Yellow - Daffodils

Yellow is the colour of sunshine, something there is so little of in these bleak, January days. Thinking of yellow and sunshine brings back treasured memories of my childhood and Nanna Hetty’s spotless, shiny kitchen in her bungalow at Heald Green. Perhaps the cupboards were yellow, or the Formica topped table, I’ll never remember, but the coffee pot with the pointed handle definitely was. I don’t think for one moment it was a Clarice Cliff, but whenever I see one it reminds me of Nanna’s sunny kitchen, her delicious fruit cake and the perfect scrambled eggs she made for me.

I hope that sunshine isn’t too far away. It’s almost impossible to imagine when it’s so cold, there’s scarce daylight from a dark grey sky and everlasting rain. Dreich. And, there is still the Covid pandemic hanging over us all.

Being surrounded by such doom and gloom at the moment, my recent choice of television viewing, BBC 4’s The Victorian Slum could be considered questionable. To give a brief outline, modern day families have taken up the challenge of living in the slum building exactly as the Victorian slum dwellers did, cramped in one room, two if it could be afforded and with the most basic of facilities. The lucky ones who found daily unskilled work could earn a meagre amount of money, every penny needed for rent and food. In the beginning, it is 1860, moving along a decade with each episode, exploring changes and differences and the hardship each family faces. Social history is very much my thing, so I’m glued to it and at the same time, thankful that I’m living now and not then. The only cheerful looking things were the artificial flowers that the children were making to sell. Within the slum is a doss house, somewhere to sleep, nothing more, for a penny or fourpence a night. The next step down is the workhouse.

One thing leads to another so with my head full of slum life in the 1860s I did some Google research on workhouses in the U.K. at that time. I was instantly transported to Bristol workhouse to be horrified at how people were treated so cruelly yet fascinated at what I was reading. The uniform for unmarried, pregnant women was a red tunic style dress. Prostitutes wore yellow. I smiled eager to share this snippet of information.

Don’t bother to tell me that’s how it was in all workhouses, not just Bristol.

Dad’s favourite colour was yellow. His mother was my Nanna Hetty, so maybe the colour yellow had significance. It was at Easter time when he suddenly passed away. Daffodils in full bloom filled each side of the front path that curved from the drive to the door. They became symbolic. Each year, I plant daffodils in remembrance of him, making sure there are some rich yellow ones. Some Tete-a-Tete are already in bud.

My poem,

Bristol Workhouse, 1860

I smoothed the cotton as I sat, and thought
Who wore this dress before me?
What became of her? Good fortune or death?
What happened to set her free?

Others were watching me, nudging, judging,
Nodding and whispering low.
My nervous hands gathered the threadbare skirt
As I glanced along the row.

Young women, not much older than children,
Some were dressed in washed-out red
With swollen bellies straining at the seams.
Those, the sinful un-wedded.

And me, I needed to feed my children
And pay the over-due rent.
There was no other way I could recoup
Money I shouldn’t have spent.

So I stood in the doorway, shoulders bare,
Brassing it out, being bold.
Closing my mind to demands of the men
While I shivered with the cold.

There’s no love lost in the Bristol Workhouse.
Pleading eyes, tear-stained faces
Cut no ice with those in authority
Looking down on the disgraced.

Downfall has brought me to sit here in a
Faded yellow dress of shame.
Of all the men who happily paid me,
No one even knew my name.

PMW 2021

Thanks for reading. Stay safe and keep well, Pam x

 

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Play the Game - Board Games

If you noticed me grinning a bit more than usual the other day, it’s because something went right. I managed to download ‘Tetris’ on to my new mobile phone all by myself. I’ve had the phone for a few weeks now and I’m still finding my way round it. I’m not one for electronic games but Level 1 Tetris fills a gap if I’m hanging about waiting and I’ve exhausted Facebook, Googled the things I’ve remembered to look up and checked my inbox. It’s fun trying to beat my own points.

When I was a child, my Nan taught me dominoes and a couple of card games. I got to stay up past bedtime because we were in the middle of Gin Rummy and couldn’t just stop. She always knew when I was tired or bored and I could never persuade her otherwise.

