In Memoriam.
This is from 'I Got On At Hallelujah Lamppost' written in the early '80s and published in Anglo Welsh Review in 1985 (my first professional publication.) Lately I've been performing it in the very different but always deeply appreciative settings of Norfolk folk: The Wolf - the Wolferton Folk Club, Norfolk - Tuesday 18 April and Folkspot Internet Radio the following Sunday. It's the sort of thing our daughter studied at University for her Thatcher's Britain course. Hang on, that wasn't history, that was our life! I did undercover work as a bus conductor (the Muse knew that - I thought I was paying the rent) to research this sequence of vignettes of the Eastern valley of Gwent: a kind of compressed verse novel encapsulating a modern industrial world. Until they got rid of the bus conductors... and then the steelworkers...and then the miners: they haven't got rid of poets - yet - so here it is. It's became much more prophetic in time with the old elegaic heavy metal community replaced by the cash-jingling 'MORE of lots of MORE to lose, mortuary bound' shiny new culture, as long as you had a job to pay for it. Wherever you stand in that debate - and families have been riven anew about it on Facebook all week - this is what happened in 'Thatcher's Britain' and this is what died to create it.
3. Fire & Brimstone
This valley had iron
In its guts,
Steeled itself to change
Moving with the trains,
Dug into its coal
For a port for the ores of Spain.
It had shod the Great Bear
Of the Steppes with skates
Made In Blaenafon
Had united the States
Across the wild west
With Monmouthshire iron.
And when King Coal called
For a Copper Grail
For his stainless steel Table,
Tongues of fire could purge
The iron in the soul
At Pontypool inferno.
4.
Conductor
The conductor stubs out
Nostalgia and fag
For the rush down valley,
While through his worn bag
Go all the colours of the river,
The green and the silver and the discoloured copper,
Changing
Forever.
5.
Afon Garde
Afon raging with the rain.
The cut steelworks sinks in the sodden clay.
Steel-faced pickets slam a portcullis
And draw up the bridge of their riverbank scrapyard:
The workers
United
Will never be defeated.
Red-soiled, livid, steaming, green,
Fed with liquid fire and gases,
Afon, desperate, blindly burrows
Like a dragon for the sea.
And all the Sunday School kids
Are Monday-morning singing....
The Word
Is on the dole
He'd rather give us the past tense of coalfield.
Emmanuel
Is on the dole
He's gone down the drain with all the rotten leaves.
Panteg steelworks at twelve o'clock,
Busmen chasing overtime, pickets - jobs,
Eyes calm as anthracite,
Clouds lined with lead
The workers
United
Will never be defeated.
6.
New Towns For Old
In Tal-y-waun
The girls are like leather, the beauty ingrained,
In 15, at 50, it remains, on the wane
Like the ghost of Coal always in the unworked vein
And what is already has, and what has will again
In Tal-y-waun.
In the the New Town
In the the New Town
In the the New Town
In the the New Town
The old canal is polished up, the gardens laid down,
And pushchair trolley women bus aroundaroundaround
And brakes and valves and services - autopias - abound.
Parked in his mother's arms high above the ground,
The brand new Son of Cymru gives a multistorey frown ,
MORE of lots of MORE to lose, mortuary-bound,
And after six, just trodden chips-
Not a soul to be found.
April 18, 2013
April 15, 2013
Happy Birthday To Folkspot
http://www.lynnnews.co.uk/lifestyle/lifestyle-and-leisure-news/great-massingham-it-s-happy-birthday-to-folkspot-radio-1-4992392
The pictures are of Oliver's Army making our debut online, on air and onstage (never do things by halves) at Folkspot a week after the anniversary (on or about my 57th birthday) of Folkspot radio reported under my very own new byeline in the Lynn News. This is the article that made me a folk correspondent for my local community newspaper. And Oliver's Army are the band that heralded the beginning of my career as lyricist, lead poet, occasional vocalist - singing Green Shirt by Elvis Costello - backing vocalist and drummer in a folk-punk-prog band.
A big week! (We shouldn't have eaten that Pepper before we went out, though, judging by the first photo.)
That gig did for Margaret Thatcher anyway. She died the next day...
March 16, 2013
Gin Trap Folk
Go to Gin Trap Folk link - under Bard on the Wire pane opposite - for a write up of a typical Gin Trap Acoustic Evening in the digital edition the Lynn News 'Weekend Live'
Photos here by landlord Steve Knowles who also sings a capella in Italian and English at the evenings (including that heart-rending one from the The Godfather, Speak softly, love) Is there nothing the man can't do?
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Photos here by landlord Steve Knowles who also sings a capella in Italian and English at the evenings (including that heart-rending one from the The Godfather, Speak softly, love) Is there nothing the man can't do?
March 06, 2013
Coming Home in Droitwich/ ‘Poetry Masterclass’ at Droitwich Spa High School
I called this ‘Last Tango In Droitwich’ in my diary because, after a teaching career that I finally gave up to be a full time writer and performer, I’m always telling myself it’s the last one. Just like the last five or six school visits I’ve done. I've had more comebacks than Frank Sinatra.
But this was, quite simply, the most enjoyable I’ve ever done. So maybe I really should stop now, at the top!
The day was four one hour sessions – with a twenty minute break after two hours - in the (excellent) library. The two middle hours were with Year 12. The outer two hours were with two top set English GCSE groups. The brief was to explain to Sixth Formers the link between poetic form and meaning – why write an ode or a villanelle or a sonnet for instance (or free verse for that matter, that’s a form too) ? ie form is a labour (of love) what does it give you? - and to encourage (extremely bright) Year 11s to sign up for English Literature in the Sixth Form.
My first decision was not to ‘teach’ – they get excellent teaching all day from people who know them and the courses much better than I - but to talk as a practitioner. Fortunately, my first book of poems Coming Home – published in 1991 when I had a shock of hair (and that biog pic is more and more of a shock these days) - is a compendium of poetic forms employed for a definite and evolving purpose. Coming Homee aims, ambitiously, to tells the story of evolution, historical development and then spiritual aspiration through a range of increasingly ‘conscious’ forms, including ‘free’ and modernist and minimalist ones. The final section is the Persian ghazal, a combination of intense freedom - lyrical, soaring emotion - with the tightest metre and rhyme imaginable. It is said to be the source of the Italian sonnet, which westernises some of its exotic Eastern/timeless features. On the way to this section, I explore a ‘formless’ form for gas, a villanelle for stone, terza rima for metal, free verse for vegetation, a rap for worm, a Petrarchan sonnet for human, a ballad for mediaeval, a dramatic monologue for Victorian etc. Re-encountering the book as I planned the ‘masterclass’ I found myself both grateful for the coherent compendium of verse forms and rather impressed by my young self’s ardour, and (as Ted Hughes wrote of them) the poems’ ‘tenacity, wholesomeness and strength.’ All of this came from the inspiration: a vision of ‘why we are here’ that accepted evolution but saw no reason to doubt a greater spiritual purpose in it.
