Memory Lanes: Brexit, Chartists, Chindits and Skylarks

The Stonehouse Brick Company’s Edwardian insignia

Are easy to miss as you walk past Spillman’s Pitch,

Where the cobbler sat tapping away, born in the Crimean War,

But still remembered by Irene, just a few years ago,

And where Old Tom, the delivery horse, trudged over the cobblestones,

Munching his way through front garden carrots,

Watching the deliveries of coal and milk and spuds and beer and bread,

And, the fishmonger, basket on head,

Listening to the housewives’ weekly question,

“What have you got for me today?”

While in the evening, tired out mill hands

Would take their beer jugs down to Vesey’s Offie,


Half way down steep Spillmans Pitch,

Getting some choc drops for the children,

Or those long liquorice bootlaces.

Rob and I talked of our teaching careers,

Nearly seventy years’ worth between us,

And that seventy years took us along the Nailsworth branch line,

To see the rusting mighty iron capstans,

One, now toppled, but one still firm and strong,

Once used for winching trucks down the gas works siding,

To a coal tippler (concrete remains there still),

Where a hydraulic ram tipped the trucks' coal


Down a chute to a narrow gauge hopper,

And thence over two bridges and the Frome,

To its destination at Stroud Gasworks –

Spillmans in the 1920s must have been more

LS Lowry than rus in urbe:

Steam whistle hooters,

Gas hissing in mantles,

Rain streaking the windowpanes,

Flat caps bobbing in unison,

Stout boots clattering on the cobbles,

Bread and marg in your pocket,

A small army on the march,

Wife at the washing:

Spillman’s Pitch,

Another Monday morning;

We walked on through water time,

Streams and millraces and water wheels,

To reach Woodchester and Water Lane:

This canopied holloway takes you to the prehistory of Selsley Common

(And memory lane),

One of a number of ancient tracks

That would have interlinked the Five Valley burial mounds and barrows

On the hilltops and valley sides,

A Neolithic tracery, connecting sites at Randwick, Woodchester, Nympsfield, Minchinhampton, Avening, Horsley, the Stanleys, Uley -

Leading to the vision (and occasional roar) of the tidal, mystical Severn,

The sweeping light of sunset cloudscapes,

The silhouettes of the distant mountains;

I talked of my father’s Chindit war -

The Channel 4 programme the night before:

‘Every man who returned was a casualty’,

And how after dad’s funeral,

When walking with Trish on the common,

A skylark soared and sang high in the February sky,

And how I pledged that skylarks and memories of dad

Would be forever conjoined –

Just as I finished this monologue,

We reached the top of the barrow,

Where a skylark stood, staring at us from the ground,

While two others soared singing to the heavens;

I’m not a pagan, but it makes you wonder …

But we did not have long to muse on this:

Our stunned stupefaction was immediately jolted

By the arrival of different ghosts -

Thousands of working men, women and children,

Marching up to the hustings up on the common,

Bands playing, music flowing, banners streaming:

‘LIBERTY’, ‘EQUAL RIGHTS AND EQUAL LAWS’,

‘FOR A NATION TO BE FREE IT IS SUFFICIENT THAT SHE WILLS IT’ …

One Chartist told me how her newspaper,

The Northern Star was eagerly read and shared,

By the working classes,

With discussion groups in the home and pubs,

And how it would herald a new age of democracy –

I showed her the Daily Mail, the Daily Express, and the Sun,

We told her about the referendum and the power and lies of the press,

And how referendums had historically been a tool of populist dictatorships,

Hitler used three, for example,

We gazed at the banner fluttering in the gathering breeze:

‘FOR A NATION TO BE FREE IT IS SUFFICIENT THAT SHE WILLS IT’.

When we turned back round to talk,

The crowds, the hustings, the banners, the bands,

The skylarks had all disappeared,

All that remained was the banner:

‘FOR A NATION TO BE FREE IT IS SUFFICIENT THAT SHE WILLS IT’,

And beneath its shade,

The headlines of the Daily Mail, the Daily Express, and the Sun.

We walked into the sunlight,

I showed Rob another headline:

'As Farage looked on, Le Pen said;

"Look how beautiful beautiful history is ..."'