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The time, the place.

A baby's pushchair wheels caked in mud hangs at a giddy angle over the kerbside. The father's right hand badly tattooed is pulling it back level. The child cries. The mother's blonde feathercut flutters in front of his cropped head.

He is staring lat lightning. \Ten miles away. ever another town. 'Where the storm lis fi~ling the mattresses ~eft ln the street.

Sheer

After three weeks of storm anything badly rooted or not tied down is being blown away.

A condemned tenement stands a black slab in the low sunlight. Shards of grey slate from the roof pepper the entrance ways. A shattered window reflects no clouds. The town seems to be full of dogs barking unseen, carried on the wind.

Across the road A new site. Flooded trenches; plastic sheeting, the wind is caught in] spiralling away from the brick. New unglazed windows.

A digger bucket clangs into the tarmac sparks then a yield of fresh earth, flint, clay.

Work stops. The pumps are switched off.

All night the wind presses against walls half-built, half-fallen, Coals glow brighter in the grate where a couple makes love awkwardly. Small barriers against the light falling away. Bone clasped to bone, flesh mixed with hair, before it sheers away.

She still cannot get used to that side of the bed being empty.

In a Stationary Shop

The 2 o'clock funeral arrives. The priest, cassock caught in a south-westerly. The buildings across the road unfinished. A mourner arriving in a works lorry. A young mother presses home to be at the school gate by 3.30.

In a stationary shop a woman in her mid-forties due for a coffee-break hears cups chink above the hum of a photocopier.

She is watching a black plastic bin liner drift up the street. Then through the cars and over the roaves toward the funeral.

At 3.45. an empty hearse mothers and children and more litter drift her way.

She glances at the cash-till's digital clock as it counts off the seconds she cannot give away.

Commandos

My parents eating dinner, straw falling from a birds nest in the joists, as a 45mph wind lifts the roof.

It floats down onto a box of myoId toys. An action-man complete with kit and bits of broken model aircraft. Dakota, mosquito, hurricane.

A gentle creaking of black felt and nails lifting from the wood. Breathing.

Downstairs my parents discussing a photo in the paper. My great-uncle's war-grave.

Jack was lucky. Then he wasn't. His glider crumpled in a field near Arnhem like a puffball. Two days later he caught a german bullet.

It wasn't the bullet that killed him but the poison seeping through his limbs.

The aircraft kept spawning.

I, a silent intruder in the attic, slide out into the light. Slide away from the breathing.

Towns on shallow hills

When they ask me what I think will happen now I say I do not know.

I say that I know that things have a way of moving of their own accord.

When the last storm ended they found a woman pacing the empty platform.

One weathered cross in the middle of this town is enough. But all summer long reports have been trickling through. Things are getting worse.

One morning we'll look out and see carcasses floating in our flooded fields. An armada of flesh and bone creeping toward us without sails between towns on shallow hills.

THE NETTLE FIELDS

We had to clear two fields on a bitterly cold Movember morning. We had to clear two fields of nettles.

I hadn't worked with my dad for years but by midday we had fires going and my feet didn't feel so frozen.

As we cleared se~ate paths weld find things. Me, drums and cannisters. Him, a broken cockpit of an aircraft.

Later he said held expected me to bale out of that wedding idea long before I had and that coming back down to earth wasn't such a bad thing.

I grudgingly admitted this was true and even a job that made my hands sting could clear the air and payoff bad debts.

Later the white smoke from the bonfires seeped through the poplar trees and hung like mist over the river.

He started telling me about a german fighter that came down over his village trailing thick white smoke like silk.

Perhaps they found the pilot in nettles. Thinking he was in Holland when all along he'd been deceived by his instruments.

Now 1 1m struggling too. Struggling to find a Common language.

