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COUNTRY
MATTERS
Before
Hitler’s bombs made their pits
in
the districts of Portsea (it’s
timely
now to offer late thanks
to
those who rid our mums of angst),
we
were all packed off to the sticks.
The
evacuation gave us
townee
refugees a focus
on
a new way of life, like see-
ing
grass every day. The
country
was
a thrill wrapped up in a buzz.
Dad,
from Dunkirk, was billeted
near
a farming monastery.
Mum,
kid brother Bill and I lived
with
a family and orchard, we
made
do as all wanderers did.
We
thought bow-and-arrow games good
till
a girl was nicked in the hand;
then
we dribbled off to the wood
where
she took down her knickers and
we
played peeing games, foraged food.
Hetty
was the girl I liked most,
our
landlady’s daughter. She
had
Shirley
Temple hair; bluebell moist
eyes;
sturdy, quick legs. I was
daft
about
her, but those times are lost.
We
hindered the monks at harvest;
mooned
over pigsties; jumped from ricks
(I
blacked my eye leaping too fast,
landing
head against knee); used sticks
for
rifle drill. An old witch
cursed
the
farmers when we hunched round by
the
forked oak tree at the lane’s end:
she
spat on her hands in the byre
before
milking their cows, she claimed.
Grandmothers
and crones had a way.
I
didn’t need Robert Graves’ tale
when
Bishops Waltham filled my skull
with
the female trinity theme.
Oak
crone, saintly mum, and the dim
haze
of sweet Hetty said it all.
I
was tasting the Other: maps
on
the school wall; bulrush, rosehips;
millpond,
quarry, slippery trench;
cows
and hazelnuts and bullfinch:
townee
finding God in the crops.
Alan
Marshfield
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