My students for the day were awake to all this. By chance, there was a fly chart from a previous lesson announcing that three quarters of Americans don’t believe in Evolution. We wondered if ‘Creationism’ could be quite that widespread even in the Bible Belt of the USA but nevertheless the sophistication with which Year 11 students approached the philosophy in my introductory ‘Invocation’ where evolution is set within a framework of human potential for the divine was staggering. We hear a lot about how ‘kids today’ don’t read enough, are lost in special effects cinema and text speak etc etc. Well, these weren’t. The way they debated whether there was anything inherently masculine in the all flash and no substance persona I used to ‘become’ Halley’s Comet was confident, articulate and masterly. I have never been so sorry to see a class go. I think by the end of the day we might have split the atom and also sketched out the poetic music for a mould-breaking spoken word Sergeant Pepper.
The Sixth Form applied themselves to the link between form and meaning with increasing insight and it was clear to both the teacher Mr Izod (or Fat Bloke as he permitted me to call him when I said was it all right to call him ‘David’) and myself that all they needed to do was trust their instincts for how form created meaning and then merely have the confidence to articulate this in the critical language their teachers have taught them. I was sorry not to get on to the Chorus of Greek Philosophers I had planned in which the whole group could have taken part but I did enjoy the way a boy and a girl performed the ‘male’ and ‘female’ voices of my Song of the Wedding Rings. They said there was no danger of a personal romance and marriage emerging from their dialogue but poetry is a kind of spell so you never know. That said, I originally wrote that poem for a wedding service – which another married couple also used – and both marriages ended in divorce so maybe not. More immediately, the students started to see what all the precision engineering that goes into crafting words into terza rima gives a poet that merely – and much more easily - writing lines of dialogue doesn’t. The fact that the sections allocated to ‘He’ and ‘She’ rhymed internally but (unlike Romeo and Juliet) never with each other was noticed and understood. The fact that a poet has to cut out all the dross verbiage and really concentrate the meaning into that tight –jewel-like– form. The fact that there is forward progression (unlike a villanelle) but that progress is slow, as in the grinding away of ego towards real marriage etc etc. All very like working with gold.
As was the whole day, in fact. Thank you Droitwich. My Last Tango. Until the next one?
See also: http://garethcalway.blogspot.co.uk/p/poem-of-month.html Stone
February 26, 2013
The Next Movie
Filmed this in January. Unless the director has fled to Tehran, it should come out this spring.
February 12, 2013
Kasturi mriga
I am assuming, perhaps wrongly, that my blog labels are responsible for these as I use the kasturi mriga in several of my blog-posted ghazals (an Indian love lyric originating in Persia.) The third couplet from 'My Valentine' ghazal (see my previous post, Your Valentine?) is one such:
My Valentine is a priestess who trails her heaven scent
To hell and back round a navel the musk-deer endlessly roves.
The extract quoted below is where it is coming from.
" There is a beautiful story of a Kasturi-mriga* which brings out the nature of all spiritual Sadhana. Once, while roaming about and frolicking among hills and dales, the Kasturi-mriga was suddenly aware of an exquisitely beautiful scent, the like of which it had never known. The scent stirred the inner depths of its soul so profoundly that it determined to find its source. So keen was its longing that notwithstanding the severity of cold or the intensity of scorching heat, by day as well as by night, it carried on its desperate search for the source of the sweet scent. It knew no fear or hesitation but undaunted went on its elusive search until, at last, happening to lose its foothold on a cliff, it had a precipitous fall resulting in a fatal injury. While breathing its last the deer found that the scent which had ravished its heart and inspired all these efforts came from its own navel. This last moment of the deer’s life was its happiest, and there was on its face inexpressible peace. "
from Meher Baba's spiritual discourse The Deeper Aspects of Sadhana
Whenever I read this fable of the quest of love, in which the little self 'dies', it seems to jog a memory of something deeply true (and exquisitely beautiful) and there have been nods of audience recognition as I've been performing that couplet and its source story this week. Whether it's just a story or whether the endangered musk deer really do chase their own inner heavenliness all over their natural habitat, I don't know. But I'm sure human beings do.
February 08, 2013
Your Valentine?
My Valentine is a picture, her painted eye like a rose,
Her body held in a soft flame of stillness, freed in a pose.
My Valentine is a dancer, unfastened hair like a tide,
Her fingers fly out of time's rut: and pluck my heart as it blows.
My Valentine is a priestess, who trails her heaven scent
To hell and back round a navel the musk-deer* endlessly roves.
My Valentine is a goddess, her neck is softer than sky:
She turns to me like a planet, and everything else explodes.
O heart, this quest is your own end, you're lost and that's why you win,
You’re stripped of even your held breath and kiss what God alone knows.
*The Kasturi-mriga, a deer of the Himalayas whose navel yields musk.
FACING PAGE
with love.....
END NOTES
Room at the Gin productions: combining words, music, theatre and visual arts in a greater whole.
Tel: 01485 571828 (orders welcome) www.garethcalway.co.uk
Persian ghazal (lyric) © Gareth Calway 2013
Macro shot of eye by Barbara Humphries, used with permission.
Though the sophisticated scoff at those who drink the dregs
They will lose their faith when they arrive at the tavern door.
Hafez
February 02, 2013
Room at the Gin
Gareth wrote and performed in the first 'Room at the Gin' event last December which used the stable to explore the roots of Christmas.
In each case, the idea is to select a room at the Gin Trap Inn that suits the material being staged. The next 'Room at the Gin' event, scheduled for the spring - a fusion of theatre, poetry and music - will explore how King Henry got rid of another Norfolk queen, Ann Boleyn, who is said to still haunt Blickling Hall every May 19.
http://www.lynnnews.co.uk/lifestyle/lifestyle-and-leisure-news/ringstead-one-man-show-gives-a-gory-taste-of-history-1-4695460
January 25, 2013
A Punktured History of Britain from Creation to Cromwell
Julius Caesar
And the Roman Empire
Couldn't conquer the blue sky...
Far away and long ago, the land was divided and leaderless.
A great king, a dragon head, was needed
To unite the people and drive out the invaders...
As the leaves of summer break in spring
From forest, field and tree
So let the spirit’s freedom burst
From the walls of this Priory...
I am wild to hold, though I seem so tame,
More fair than mortals can say
And I sold my heart for a worldly crown
And I'll take your breath away...
