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tramp

POVERTY, POVERTY KNOCK

Up a steep lane banked with a flint wall

are the remains of a workhouse. A heritage

lottery grant has preserved the section

for men in its pristine austerity.

 

In return for a wash, clothes boiled, a bowl

of gruel, a night’s sleep, the following day

from first light they would grind stones – working

a cast iron, giant-size egg slicer, like

a destructive loom. After midday,

and no food, they would tramp, like their Poor Law

forebears, to the next parish, the next workhouse.

 

My grandmother, despite the Welfare State,

her widow’s pension and her three daughters’

pensionable, public service ‘jobs for life’,

invoked the spectre of the workhouse.

And the spectre haunts us still. Poverty is,

at best, a venial sin purged through

working for nowt or as near as nowt –

or a mortal sin, punishable

by eternity in bed & breakfast

after bed & breakfast from town to town

with no table to eat at, nowhere to play…

 

All luxuries were forbidden, so,

at the bottom of the lane, the lads

would stow their smokes in gaps between the flints.

As they set off on their next tramp, I would

like to think they’d all light up and joke

how they had fooled the master yet again

– and curse a bit and laugh a lot. But, perhaps,

they had been brought too low.

 

 

 

DEDHAM VALE REVISITED

Dedham Vale, John Constable, 1802
Dedham Vale, John Constable, 1802
Dedham Vale, John Constable, 1828
Dedham Vale, John Constable, 1828

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

September touches the Vale like a sigh,

a mellow, fruitful suspiration

edging from green to lemon, agitating

gently the skieyest leaves. The Stour

meanders to a sea of clouds vanishing

over an unimaginable Europe.

Dedham Church, a testament to wool,

focuses an especial scene: Saxon names,

corn marigolds, skylarks and enclosures.

 

After Napoleon, Peterloo and his wife’s

slow death, another canvas shows the same

landscape. New buildings exploit the river

and the church tower is luminous yet

vulnerable, not focal, to a whorl

of cumulus billowing from beyond

the horizon over dark, distressed elms.

Crouched under the overgrown bank of a lane,

the last you see of the painting, with her tent

and her cooking pot, a tramp woman

nurses a child under the tumbling sky.