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Beeston

SERENDIPITY

Pursuing our Holy Grail of finding
four balloon back Victorian dining chairs
in good condition, we drove, to furthest
Cheshire – near where the motorway grows
and the villages have Anglo-Saxon names –
the second Saturday before Christmas
to an antique centre once a dairy farm.
In seven erstwhile milking sheds, covering
fifty thousand square feet, were displayed
a range of products of the industrial
revolution – A Hornby train set,
a tractor seat, a Singer sewing machine,
a framed, signed photo of Edwina Currie,
a Parker-Knoll chair, a room full of plastic
Disney figurines, etcetera,
etcetera. We ate an over priced
toasted sandwich each and left chairless.

Heading home, we stopped, on a whim, in Nantwich –
one of Cheshire’s three ancient salt towns –
where you had spent your early adolescence.
This was the pub your parents ran, there
was where the Girl Guides met, here where you
and your best friend Joan took each other’s snaps
with a Kodak Brownie. We entered
St Marys, the fourteenth century
parish church – grand as a cathedral – Joan
had ten years later been married in.
A choir was rehearsing a Christmas concert.
We sat in the loud stillness churches make.

As we drove to Chester on the A51,
twelfth century Beeston Castle was
silhouetted in ruined splendour
against a sunset of streamers of pink
tinged with grey. We talked of the singing
we had chanced upon and, almost wistfully,
of that long, eclectic tradition
seemingly transcending time and fashion
as if it were something substantial not
a trick of stone or shadow.

 

 

 

AND WITH A LITTLE PIN

Flint Castel, Samuel & Nathaniel Buck, 1742
Flint Castel, Samuel & Nathaniel Buck, 1742

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On liberty’s last morning, he said mass

in the Great Tower – the chapel was cold

as winter. August’s sun warmed the rebels

riding along the estuary shore,

their drums silent. He watched from the walls.

At his back, the seas breaking on Ireland. King

and Usurper, first cousins, exchanged

purple words in the base court, a surfeit of

epithets: bombast, self-pity. Serfs

were indifferent but Richard’s dog fawned

on new majesty. The epicure

who bespoke a coat of cloth of gold

rode captive from Flint to London in the same

suit of clothes. Through Chester he was jeered, stoned.

 

Twenty miles inland,  a sandstone hill

 – sheer to the west – rises from the plain.

Parliament’s army sacked the castle.

Westwards there is the estuary’s mouth,

the livid sea. Above twitching fern,

a hawk stoops. Stones, flung into the well’s blackness,

fall through the hill seawards and never sound.

 

Beeston Castle, Cheshire, Benjamin Pouncy, 1773
Beeston Castle, Cheshire, Benjamin Pouncy, 1773