Ann Boleyn, King Arthur, Boudicca, The Peasants Revolt, not in that order. All this and much else besides a week today at the Gin Trap. And that's just the first half before Cromwell. Don't miss this punky sleigh ride through British history!
I'm posting this on Burns Night Day and with Murray hopefully saltiring Britain towards an Aussie Open final. There's nothing Little England ('let's ditch Scotland, let's ditch Europe, let's disappear up our Offa's dyke') about the Britain I celebrate here.
January 15, 2013
PRESS RELEASE- CROMWELL’S TALKING HEAD (January 14 )
January 30 is an ominous date in any royal calendar. It was the day Charles I was beheaded in 1649. But did you know that Oliver Cromwell was also beheaded (not to mention hanged, drawn and quartered) on that date in 1660? The crucial difference being that Cromwell had already been dead and buried for two years when it happened! Norfolk author Gareth Calway’s dramatic monologue tells the story.
Cromwell, one of the 57 signatories of Charles I’s death warrant, died in 1658 as England’s only Republican Head of State and was buried with great honour and embalmed ( against his wishes) as a king. But at the Restoration, his reviled body was exhumed, disgraced and the head put on a spike on top of Westminster Hall. It remained there for 25 years until a lightning bolt removed it. It was smuggled away the next morning by an old soldier and hidden up a chimney for decades and then had an extraordinary and often gruesome afterlife before eventually being buried secretly at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge in 1960. A plaque there commemorates the fact. So the East Anglia which gave Cromwell his first prominence remains haunted by his story and the old revolutionary head remains at the heart of an England he dominated.
Gareth’s carefully researched dramatic monologue makes the most of the gory aspects of this true gothic story and was a sell out success when it was performed at Oliver Cromwell’s House on Sep 3 (the date of Cromwell’s decease in 1658 and of his three mightiest victories in 1649,1650 and 1651).
Cromwell’s Talking Head will be touring as a one man show this year and you can see the performance at two East Anglian venues at the end of this month: on January 30 itself at Oliver Cromwell’s House in Ely (reserve tickets on 01353 662062, £7.50 includes tour of house and glass of Cromwell cider) at 2 pm and then at the Gin Trap Inn, Ringstead on February 1st at 8.30 pm, preceded by a first half A Punktured History of Britain. (reserve tickets on 01485 571828, £7)
Further details contact Melanie Calway on melaniecalway@gmail.com or on 01485 571828
ancyrian, cole green, sedgeford, norfolk, PE36 5LS
http://garethcalway.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/my-new-book-and-first-collaboration.html There is a podcast at:
http://readingroom.podbean.com/2012/07/23/room-29-cromwell%E2%80%99s-talking-head-by-gareth-calway-%E2%80%93-a-reading-room-special/
and a review at:
http://www.radiodramareviews.com/id1161.html
Cromwell's Talking Head (text/art book)
Dramatic monologue by Cromwell’s severed head with folklore/fantasy illustrations; "A triumph of narration and vocal colour" (Radio drama reviews); "Interesting and lively new take on Cromwell" (Cromwell House Museum).
On sale at Oliver Cromwell’s House, by ISBN 978 0 9573960 0 5 and on www.garethcalway.co.uk
Cromwell's Talking Head will be featured on the Afternoon Show on Radio Norfolk on Tuesday 29 after three pm.
http://www.cambridge-news.co.uk/Ely/Fun-and-games-to-mark-Charles-Is-grisly-demise-01022013.htm for an online front page in the Ely edition of the Cambridgeshire Evening News.
Cromwell, one of the 57 signatories of Charles I’s death warrant, died in 1658 as England’s only Republican Head of State and was buried with great honour and embalmed ( against his wishes) as a king. But at the Restoration, his reviled body was exhumed, disgraced and the head put on a spike on top of Westminster Hall. It remained there for 25 years until a lightning bolt removed it. It was smuggled away the next morning by an old soldier and hidden up a chimney for decades and then had an extraordinary and often gruesome afterlife before eventually being buried secretly at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge in 1960. A plaque there commemorates the fact. So the East Anglia which gave Cromwell his first prominence remains haunted by his story and the old revolutionary head remains at the heart of an England he dominated.
Gareth’s carefully researched dramatic monologue makes the most of the gory aspects of this true gothic story and was a sell out success when it was performed at Oliver Cromwell’s House on Sep 3 (the date of Cromwell’s decease in 1658 and of his three mightiest victories in 1649,1650 and 1651).
Further details contact Melanie Calway on melaniecalway@gmail.com or on 01485 571828
ancyrian, cole green, sedgeford, norfolk, PE36 5LS
http://readingroom.podbean.com/2012/07/23/room-29-cromwell%E2%80%99s-talking-head-by-gareth-calway-%E2%80%93-a-reading-room-special/
and a review at:
http://www.radiodramareviews.com/id1161.html
Cromwell's Talking Head (text/art book)
Dramatic monologue by Cromwell’s severed head with folklore/fantasy illustrations; "A triumph of narration and vocal colour" (Radio drama reviews); "Interesting and lively new take on Cromwell" (Cromwell House Museum).
On sale at Oliver Cromwell’s House, by ISBN 978 0 9573960 0 5 and on www.garethcalway.co.uk
Cromwell's Talking Head will be featured on the Afternoon Show on Radio Norfolk on Tuesday 29 after three pm.
http://www.cambridge-news.co.uk/Ely/Fun-and-games-to-mark-Charles-Is-grisly-demise-01022013.htm for an online front page in the Ely edition of the Cambridgeshire Evening News.
January 06, 2013
Broadcast on Folkspot Radio
The script of an hour-long music and spoken word collaboration performed live on Folkspot radio on January 6 2013 (at Great Massingham) surveying British history and arts projects scheduled for the year ahead - text written (with a little help from Neil Young and The Beatles) and performed by yours truly. The music (except where indicated) was written and performed by Mark Fawcett.
'Well I dreamed I saw the knights in armour coming
Saying something about a queen.
There were peasants singing and drummers drumming
And the archer split the tree.
There was a fanfare blowing to the sun
That was floating on the breeze...' (Neil Young)
Far away and long ago, the land was divided and leaderless. Barbarians invaded from north, east and south. A great king, a dragon head, was needed to unite the people and drive out the invaders. Such a king would prove himself by drawing out from a weathered rock a wondrous sword. Many years passed and many strong men failed. At last, a boy succeeded. His name was Arthur. He established a great fastness called Camelot and trained a band of mounted warriors called The Knights of the Round Table. Together, they drove out the barbarians:
At the end of the world,
Death-cries in long-axed waves on the wind,
The howling of sea-wolves
Breaking from thick throats like heart’s hope
At the end of the world,
The cry of a thousand farmboys dead...
Surrendering ground for thundering hooves to sunder the Saxon.
