Dick Jones' Patteran Pages

THE SUN HOTEL, DEDHAM, 1954

I wake to the hysteria
of bells - medieval laughter
out of my stained glass dream.

Paddling Daddy's slippers
across bare boards
(as black and ancient as the mud

that silts up the Stour),
I reach the leaded window.
Beyond, the church squats on its bones,

brooding music.  Hymns are hatched
stillborn; organ voices rage in vain,
quelled by the crowing of the bells.

The street in both directions
is innocent of cars.  Phantom mist -
an atavistic veil - blurs outlines:

passers-by are cloaked and cowled,
pacing the tracks and byways
of their ancestors.

My child's breath smokes
the glass.  Morning thickens;
even the light seems ancient now.

Yawning, I curl back
into a tumulus of sheets.
The bells cascade, mocking the shape

of my few years.  I sleep again
and now, in the mapless dark,
my green heart beats faster.

Mine is the steady pulse
that animates this room;
its beams draw new sap

from my source.  Plaster,
lath and tiles expand;
the house tests its roots.

The bells rejoice  a continuity of mornings.
This, the moment and the lost years
are swallowed in their shining.

A delightful Saturday afternoon spent en famille in the company of long-term visitor to the Patteran Pages, Carroll McNeill.  Carroll is over from California visiting the UK & she made it across London & out to Hertfordshire, battling against that contemporary version of storms, floods & hostile natives, delays on public transport.  On arrival she bonded with the kids within seconds & we all rambled off to the Red Lion for lunch & much conversation.

There’s always a modicum of risk when we transpose from written words issued at a distance to a face-to-face encounter.  But it was the easiest of meetings & all too brief.  Carroll took several photos, carefully edited copies of which will appear on the Pages soon.

Bon voyage back home, Carroll, to the comfort of your much-missed pillow... 

.o0o.

Many years ago a college friend of mine did a teaching practise in a Catholic primary school in South-East London. He was appalled when, on the first day, he was asked to witness the punishment by the headmaster of an 8-year-old boy.  It was administered in the form of six strokes of a cane on the miserable child’s bottom. After the headmaster dismissed the weeping boy, he rationalised the chastisement to my shaken friend as ‘beating the devil out & God in’.

Corporal punishment was outlawed in British schools in 1987. However, the notion of legitimised physical assault on a minor seems now to belong to an era much further removed in history than a mere two decades ago.

But check this out. It’s the website of one Joey Salvati, a carpenter of New Kensington, Pennsylvania, who was told by God to manufacture wooden paddles with which to beat recalcitrant children. 

I have just deleted a couple of paragraphs of spluttering commentary, feeling that Joey’s own words represent the moral squalor so much more effectively.

.o0o.

Oh, to be in England now that April's there.
Robert Browning

Maybe with Carroll’s visit still in mind, I share with you a couple of potent images of the mellow springtime England now beginning to emerge after a sombre winter – a pint of England’s greatest bitter, Timothy Taylor Landlord (look on & weep, Mike) & a chart tabulating the player positions for cricket.