The truth is

the truth is that we acted like two wrestlers trying to break each other or push the other out of the ring. Usually in that sordid room of mine cigarette ash everYWhere an empty bottle of vodka trying to get it in too much drink.

a black and white portable on the sound turned down a billie holiday tape the hanging song red wine rings on the dirty carpet and lipstick stains on the mugs.

some sort of love though what else she would get up to I don't know I didn't get up to much in all those years maybe drank a bit to much more than once

it was some sort of love and it seems more important to write the truth about it now as it really was.

I've got to get on

I've got to get on now. Something's just clicked like a switch in a pump-house or an automatic timer on this central-heating that the youngest of my sister's children has just burnt her hand on but not badly. Something is whirring far below me, engines of submarines perhaps, or armies of navvies dragging chalk out of the hills with horses.

My sisters downstairs consulting a medical dictionary, trying to find her spleen. The rose-tinted illustrations like a map of hidden tunnels, pipes or underground furnaces. I have been in the dark too long she says. When am I going to grow up and make the connections that bring kids, a house, and somewhere to plumb a washing-machine in? She's still worried about her spleen. Her finger moving across the picture. I'm worried about the time passing, the dead lines that brought me here I've got to get on. I've got to get on now. With words that'll cut through anything.

~-o\.vI

»: The'%ld~·

........

If you really knew me you would see behind the troughs where cattle shiver and rats tear at sacks of feed. You would see torches flaring on a dark road lined with empty telegraph poles, leading out to a river, you would see a new beginning.

If I leaned closer to you you would hear the wires start singing. The first electricity sizzling in damp air or your first sight of rain sweeping across an english street, maybe. The hymnbooks are bright. The text clear on the creased pages. Above wind rattles the carpented beams.

I was not born with this village inside me. It was built slowly. Ground up. Each plank dragged from nettles or straw and hammered in. A new shape rises behind the barns and sheds. Now ever since the bell rang early no-one has been able to stop it sounding. Some in the village say it splintered bone others that it turned hair grey.

It tore down my fences. The dovecote emptied, messages blown away.

Now I have calls to answer as our first lorry spins like a beetle round the village cross. Slide into me and you'll hear more engines and barrels creaking with water. There is talk now of more lines coming. As I speak they are being nailed to new posts in wet fields by men in lorries. Soon I shall hear your voice. Clear as if beside me. Your name calling from the far hills in the morning.

Believe me, believe in me.

The Stormwater Miracle

Fifth storm in four weeks~

water pouring up out of the drains. Torrents filling the gutters with the spume of tcomuch rain, silting the lawns with litter.

As if we were riding on a great whale that had surfaced in our valley. Terraced houses and shops, like limpets suddenly started shifting. Satellite dishes and empty kitchens, Aquarium-lit front rooms, blue and green~

ornament cabinets full of glass fish, glistening, lifting ••

Yesterday these rooms were flooded with fish from floor to ceiling. They called it the 'Stormwater Miracle'

The whole world is watching us now. Those screens that never stop flickering, unravelling it all in foreign language editions.

Do Not Tell Me of Fear

tell me of raspberry bushes shivering in a light wind or of mist rising off wet meadows or of your lover breathing as sunlight drifts across your window

do not tell me of fear you have not been close enough to watch it's pall rising to stand under it's shadow

I once met a blind man who woke every night back at sea on his ship that sank watching the hands still trapped in the cabin turning to light and heat

do not tell me of fear you who have not stood close enough to taste it on your tongue or feel it catch in your hair if you had your mind and body could only choke it in

never to be released.

Hunter and hunted

I would always find them. Small cardboard targets, holed, lying between dusty decorations and browned family photos. The grey ones were from fairgrounds, the white ones from cadet camp. After turning the backgarden into a range the grass would be showered in fragments of blue and brown glass

We'd run to the park to see The Berkshire Regiment recruiting. A simulator, a truck and a tent netting small minds like a trawler's nets. Cold airgun pellets scooped and held in a warm fist.

Twenty years later and my uncle's cadet force are camped on the downs. Their boots muddy they stumble in from rifle practice and clean their guns. Fifteen and sixteen years old sliding towards jobs and marriage.