Space to die in
Or my name’s not Arthur...
Our heels print the end of that world in a line
In the westering turf that gives back and holds and gives back and holds and gives back and
holds and holds and pens it
Lladd, for the explosive, mounted lightning charge of the British
Driven against a last ditch in their own land
There, like a squealing boar for slaughter.
A hard British line in the soft wet turf
These pirate pig-English could not read/
Though shoved around later
By strokes of non-combatant Latin/
And monks who couldn’t fight/.
Celtic hoof-prints that would not admit/
Corbenic deconsecrated/
The Grail put to hard use in kitchens/
Grail-maiden wastes fertilised/
In fierce field-brothels of endless yielding/
Gwenhwyfar plucked as a concubine/
Her white phantom beauty/
Laid like a ghost on a bloodstained bed/
And called by a C word that isn’t Cymru/
Breeding an Angle country/
Whose monk-curse is less than the air/
Saesneg is written on / the snorting ash/
Civitas burns to./ Instead of which/
(drums)
Thanks to our play of thundering hooves/
Thundering hooves in defence of these islands/
The land remains Britain for fifty years/
And Logres forever!
(German) And tomorrow belongs to me. (wielding axe) Tiw’s day, Woden’s day, Thor’s day, Freya’s day.
© Gareth Calway 2011
Hello Jennifer in Calfornia, Howard in Andalucia, Emma and Tony in Brighton and Kevin in the Cafe Abersychano. And all the others who dig us. I said ‘the time of King Arthur’ and so far I’ve stayed in a sixth century in which there may well have been a British cavalry general – possibly even called Arthur – who kept the invaders at bay for 50 years. There is archaeological evidence for this. But after that Arthur passes into Welsh legend via a dreadful summer without sunshine caused by a meteor striking the world or an underwater volcano - popularly remembered as the start of the Dark Ages - and in due course into Norman and mediaeval romance.
12C Welsh Monk
God sends a bolt from the heavens, fire and brimstone from under the earth. In 536, a summer without sunshine all over the world. In 539, Arthur and his dark son Mordred, the evil one, murder each other at the icy battle of Camlaan. Morrigan Macha Bodbh, Celtic triple goddess of birth, marriage and death – Mordred’s mother, Arthur’s sister – ships him beyond the sunset to the mystical isle of Avalon. From Avalon, Arthur watches as his realm of Logres, his faithful Lancelot and his queen Guinevere are all consumed by a love too hungry for this world ...and for six of the seven heavens.
Sixth Heaven (ghazal, with Indian music)
Lancelot (sings and speaks alternate couplets)
Your face that burns upon my Eye in searing fiery gale:
More clear than any seen on earth or heavenward trail.
Sir Lancelot has failed at last, by love’s Cup undone.
His thought and self are shrivelled lifting Guinevere’s veil.
I see your face in everything, but cannot leap the gulf
Between belief in what I see and being what I fail.
She feels his wreck in her, a bliss that pierces his heart
And bleeds from hers like wounds of Passion’s holiest nail.
The agony of longing long, the ecstasy of pain
In love-struck hearts the Sun uplifts through bars of a gaol!
The Sun is Everything and nothing isn’t the Sun:
A black hole all-consumed in one whole - yet shadows prevail.
In sainted flames of love, with nothing else it can see
It burns away in grief, this Eye that can’t have the Grail.
O Lancelot, her Absent Heart is All to you now.
She’s in the Seventh Sun, where Lovers leap and visions...fail.
© Gareth Calway 2012
from the Ballad of Margery Kempe
Speaking of visions, we have a famous one in West Norfolk. Margery Kempe was a burgess’s wife in Bishop’s Lynn in the late 14C, early 15C (the reigns of Richard II and Henry IV Part 1 – Black Death, Peasants Revolt.) Lynn was a great seaport then second only to London on the east coast and part of the Hanseatic union and Margery’s father was mayor and sheriff several times. But after twenty years of breeding fourteen children with her slightly hopeless husband, John, she started dressing in the white robes of a holy woman and going off on dangerous pilgrimages to Rome and the Holy Land, weeping loudly about Jesus’ suffering to the annoyance of many churchmen who tried unsuccessfully to control her. She later dictated a book about her experiences – the Book of Margery Kempe - which is said to be the first autobiography in English. She is credited with saving St Margaret’s, her beloved parish church, from the Great Fire of Lynn in 1421 by prayer – and various practical suggestions to God about how to put it out (sending a snowstorm.) Her book describes the visions she had all her adult life, including the holy ghost as a noisy dove bellowing in her right ear which she requested God change into a merry robin. We’re hoping to stage our show - the Book Launch of Margery Kempe – at St Margaret’s itself later this year. Here she tells her story:
God tunes the bellows in my ear
Into a robin’s song
And sails my soul to holy lands
Through world and priestly storm.
Each babe in arms this creature sees
Is Christ the child to me
And every handsome man in Rome
His manhood deity.
Though York’s Archbishop damn my tears
As Lollard-work or Devil’s
The anchoress of Norwich says
‘They do the work of angels.
‘The Devil has no power where
Contrition and compassion
Weep humbly from a homely heart
In agonies of passion.’
But, Mother, does this roaring passion,
This bottomless weeping well,
This tongue of hot consuming flame
Fly out from heaven or hell?
For long ago I sinned a sin
That’s never been confessed,
(Except to God) a Lollard sin
Or else a sin of flesh
And though unworldly now I seem
And lost in visions quite
I brewed, had fourteen babes, before
I dressed in virgin white.
And cut a dash through Bishop’s Lynn
Proud daughter of its Mayor,
My cloaks with modish tippets slashed,
And gold pipes in my hair
Till hearing heaven’s Song of Songs
I shunned the gutter’s ooze
‘And though you rule me, husband dear,
A single life I choose.’
‘But Margery, does this roaring passion,
This bottomless weeping well,
This tongue of hot consuming flame
Fly out from heaven or hell?’
John, every pilgrim step I trudged
From wedlock’s grave mundane
And churchman’s plot, was heaven-winged
By doves that sang God’s name...
© Gareth Calway 2012
Speaking of churchmen’s plots, Binham Priory – where we staged a show last summer – has a history worthy of Peyton Place. , Priors going truant, or being put in irons, revolting peasants burning the rolls, haunted walls and of course the whole drama of the Dissolution of the Monasteries. Here’s our Dylanesque take on it all.
Dissolution Row: The Ballad of Binham Priory
Call their names from the rubble: Alexander de Langley,
Mad as a scholar – ‘here’.
William de Somerton, William Dyxwell,
Priors and bad boys - ‘here.’