I’ve always enjoyed board games. Every Christmas, a Compendium of Games would be left by Santa. Ludo, Draughts, Snakes & Ladders, Tiddly Winks, Blow Football and more besides. I’d pester the family for someone to play with. Grandad was good for Tiddly Winks and Draughts. I didn’t have enough puff for Blow Football, so it was mainly ignored.

I was twelve years old when I was given my first Monopoly. I loved it more and more as I learnt how to play. For me and my parents, it became our regular Sunday evening thing and stopped me worrying about Monday morning and dreaded school. Times were tough for me then.

Monopoly is still a firm favourite, though alas, seldom played since our children grew up and left home and had babies. I wonder how friends might react to me hosting a Monopoly and supper evening? Just an idea.

We’ve got Trivial Pursuit and various levels of general knowledge games. We still have the small box of ‘Kids Trivia’ that our children and I would take to visiting times when my husband was in hospital long term. He would provide a box of Maltesers to share. So many times we walked from home, up East Park Drive to Victoria Hospital, with the game, juice and other things for the children. We saw snowdrops, then crocuses, and then daffodils as winter turned to spring. The conversation was always the same.

“Is Dad coming home soon, Mum?”

“I don’t know, love. We have to wait and see.”

Maltesers remind me of those visits and the fond memories of the lovely family times we shared in a side ward. Eventually, he could come home and all was well. My anxious times, when the children were in bed and I was alone with my thoughts, began to evaporate as life returned to normal.

As the children got older they had Game Boy, PlayStation and later Xbox, all beyond me though I managed a couple of levels of Super Mario. We still kept playing family games as often as we could and certainly round Christmastime and school holidays.

Scrabble must be the best word game ever and I’m always up for the challenge. I bought a travel version thinking it would be perfect to take away with us on our breaks to Scotland. I hadn’t considered how tiny the letter tiles are and how hard to read, when I’m short-sighted to begin with and my husband has glasses for reading that he wears all the time.

Recently, a work colleague told me what a fun-filled evening she’d had at home with her husband and adult sons playing board games and enjoying a takeaway meal. I’m glad to know I’m not the only one who would like that.

Meanwhile, let’s see if I can exceed 200,00 points on Tetris.

This poem is written by Morgan, on hellopoetry.com. I'd forgotten the fun we had playing Operation, until the game mirrored life too much.

 

Board Games

 

February nights rip me into pieces
So when I'm scattered randomly
across your bedroom floor,
I hope you look down
at my knee caps
and collar bones
& think about how much you
enjoyed doing puzzles at
the small, cherry wood
coffee table in your parents'
living room when you were ten
And I hope you put my tongue
back in my mouth
and my eyes back in my skull
And you breathe your
cinnamon & whiskey
breath all down my throat
until I remember how to
find air on my own.

 

Thanks for reading, Pam x

 

 

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Springy stuff

As I walked my little chimps to school this morning I looked around me at the gardens bursting into life and pondered a bit. Then pondered some more. Then felt happy because it was spring. Spring is where I come to life, after being a grump all winter as it's freezing and damp. I watched the little daffodils standing bright and tall and thought to myself, they don't let a bit of cold weather get them down, they make their merry way through the soil regardless of what the weather man says at the same time each year. They don't moan about their electricity bills, how much baked beans cost these days they just burst up like little bubbles of happiness ready to brighten everything around them. Their smiley little heads bobbing side to side in the breeze wondering if the little kids on the school run are going to decapitate them and give their heads to their mums. Yes they don't last too long but they'll always come back next year.  Daffodils, and spring, make me smile and give me that burst forward into the future, that lovely optimism that makes me think yes, life is going to be good. They aren't just plants that produce a lovely flower, they are fearless, relentless little soldiers lined up across gardens everywhere, saying "Bring it on, I can take whatever you've got." Daffodils are good.

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What we below could not see

A guest post by David Riley

What’s the best poetry about spring? I’ll tell you, it’s my job to pontificate. It’s when humans are, at most, at the edge of things. Take Seamus Heaney’s Rite of Spring, for example. Spring is there and does better than people can, who can only imitate its liberating effects.