Above them grown men ease their aircraft westwards. They chase the fading sun with charts in their laps. Fox, rat and bear. The hunting begins as below endangered species flicker across T.V. screens. The last light in the tent goes out. The last light in the fairground goes out. The last lights in the eyes in the forest. Go out. Completely.

Revolvers

I've been waiting all day Wandering round and round the house waiting for it to hit me. Staring through the curtains at the house across the street.

Then I saw it. The kid was about sixteen no older, wearing a blue anorak. Stickers on the arm. He was wedged between a white escort and a bright yellow motorbike ( a trials model ) Leaning on the car's bonnet. A young woman was pushing a pram past him. That's all it was. Struck me as perfect.

So now I'm writing it down. I'm listening to Tommy Johnson the electricity in his mouth drifting into mine. 1928. Memphis. Tenn.

Now I'm not waiting anymore Lord I'm gonna open my mouth I'm gonna blow it all away.

saturday night specials motorbikes in windy streets crackling.

Zephaniah Grace

Magnesium nitrates straw bales cart full of apples in the rain light to dim flashes in the skull bones of cattle discovered in wells blood in field wool on wire stains on fingers on sky blue powder flash around eyes lightning sheep torn by jackdaws feather pillows velvet curtains rabbit tails backdrop of mist frosty morning evening artificial sittings cornfields drawing rooms movements left then fixed.

Images in fields, plates washed barrel of cherries, thatchers wait tar brushes, rats, black hats, rakes. Petticoats, flashing moustaches. With twist of lens a blind begger froze up. Or walking the rails to the poor house. Overcoat patched with courderoy. Straw man, a walking scarecrow. Image slowly forming.

Zephaniah Grace.

Photographer. Shepherd. 1869. Blewbury. Berkshire. England.

Pulled out of the river

I feel fucking tired I've been working too hard Two skinheads, one boy, one girl have just passed me on this train. First I noticed her peroxide hair and fishnet stockings then his cropped head. Perhaps I write too much about the here and now that maybe bigger things are waiting downstream I don't know though.

In fifteen minutes this train will be hurtling across rivers laid across alluvial beds just the sort of subject matter you need hard, full of grit But right now it's just the details a terminus on a sunday evening a buffet car stocked with sandwiches passengers half-dead or perhaps just asleep.

1 1mSuddenly far away wading slowly through dark water like a heron staring down at a clear gravel bed. ~aiting.

Then the train hits the river bridge, words drift off in a current.

Straw is falling from a cart on the first sunday in september, 1826. floats along the river. Behind it the fields are lit like a hell where fish go when they die. Souls pulled up instead of down.

Pressure

Reading William Carlos Williams on a train. Feeling the rush of words like cold currents across flooded fields.

Reading station approach lit up in the dark night feeling the water rising pouring through our hair past the carriage windows like a model aircraft in a wind-tunnel or just reading William Carlos Williams on a train at 11.30. p.m. When a girl walks past., Hair coloured like cockerel feathers Like you'd see them on a bright morning after rain, gleaming.

The pressure of this.

CONTINENTAL DRIFT

The trawlers have been and gone, under these clouds, these stars, drifting for hours over the quiet passages.

The empty banks, tarmac roads, flooded land between motorway junctions and railway tracks.

Silver baskets hoisted to the side of limousines are emptied then totter, sway and collapse.

I found one basket turned turtle in builders sand. Yesterday the boy who stole it came rolling over the hill in it, grinning,

like the fisherman holding the first celeocanth, astonished at what one net could hold.

The streets are wet this evening with autumn rain, paths streaked with snails, slugs and worms. The verges littered with silver trolleys; empty.

.~ ....

Great poets, empty seats

Too many times to count on these hands I have felt these tracks under me. This blood confined to this compartment speeding like a spear toward the setting sun. But no time has it chilled my heart to look into the eyes of someone like the girl I see opposite me.