A mad monk in solitary’s dungeon-chains,
Tortured to brake his devil;
Alchemy funded by holy sales,
Sieges, arrests and trouble;
Monks eating bran and drinking rain
Till King John raised the siege;
A wanderlust prior, administ-truant,
Deposed and then reprieved.
As the leaves of summer break in spring
From forest, field and tree
So let the spirit’s freedom burst
From the walls of this Priory.
The peasants were revolting here
In 1381
When Master Lister led the charge
And derring does were done.
‘Enough!’ he cried, ‘of fattened bishops
Fed on Priory rolls,
Enough of tenants, rents and lords
And serfdom’s heavy loads.’
‘I’ll join that fight!’ said Binham John Lister
To his name-sake of Felmingham
George whose Norfolk Peasant Spring
Brought mayhem into Binham.
‘As the leaves of summer break in spring
From forest, field and tree
So let the spirit’s freedom burst
From the walls of this Priory!’
In Norwich, the Bishop Dispenser caught wind
Of the peasants’ merry fire,
And the Fightin’ Bishop’s fist of stone
Killed it with his ire.
‘Lister of Felmingham, for sins against
Your betters and your King,
I’ll have your guts for my Bishop’s garter
And the serfs can kiss my ring.’
‘You can have my neck and guts’ said Lister
But my soul flies straight to heaven
When Adam delved and Eve span, ‘lord’,
What rents were recked in Eden?
‘As the leaves of summer break in spring
From forest, field and tree
So let the spirit’s freedom burst
From the walls of this Priory.’
The old order stood another six generations,
A flint face carved in art
Then Lister’s spirit came back to haunt
The Priory’s stony heart:
He laughed as King Henry’s Inspectors Called,
‘Found fault’ with the Priory rolls,
‘Down with these rood screens, saints and crowns
And idol Gods on poles;
‘Whitewash these saints from the walls of the nave,
A clear new page for the Word,
Your bishops’ bank is ruined now
There are no serfs to herd!
‘As the leaves of summer break in spring
From forest, field and tree
So let the spirit’s freedom burst
From the walls of this Priory.’
This high Notre Dame of Norfolk shrunk
To a nave-sized Parish Church,
Abandoned wings sold off for stone
To men scarce more than serfs
But when Paston quarried the haunted pile
To build a house in the grounds,
A wall killed a workman and none to this day
Will build in Priory bounds.
Three miles to the West, Roman relics and smoke
Rise again from Celtic Earth
Like the re-appeared saints whose rooted gaze
Reclaim the walls of this church.
As the leaves of summer break in spring
From forest, field and tree
So let the spirit’s freedom burst
From the walls of this Priory.
Let the holy rain of autumn fall
From the solitary tree
And the grass grow wild and the four winds blow
Through the grounds of this Priory.
© Gareth Calway 2012
The great legs of Henry VIII loom large over the Dissolution and he’s also the subject of another show of ours: Tom and Harry, which features the Norfolk-landed woman they had in common, Ann Boleyn. Tom is Sir Thomas Wyatt who was Ann’s first love later replaced by Henry VIII. Wyatt was put in the Tower for committing what was in effect retrospective adultery with Ann and from the Tower he watched her beheaded. Here I imagine the thoughts that went through that head the last morning of her life.
ANN Why would Henry kill six adulterers to destroy me when one would do? That was the Seymours, annihilating the competition. Jane Seymour – by refusing him hers - had his lips; her faction his ears. The court flew from my weakness. I refused to smile on Henry’s affairs. Jane showed ‘gentleness’ in this, I ‘cursedness’. Bad move. They say Henry never spared a man his fury or a woman his lust. And that his hand pulled the strings of the English Reformation. But I know his hand. It lures, ignores, manipulates, leads, abandons. It’s his other hand you’ve got to watch, the one stroking a pregnant belly. The world he imagined he made real: plots everywhere, the strong to his side, or his bed, the weak to the scaffold. The only defence is to counter-attack first, like Thomas Cromwell. We were too slow. I watched my brother hanged, drawn and quartered, spilling the guts he’d shown before. This morning, I will ‘be beheaded or burned at the king’s pleasure.’ All the pleasure I once gave Henry’s body has won me this mercy: a blade instead of the flames. The king never had my heart, he says, and he will have my clever head on its stiff Protestant neck for it, while Norfolk my accuser blooms like a rose in June, all the offices, grants and honours in the world vouchsafed by that one failsafe: royal favour. Tom, you had my fickle heart once and kissed my neck like you meant it, praising its yielding softness. (hands on neck) Pray for that softness now.
The Ghost of Anne Boleyn
I stole to the door of Blickling Hall
On the nineteenth night of May
And met the ghost of Anne Boleyn
Shining bright as day.
Six headless horses drew her coach
A headless coachman drove,
‘Give them their head!’ she laughed, then turned
On me her look of love.
‘Oh lordly, learnéd, manly face
Where force and beauty meet
Oh sport, debate and war with me:
Renaissance man complete.
I sought you once, who later flew,
I stalked you in your chamber
With night gown slipping from my arms
Before my lips spelled danger.
How like you this? I whispered then
And kissed you wild and free
As blood-red roses, soft and sweet,
Before the King took me.
I lost my head for the rose of the world
And the rose withered on the thorn,
A hunted hind whose fickle heart
Died for the loudest horn.’ –
Her white hands stole around my neck,
I screamed with stolen breath
‘O save me from this dreadful witch
And a fate much worse than Death!’
Her Lutheran brow as bright as the moon
A smile like the blossom of May
Her hair raven-black but her lovely head
Twisted the other way.
Her neck of worm-picked bones was ringed
With a bloody royal band
Engraved ‘I am Caesar’s’ in diamonds chaste,
And King’s gold on her hand.
‘I am wild to hold, though I seem so tame,
More fair than mortals can say
And I sold my heart for a worldly crown
And I’ll take your breath away.’
‘I am not your True Thomas!’ I cried in dread.
And her witch face turned away
‘Ah! You’ve named the angel who guards my grave
I can no longer stay.
I lost my head for the rose of the world
And the rose withered on the thorn
A hunted hind whose fickle heart
Spiked the largest horn.
© Gareth Calway 2012
And here’s the old villain himself, a man who made history in his own giant image if anyone ever can.