Even more, people can be removed from things, as Ted Hughes does in The River in March. His river is an elemental force, it might even be a deity in itself. In Heaney and Hughes there are things the river and Spring can be and do - they don’t stand for something, they are something.

Wordsworth knew it too - his daffodils are beauty on a hillside, whether there are people there to see it or not.

Jane Hirschfield is excellent at showing how nature is really something other. We may dress it up and give it names, develop amnesia every year when the same seasons come around and trot out our same banalities but it is that something of itself, beyond us, that she shows.

Edward Thomas in his many meditations on nature sometimes links human activity and the seasons. At other times, he urges us to take a step back or rather to another position altogether, where we might see nature as other creatures do. Read his Thaw. See what you think. 

Rooks are back again by Alexei Kondratyevich Savrasov

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Dying for a Daffodil

 by Ashley Lister 

 Mention the Lakes to me and there is only one poem that pops into my memory. I suspect it’s the lines of verse at the forefront of most people’s thoughts when they’re associating poetry and Lake District.

I wandered lonely as a cloud

That floats on high o'er vales and hills,

When all at once I saw a crowd,

A host, of golden daffodils;

Beside the lake, beneath the trees,

Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

I mention Wordsworth’s Daffodils because, this week, I’ve been unable to put much forethought into my blog post. I’ve been stricken with a cold bug that’s on the verge of developing into a terminal case of man-flu. If this condition does prove fatal, the following parody on Daffodils shall serve as my epitaph.

I sobbed and coughed and moaned and whined

And stuffed bog paper up my nose

And languished on my fat behind

Whilst watching television shows

And miserably I cried all day

And wished my cold would go away.

I took painkillers every hour

I mainlined bowls of chicken soup

But every taste just tasted sour

And chicken soup just makes me poop

So there I lay feeling so shitty

And wallowing in my own self-pity.

And every conversation’s killed

By hateful, painful coughing fits

And drinks are regularly spilled

It’s really getting on my tits.

This damnéd cold just drags and drags:

I’m drowning under old snot rags.

Now you may say I’m an evil cow

But one goal keeps me alive.

It broils beneath my fevered brow

And makes me desperate to survive.

If I achieve recovery:

I’ll kill who gave this cold to me.

Ashley (cough splutter) Lister

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Spring has Sprung

Today is the vernal equinox. Finally we can say goodbye to winter. Goodbye to knitted hats and adult mittens. Goodbye to the SAD lights and vitamin d tablets. Goodbye to big coats and multiple layers. Goodbye to moody mornings and nippy nights. We can say goodbye to warring with winter because spring has started to push its bright colours into our days; fresh blue, budding green and beaming yellow break me from the grey. I start to feel alive again. Like I want to skip, do something impulsive, take a road trip, make a picnic, feed some ducks, play Frisbee, build a sandcastle, wear festival wellies on a sunny day, go open water swimming in the Lake District, drive with all the windows open, dive into a massive ball pool, hire a bouncy castle, buy a DSLR camera, start a photography course, send poetry out into the big bad world, laugh instead of getting scared, rebel, refuse to conform...

I’m not entirely sure if my current mindset is anything to do with it being the first day of spring, or whether it is in fact a result of today also being my birthday. I have a hunch that it might be the latter.

I find, as I get older, that birthdays are less appealing. That I’d rather avoid than acknowledge I’m becoming a year older. They have a similar effect to New Year; they prompt you into thinking, making promises and changes, and wishing the next year of your life will be successful, fruitful, happy. When I was four, closing my eyes tight and blowing out the candles was easy. When you’re young you believe you know what will make you happy, but as you grow up, becoming more aware, you realise that it is far more complicated than roller skates or pierced ears

Two paragraphs earlier I said that spring (my birthday?) makes me want to rebel and refuse to conform, and this post is taking a miniature step towards doing that. It is off-topic and disconnected from the theme – because I felt that daffodils were more important than gods...

Thank you for reading,

Lara 

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