We flicker like a train seen from a far hill and we are gone.

I remember as a child believing that the pictures I painted were somehow other magical worlds.

Tonight I saw a famous poet read as poet's do when they're famous. But poets come and go you know like empty trains across empty streets. Right now what I want is this girl's love. A tender hand caressing the bitter sweet from within.

As for the world the. world wAere -poets .-read, ·even .great ones ~ll I don 't know. see, thia poet ha.:;f.4 n.ighttM~ aoout empty seats about looking up and there's nobody there.

Warmth, light, heat, that's what we need.

The train shudders to a halt. A long way from the sea. In the dark I can hear the empty seats breathing.

THE ICE HORSES

I lean over and point my father's gaze to the photo of Bud Finch at the wheel of his 'Minneapolis Moline' tractor which, though sank during the war, had been salvaged.

Later, as a storm battered the tin roof of our garage and flakes of broken fence spread across our lawn, I returned to Bud's memoirs.

One winter the Thames here froze over and horses walked out across the river to graze upon the reeds. One fell through and men from Bud1s village pulled it out, laid it on a gate, carried it back to the village.

This flashes through my mind as I cross the same water in the passenger seat of my dad's truck. We are working at a mental institution, ( once a military hospital ) slipping under the wooden floorboards of wards to fireproof heating ducts with glass fibre.

We hear heavy horses above, wandering.

Later still I discover that my maternal grandfather lay in that hospital as I was born in the winter of 159. My mother tells me I was taken in and shown to him like a new tractor brought onto his farm. Did his eyes see swaddling bands, metal bed, window bars and bare floorboards glazed with water or did they see ban~ ~ield~ h?rse~, folding under snow~ ~lPS slnklng ln a blizzard.

The funeral Will take Place at All Saints' ChurCh. North Moreton. on Monday Of Mr BUd Finch, the vil­lage's best known character.

Mr Walter Finch. who Was alfec­tionately known as BUd. had liVed at Filberts in the Village for nearly 80Years.

His late mOther's family had liVed at Moreton for generations.

With his father, Mr Frederick Fin­ch, they farmed in the area.

Among Mr FinCh's interests Were motor racing and old tractors,

The MinneaPOlis-Moline. Which MrOn his Finch USed in his farm work for

many Years. Was salvaged after being sunk in enemy action in the SecondWorld War. I

Mr Finch. a bachelor. Who Was 86. ~~ had a remarkable memory and a great gift for story-telling. both of

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Which Were reVealed in BUd Finch IRemembers: North Moretan OVer ~f~Eighty Years. Which Was PUblished last Year, and in a broadcast he didon Radio OXford.

His other interests included shoot_ing and Cricket.

He Was treasurer of Moreton Crick_ et Club in 1921 and at the time of his dent.death on Tuesday he Was its prest­

~-----

Scything at the

The President's lase appearance (with Jon~ Cu~ ley' in 1987

42 43

Searching for a tomb

Sun shone warm on the bonnet as we pulled up the gravel drive. The old rectory stood deserted. The congregation has been dwindling these five years and twenty.

My father's wellingtons flap as he strides off through the wet grass. I have a photo of him sitting in his stepfather's arms holding a team of horses pulling a plough aged about ten.

Here we are. Two figures caught in the open. Standing in a churchyard. Little Wittenham, Oxfordshire. On a frosty November evening.

My father is circling the headstones and green iron crosses, looking.

A flock of doves twist and jink in the blue air above us.

We stare down like two men on a bcidge. Staring into clear and shallow sunlit water Searching for the shadow of a fish.

The father he has never seen. The grandfather I will never meet.

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TOWNS ON SHALLOW HILLS Shaun Belcher

':'C:';:'~S ON SHALLOW HILLS - .s~aun 3elc:;erFEBRUARY 1990 ~0rseshoe Press pamphlet ~c.l

~imited edition of 25. AS fCCTat. Illustrated. Signed by the artist.

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