Henry VIII You’re looking at the biggest in England, whatever she said to her ladies of the bedchamber. The first thing I learned was never trust a courtier. Back-watching ministers like Sir Henry Wyatt feathering his own nest. I grew up over-protected, watchful, wary. But they’re all wary of me now. What Dad grabbed at Bosworth wasn’t the glorious England of Henry V. It was a farmyard stuck in the Middle Ages: deserted, backward, inward, a dunghill on France’s doorstep still recovering from the Black Death about 100 years slower than the rest of Europe. Edward III ruled five million people. Richard II, twenty five years of Black Death later, half that. Now, after twenty five years of me, everything’s soaring: population, rents, prices, land speculation, commerce, enclosures, evictions. Consumables at 231%. Uprooted peasants flooding the towns and wages falling. But my Tudors: the landowners, commercial farmers, property investors, the nobility, the gentry, the merchants, the land-grabbers making it yield: all rich and getting richer. We’ll be conquering Europe again soon like the knights of old. Meanwhile, my Renaissance men – handsome soldier- scholars strutting Italy and France - sing Italian sonnets to my Tudor rose and their hearts out to ladies they can’t have! Hands off, Master Wyatt, she’s mine! (laughs) What did the Irishman say? The foundation stone of the Protestant Church are the balls of King Henry VIII’ ? If that’s true I’m a Dutchman. Erasmus was writing his Greek and Latin New Testaments at Cambridge when I was a young king dancing Spanish steps on the graves of my father’s councillors. The Renaissance had come to Little England, closely followed by Luther’s Reformation, not mine. Ann’s circle brought Lutherism to my court but it wasn’t her Bible I married her for. Luther said priests should give up their concubines and marry: their balls, not mine.
© Gareth Calway 2012
The Ruined Hall (Fye Bridge House, Norwich, in the Romantic Era)
Strange that an Encyclopaedic Age
Leaves Fye Bridge House un-reckoned on its page.
But wait! A lace-cuffed bard with limpid eye
Is haunted by a spirit thrilling by.
“She walks in beauty, like the night
In ages past when full moon shone
Upon the helmet of the questing knight
As if it were his lady pale and wan.
She haunts the former greatness of the Hall,
The heavenly night-flights of a higher age,
Her skin is white as death, her spectral
Figure rises from the poet’s page.
She seeks that Ruined Hall and sings
An elegy for days before a floor
Plucked window’s eye and clipped the wings
Of church-like spaces walked before.
She plays a dulcimer and on her lips
The milk of Paradise is glowing still
And rosy-red the wine... or blood, she sips
With eager thirst beyond a mortal’s fill.
Her cup is charged again, again, and ever:
Her road to wisdom’s Palace is excess;
Her rose lips wailing for her demon lover
And dark eyes staring in her naked breasts!’
The poet sings his verse with heaving breast
And swoons upon the vision he evokes
And heaves his fainting heart into his mouth
And on her milk of Paradise he...chokes.
‘A restless spirit! Wild! Unbounded! Free!
A waking beauty past all human measure;
She falls upon my thorns of life. I bleed!
Her gates of Eden open at my ple-….”
Alas! A pounding at the door, the vision flies!
The Vicar calls on business, and the poem ...dies!
© Gareth Calway 2006
A...men.
She Loves You. (chorus, sung in fifths)
Spectre: I’ve always loved that plucky bastard. Ever since we were boys miming his three cool cat choir, great clunking guitar solos and Cavernous drum from Mam’s laundry slats. Raw whoops of joy in four-part harmony. Anything that you want. Ushering in a decade that lost the plot but found the music.
- The French aren’t sure about The Beatles. What do you think of them?
Beatle: Oh, we like the Beatles.
- How can you bear teenagers imitating you by wearing Beatle wigs?
Beatle: They’re not imitating us because we don’t wear Beatle wigs…
Spectre: I cried when the Dave Clark Five toppled them along with the Christmas decorations in 1963 and Mam said it was All Over. When the Fabs were Christmas Number One again in 1964 she said it again. She said it again when they were Christmas Number One in 1965. I thought for an awful moment that when she said it again at Christmas 1966, a Christmas without a Beatles Christmas single after a year without a Beatles British tour, that she was right. When the YEAHverly brothers were back at Christmas Number One again in 1967, she stopped saying it. For Christmas 1969, she bought me my first, their last Christmas Number One album. She called it Happy Road. I was twelve then and, unlike Father Christmas, they hadn’t let me down. They were still here, holding hands that wash dishes, hands that cup faces, hands flung at diamonds, hands ringed with dreams, shake-it-up baby faces, sweet little teens. Filling Nowhereland with the soundtrack of luv.
“John, there is a Stamp Out The Beatles movement under way in Detroit. What you going to do about it?”
Beatle: “We have a plan to stamp out Detroit.”
There is also an Adopt the Beatles movement in the British royal family.
The Queen (in a Christmas Day party hat): Where are you playing next?
Beatle: Slough.
The Queen: Oh that’s near us.
It is looking down its hooter at John. ...
The Queen: “And which one are you?”
Beatle: “I’m the one with the big dick!
Spectre: ‘Those in the cheap seats, clap your hands. The rest of you just rattle your jewellery.’
The Queen: “Oh haw haw haw!”
Spectre: Oedipus Sex. Conquering the planet. Saving the city. And getting the girl.
Beatle: She loves you (both) Yea Yeah Yeah
© Gareth Calway 2012
That’s from It Was Fifty Years Ago Today, our Beatles show. Frightening to think that exactly 50 years ago, Love Me Do was at No. 17 in the charts and Beatlemania was about to seize the world. We’d like to end with a more distant history associated with that great water that surrounds us in Norfolk: the North Sea. We started with King Arthur: here’s the story seen from the point of view of the villains in that piece, the Angles who have given their name to East Anglia and to Angle-land. What was it like to for a young Angle to cross that dreadful ocean and then face the British?
Angle
The fire’s flames flee from dark’s dagger drawn,
trees’ twigs tremble my blood runs cold,
death-dread from deeps from hills, from hollows, through night-silence numbs my axe-aching arms…
Now darky-feet drumming sheep-feet, horse-feet,
wolf-howl, bear-roar, rain-start and rain-stop;
today’s crop of slaves stir by my lord’s boat,
the half-clearing crowds with ghosts from bad dreams;
no light now but starlight fierce as gods’ faces
to kindle my blood or make sure my sight:
a witch of a watch slumped in snake-fern
and no song of heroes to cheer my chilled cheeks.
When I boast man’s beard I’ll bear with my kin
the boat-gorging wave-road’s spite-spitting storms
and go from this fell ground back to the faderland...
© Gareth Calway 1991
Finally, a millennium after those doughty English, the unsung heroes who kept England fed at a key time in its growth: the cod fishers of the Iceland fleet, many drawn from Norfolk. Not only did they have to face the boat-gorging wave-road and a summer anchored six miles off Iceland, they were heavily taxed on their return and the price of their cargo kept artificially low. As English as cod and chips before the chips and natural recruits for the Royal Navy, this is our tribute to those old salts.
