When the weather’s against you, you
have to explore inside the house:
Psychokitchenography/Mythokitchenography
When you stay in a converted barn
worth a million pounds,
A weathered old long red brick
structure: The Threshing Barn
(‘Sleeps 12. Large barn
conversion, on the edge of the village
overlooking open countryside and Horton
Tower,
fitted to a high standard in a contemporary style.
The house has 6 large
bedrooms and 4 bathrooms.’),
And your extended family
drive out in their cars
To share National Trust
membership cards,
You choose to stay to
wander the lanes in the high Easter wind,
Passing a newly thatched
cottage:
‘R. Hayward and Sons
-Thatchers since 1780’ -
And it’s easy, when you
return to the empty house,
To imagine the discussions
in the winnowing dust
Of the hard, harsh winter
of 1830,
Right there in the
kitchen where you sit writing these lines,
Listening to the rhythmic
thrash of the flails,
Watching the drift of
the choking chaff,
Eavesdropping the
muffled talk of threshing machines,
The burning of hayricks,
the messages passed along the village lanes:
‘Who will write a letter
like they have all over Wiltshire?’
‘Let’s ask for eight
shillings a week,
And no damn threshing
machines to come here.
We can sign it Captain Swing, like the other villages
do.’
‘And if farmer won’t pay
us, then we’ll damn well burn down his hayricks.’
But other voices speak
of the gallows, the gaol, the squire,
The yeomanry,
transportation, Van Diemen’s Land …
They eat their bread and
cheese,
Smoke their pipes, burn
the letter,
And pledge their selves
to secrecy.
But
‘Who hath not seen thee
oft amid they store?
Sometimes whoever seeks
abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on
a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by
the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap’d
furrow sound asleep,
Drowsed with the fume of
poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath
and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a
gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head
across a brook;
Or by a cyder-press,
with patient look,
Thou watchest the last
oozings, hours by hours.’
Phil Smith’s On Walking … and
Stalking Sebald Axminster: Triarchy Press (2014):
‘Multiplicity is the key mythogeographical principle, the principle
of multiplicitous narratives and many histories, disrupting the established
narratives not only to introduce subaltern ones, but … to invent our own’.
