An English Life
It is midnight the Milk train pulls into darnall station
No ordinary passengers here
Steelworkers with their families
Loaded with fishing tackle, sandwiches and maggots
The Fossdyke in Lincolnshire, their destination
The fare Half a crown for happiness
The long walk in the dark
A stairway to heaven in my memory
Dawn on the Foss and a cup of tea,
Fever in the blood, the first eel of the day
Our cane rods lovingly handed down from father to son.
I remember, Pheasants looking for mates
Shrieking their songs of love
Swans begging for scraps
Their majestic white necks, nodding,
A greeting into their kingdom
The mist off the water revealing
Families being together, laughing, enjoying what was free.
For tomorrow the grime returns.
A conversation with a stranger then out of a bag,
The rabbits, sometimes hare, sometimes pheasant.
Onions and carrots, shortly follow
The smell, forever linked with summer
The scent of my childhood
Summers were hotter then
At times I drank the Foss, for I was nature’s child
Being clean was never a priority,
Catching fish was, never killed always returned,
Our Covenant with Nature
For it is the sport that we honour
On the train back, the talk is fish, who caught the biggest,
who caught the most
Sprawled on the seats my five brothers and sister,
all in a heap fast asleep.
Dreaming of floats going under, catching that elusive Tench,
Catching more than my brothers
Small dreams for some, the World to us
A spawning ground for future World champions.
Dawn Breaks once more
And a small unassuming man closes the door,
Off to the Steelworks,
But he must have been a demon in bed to have fathered seven kids
My mother wakes us,
Four in a double bed and one bed wetter
[...] Read more
poem by Steven Cooke
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