The Ballad of the Cod Fishers
A tribute to an unsung group of men (and their families) who delivered artificially cheap nourishment to England at a time of booming population and unprecedented economic growth from the Elizabethan period ot the Industrial Revolution. Survivors were natural recruits to the Royal Navy. The Oliver here is Cromwell. The Mayor is Thomas Toft (Mayor of Norwich 1654)
The Mayor he sits in Norwich town
Eating his snow-white cod
‘This fair meat of the northern wastes
Is English as our God.
We need a fleet to bring it home
To feed our growing nation
Of salts who sail close to the wind
And closer to starvation.’
The frozen price of Iceland cod
Is Norwich Market cheap
But the rising tax on catch and salt
Makes tar and fishwife weep.
Oh these chippy men of Nelson’s breed
Who braved the northern seas
They paid the highest price of all
And the meanest price received.
The Iceland fleet sails north in March,
Great ships of forty men,
The doughtiest hearts in England’s shores
From Eastern shire and fen.
Such crews as drive the men of war
To English Victory
Cured by these waves, the saltest men
Who ever put to sea.
Fierce winds and tides have blocked for weeks
Their course through Pentland Firth,
The nearest place to death and hell
On all God’s Christian earth.
Oh these chippy men of Nelson’s breed
Who braved the northern seas
They paid the highest price of all
And the meanest price received.
And the Danish King sits like a storm
That broods upon a shore:
‘Six miles off Iceland you must toss
Nor trade nor fish there more!’
‘No time, sea-lads, for those native cures
And cods hung out to dry,
Our summer catch is steeped in salt
To keep it from the fly
And salt is taxed at rising rates
By Oliver’s excise
And ten score cod per loaded ship
His officers will prise.’
Oh these chippy men of Nelson’s breed
Who braved the northern seas
They paid the highest price of all
And the meanest price received.
Widows and traders who keep afloat
These ventures seal their loan
With a premium more than twice the mean
For so many come not home.
O long the Jack Tar’s journey home
And deep the briny ocean
And toothsome was the bone-white cod
That fed a hungry nation.
And long the Norwich fishwives stand
With wood combs in their hair
In August at the river’s edge
When fish nor men appear.
Oh these chippy men of Nelson’s breed
Who braved the northern seas
They paid the highest price of all
And the meanest price received.
Gareth Calway 2012
Broadcast text(except where indicated) copyright Gareth Calway 2013
'Well I dreamed I saw the knights in armour coming
Saying something about a queen.
There were peasants singing and drummers drumming
And the archer split the tree.
There was a fanfare blowing to the sun
That was floating on the breeze...' (Neil Young)
Far away and long ago, the land was divided and leaderless. Barbarians invaded from north, east and south. A great king, a dragon head, was needed to unite the people and drive out the invaders. Such a king would prove himself by drawing out from a weathered rock a wondrous sword. Many years passed and many strong men failed. At last, a boy succeeded. His name was Arthur. He established a great fastness called Camelot and trained a band of mounted warriors called The Knights of the Round Table. Together, they drove out the barbarians:
At the end of the world,
Death-cries in long-axed waves on the wind,
The howling of sea-wolves
Breaking from thick throats like heart’s hope
At the end of the world,
The cry of a thousand farmboys dead...
Surrendering ground for thundering hooves to sunder the Saxon.
Space to die in
Or my name’s not Arthur...
Our heels print the end of that world in a line
In the westering turf that gives back and holds and gives back and holds and gives back and
holds and holds and pens it
Lladd, for the explosive, mounted lightning charge of the British
Driven against a last ditch in their own land
There, like a squealing boar for slaughter.
A hard British line in the soft wet turf
These pirate pig-English could not read/
Though shoved around later
By strokes of non-combatant Latin/
And monks who couldn’t fight/.
Celtic hoof-prints that would not admit/
Corbenic deconsecrated/
The Grail put to hard use in kitchens/
Grail-maiden wastes fertilised/
In fierce field-brothels of endless yielding/
Gwenhwyfar plucked as a concubine/
Her white phantom beauty/
Laid like a ghost on a bloodstained bed/
And called by a C word that isn’t Cymru/
Breeding an Angle country/
Whose monk-curse is less than the air/
Saesneg is written on / the snorting ash/
Civitas burns to./ Instead of which/
(drums)
Thanks to our play of thundering hooves/
Thundering hooves in defence of these islands/
The land remains Britain for fifty years/
And Logres forever!
(German) And tomorrow belongs to me. (wielding axe) Tiw’s day, Woden’s day, Thor’s day, Freya’s day.
© Gareth Calway 2011
Hello Jennifer in Calfornia, Howard in Andalucia, Emma and Tony in Brighton and Kevin in the Cafe Abersychano. And all the others who dig us. I said ‘the time of King Arthur’ and so far I’ve stayed in a sixth century in which there may well have been a British cavalry general – possibly even called Arthur – who kept the invaders at bay for 50 years. There is archaeological evidence for this. But after that Arthur passes into Welsh legend via a dreadful summer without sunshine caused by a meteor striking the world or an underwater volcano - popularly remembered as the start of the Dark Ages - and in due course into Norman and mediaeval romance.
12C Welsh Monk
God sends a bolt from the heavens, fire and brimstone from under the earth. In 536, a summer without sunshine all over the world. In 539, Arthur and his dark son Mordred, the evil one, murder each other at the icy battle of Camlaan. Morrigan Macha Bodbh, Celtic triple goddess of birth, marriage and death – Mordred’s mother, Arthur’s sister – ships him beyond the sunset to the mystical isle of Avalon. From Avalon, Arthur watches as his realm of Logres, his faithful Lancelot and his queen Guinevere are all consumed by a love too hungry for this world ...and for six of the seven heavens.
Sixth Heaven (ghazal, with Indian music)
Lancelot (sings and speaks alternate couplets)
Your face that burns upon my Eye in searing fiery gale:
More clear than any seen on earth or heavenward trail.
Sir Lancelot has failed at last, by love’s Cup undone.
His thought and self are shrivelled lifting Guinevere’s veil.
I see your face in everything, but cannot leap the gulf
Between belief in what I see and being what I fail.
She feels his wreck in her, a bliss that pierces his heart
And bleeds from hers like wounds of Passion’s holiest nail.
The agony of longing long, the ecstasy of pain
In love-struck hearts the Sun uplifts through bars of a gaol!
The Sun is Everything and nothing isn’t the Sun:
A black hole all-consumed in one whole - yet shadows prevail.
In sainted flames of love, with nothing else it can see
It burns away in grief, this Eye that can’t have the Grail.
O Lancelot, her Absent Heart is All to you now.
She’s in the Seventh Sun, where Lovers leap and visions...fail.
