches fell from the track
into a swampy field covered in peat moss.
Luckily unscathed, his companions and he,
removed themselves from their dangling coach
and went from person to person,
comforting the injured and dying without reproach.
Calm and collected, completely composed
he relieved the victims with a nip of Brandy,
some died in his arms, some had wounds very great,
Impressing on his mind, he later suffered with PTSD.
He returned to his carriage to retrieve
the manuscript called "Our Mutual Friend",
But the experience struck him dumb for two whole weeks,
Trauma haunting his dreams til the very end.
So badly affected he struggled to write,
instead conducting a Reading Tour,
but in 1870, he suffered a stroke and died
5 years to the day of the rail crash so harshly endured.



Its a work in progress and needs tweaking, but you see what I mean. Oh dear me!  ;-)

Thanks for reading.

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