The Cherry Picker.

Lady Elizabeth Butler’s 1876 painting, “Balaklava,” shows the remnants of the Light Brigade in 1854, straggling back after their ill fated charge against the Russian guns in the Crimea. In the centre of the picture, dismounted, is trooper Pennington, 11th Hussars. It was his shocked and haunted look in this painting that gave me the idea for this poem.

The 11th Hussars were Lord Cardigan’s own regiment. Nicknamed the ‘Cherry Pickers,’ because at sometime in their history they had been found unready for battle, resting in a cherry orchard. This is also believed to be the reason for their cherry coloured britches.

Trooper Pennington, who survived the charge, later posed for this painting and then went on to become an actor. He died in 1923.

The Cherry Picker.

Well I took the shilling and made me mark
with a scratch of the sergeants quill,
an’ I fell in behind,
an’ I marched quick time,
an’ I quickly learned me drill.

They took me aside, asked if I could ride.
Me, who lived behind the plough?
I replied. ‘Of course,’
was put on an ‘orse
an Hussar they said I was now.

Long hours I’d labour, I mastered the sabre
I’d cut, I’d thrust and I’d parry
I was Cardigan’s man now
I’d scrape and I’d bow,
wear britches the colour of cherry.

I drank in the bars, with the other hussars
to forget the smell of the soil.
I kept me nose clean
cos the sergeants was mean
and I feared the lash’s coil.

Then in fifty three, we was sent to sea
to a place they called the Crimea.
It was full of disease
and at night we’d freeze
we disliked the whole idea.

With the Lancers we made, The Light Brigade
and we rode to recover the guns.
Sent up the wrong valley,
a suicide alley,
an ambush the Russians had sprung.

We were cut to shreds, with half of us dead
scythed down by the enemy shells
and when the smoke cleared
my eyes, full of fear,
saw a scene that was straight out of hell.

Those that survived was barely alive
their tunics was tattered and torn
grown men were crying,
horses were dying
I’ve never seen men more forlorn.

I’m lucky they said, that I’m not with the dead,
that the surgeon was skilled with the knife.
But I lost me leg,
so I walk on this peg,
and It’s not left me much of a life.

So when you hear the drum, you turn and you run
you don’t take ‘is majesty’s coin.
Think what you’ve been told
that way you’ll grow old,
I don’t want for my son to join.

Your Hands.

I think I’ll just let this one speak for itself.

Your Hands.

It’s your hands I remember the most.
The hard calloused and leathery skin
of your work worn fingers and thumbs,
ingrained with grime, cracked and scarred
by wind, weather and passing years.

I remember your hands as you milked,
as you washed and wiped and parried
the swipe of a wild whipping tail,
one hand resting with warm reassurance
high up on a young heifer’s flank.

I remember the way that they’d pluck
a whiskered ear of sun gilded barley,
crushing the germ between your palms,
blowing away the chaff in a dusty cloud
then biting the grain, testing its ripeness.

I remember your hands at the hedgerow,
cutting with billhook, trimming and bending,
laying a weave of hazel and hawthorn.
Smelling the wood smoke of your fire,
where cold from the wind, we warmed.

I remember your hands as you rested,
rolling Old Holborne, as neat as you like
with the same hands that hammered
or hefted a spanner, or dug with a spade,
yet ever so deftly that roll up was made.

I remember your hands as you waited,
confined to your chair, clean and cold,
they were stripped of their strength
by months of enforced inactivity.
They were not your hands.

Class Reunion

‘Never look back,’ is a piece of advice that I am not sure I agree with. Last year I met up with an old friend, someone I had lost contact with when I left the school and the area I had lived in. This led recently to me attending an informal reunion of some of the members of my old class of 1961. I had seen none of these old classmates for 49 years. Sometimes the only way to capture something on paper seems to be in the form of a poem. Poetry has an ability to handle feelings and emotions so well; this was one of those occasions.

Class Reunion

The room is crowded, heads all turn,
familiarity… and yet?
My mind is racing to decode,
unlock a past that hides behind
receding hairlines, streaks of grey
and faces etched and lined by life.

A simple sound, a schoolboy jest,
a school girl laugh.
A voice… that tugs away the years
has slipped from lips that I once kissed.
Again I’m tongue tied, lost for words,
time stripped away to who I was.

But by this simple memory stirred,
I see in all those lived in faces,
lost and long forgotten friends,
whose shrugs, whose smiles, whose laughs, whose giggles
haven’t changed, they’re all still there,
for all their worries, all their cares.

Their chatter echoes playground chants.
Where did you go? Where have you been?
What happened to..? Who married him?
Do you remember…?
Yes… I do.
Oh yes! I do remember you.

The Last Tommy.

A spell in the army and an interest in military history has led to many of my poems having a military theme and I will group these under the category of ‘Barrack Room Ballads’, borrowed from Kipling of course.

A short while ago the last of the First World War veterans died and at the time several good poems were written to commemorate the occasion, including Carol Anne Duffy’s wonderfully imaginative poem ‘The last Post’ , however I felt that I wanted to mark the occasion myself somehow. This was the result.

The Last Tommy

A lifetime lived and then some more
nearly a century of silence and then,
he remembered, recalled to mind,
the horrors of that heinous time

A gentle man, West Country born,
a tradesman who would work with pride.
A family man that honoured truth,
showed no regret for his lost youth.

He watched as slowly, one by one,
his band of brothers slipped behind
and scared that we’d forget the past,
decided he’d speak out at last.

Then history’s fallen, with his tongue,
rose from the trenches, tired and torn,
with hollow eyes that seemed to plead.
‘Listen to him. Remember me.’

Who will remind us now he’s gone?
A generation’s mouthpiece mourned.
The falling poppies will perhaps,
then we’ll remember Harry Patch.