© Gareth Calway 2012
from the Ballad of Margery Kempe
Speaking of visions, we have a famous one in West Norfolk. Margery Kempe was a burgess’s wife in Bishop’s Lynn in the late 14C, early 15C (the reigns of Richard II and Henry IV Part 1 – Black Death, Peasants Revolt.) Lynn was a great seaport then second only to London on the east coast and part of the Hanseatic union and Margery’s father was mayor and sheriff several times. But after twenty years of breeding fourteen children with her slightly hopeless husband, John, she started dressing in the white robes of a holy woman and going off on dangerous pilgrimages to Rome and the Holy Land, weeping loudly about Jesus’ suffering to the annoyance of many churchmen who tried unsuccessfully to control her. She later dictated a book about her experiences – the Book of Margery Kempe - which is said to be the first autobiography in English. She is credited with saving St Margaret’s, her beloved parish church, from the Great Fire of Lynn in 1421 by prayer – and various practical suggestions to God about how to put it out (sending a snowstorm.) Her book describes the visions she had all her adult life, including the holy ghost as a noisy dove bellowing in her right ear which she requested God change into a merry robin. We’re hoping to stage our show - the Book Launch of Margery Kempe – at St Margaret’s itself later this year. Here she tells her story:
God tunes the bellows in my ear
Into a robin’s song
And sails my soul to holy lands
Through world and priestly storm.
Each babe in arms this creature sees
Is Christ the child to me
And every handsome man in Rome
His manhood deity.
Though York’s Archbishop damn my tears
As Lollard-work or Devil’s
The anchoress of Norwich says
‘They do the work of angels.
‘The Devil has no power where
Contrition and compassion
Weep humbly from a homely heart
In agonies of passion.’
But, Mother, does this roaring passion,
This bottomless weeping well,
This tongue of hot consuming flame
Fly out from heaven or hell?
For long ago I sinned a sin
That’s never been confessed,
(Except to God) a Lollard sin
Or else a sin of flesh
And though unworldly now I seem
And lost in visions quite
I brewed, had fourteen babes, before
I dressed in virgin white.
And cut a dash through Bishop’s Lynn
Proud daughter of its Mayor,
My cloaks with modish tippets slashed,
And gold pipes in my hair
Till hearing heaven’s Song of Songs
I shunned the gutter’s ooze
‘And though you rule me, husband dear,
A single life I choose.’
‘But Margery, does this roaring passion,
This bottomless weeping well,
This tongue of hot consuming flame
Fly out from heaven or hell?’
John, every pilgrim step I trudged
From wedlock’s grave mundane
And churchman’s plot, was heaven-winged
By doves that sang God’s name...
© Gareth Calway 2012
Speaking of churchmen’s plots, Binham Priory – where we staged a show last summer – has a history worthy of Peyton Place. , Priors going truant, or being put in irons, revolting peasants burning the rolls, haunted walls and of course the whole drama of the Dissolution of the Monasteries. Here’s our Dylanesque take on it all.
Dissolution Row: The Ballad of Binham Priory
Call their names from the rubble: Alexander de Langley,
Mad as a scholar – ‘here’.
William de Somerton, William Dyxwell,
Priors and bad boys - ‘here.’
A mad monk in solitary’s dungeon-chains,
Tortured to brake his devil;
Alchemy funded by holy sales,
Sieges, arrests and trouble;
Monks eating bran and drinking rain
Till King John raised the siege;
A wanderlust prior, administ-truant,
Deposed and then reprieved.
As the leaves of summer break in spring
From forest, field and tree
So let the spirit’s freedom burst
From the walls of this Priory.
The peasants were revolting here
In 1381
When Master Lister led the charge
And derring does were done.
‘Enough!’ he cried, ‘of fattened bishops
Fed on Priory rolls,
Enough of tenants, rents and lords
And serfdom’s heavy loads.’
‘I’ll join that fight!’ said Binham John Lister
To his name-sake of Felmingham
George whose Norfolk Peasant Spring
Brought mayhem into Binham.
‘As the leaves of summer break in spring
From forest, field and tree
So let the spirit’s freedom burst
From the walls of this Priory!’
In Norwich, the Bishop Dispenser caught wind
Of the peasants’ merry fire,
And the Fightin’ Bishop’s fist of stone
Killed it with his ire.
‘Lister of Felmingham, for sins against
Your betters and your King,
I’ll have your guts for my Bishop’s garter
And the serfs can kiss my ring.’
‘You can have my neck and guts’ said Lister
But my soul flies straight to heaven
When Adam delved and Eve span, ‘lord’,
What rents were recked in Eden?
‘As the leaves of summer break in spring
From forest, field and tree
So let the spirit’s freedom burst
From the walls of this Priory.’
The old order stood another six generations,
A flint face carved in art
Then Lister’s spirit came back to haunt
The Priory’s stony heart:
He laughed as King Henry’s Inspectors Called,
‘Found fault’ with the Priory rolls,
‘Down with these rood screens, saints and crowns
And idol Gods on poles;
‘Whitewash these saints from the walls of the nave,
A clear new page for the Word,
Your bishops’ bank is ruined now
There are no serfs to herd!
‘As the leaves of summer break in spring
From forest, field and tree
So let the spirit’s freedom burst
From the walls of this Priory.’
This high Notre Dame of Norfolk shrunk
To a nave-sized Parish Church,
Abandoned wings sold off for stone
To men scarce more than serfs
But when Paston quarried the haunted pile
To build a house in the grounds,
A wall killed a workman and none to this day
Will build in Priory bounds.
Three miles to the West, Roman relics and smoke
Rise again from Celtic Earth
Like the re-appeared saints whose rooted gaze
Reclaim the walls of this church.
As the leaves of summer break in spring
From forest, field and tree
So let the spirit’s freedom burst
From the walls of this Priory.
Let the holy rain of autumn fall
From the solitary tree
And the grass grow wild and the four winds blow
Through the grounds of this Priory.
© Gareth Calway 2012
The great legs of Henry VIII loom large over the Dissolution and he’s also the subject of another show of ours: Tom and Harry, which features the Norfolk-landed woman they had in common, Ann Boleyn. Tom is Sir Thomas Wyatt who was Ann’s first love later replaced by Henry VIII. Wyatt was put in the Tower for committing what was in effect retrospective adultery with Ann and from the Tower he watched her beheaded. Here I imagine the thoughts that went through that head the last morning of her life.
ANN Why would Henry kill six adulterers to destroy me when one would do? That was the Seymours, annihilating the competition. Jane Seymour – by refusing him hers - had his lips; her faction his ears. The court flew from my weakness. I refused to smile on Henry’s affairs. Jane showed ‘gentleness’ in this, I ‘cursedness’. Bad move. They say Henry never spared a man his fury or a woman his lust. And that his hand pulled the strings of the English Reformation. But I know his hand. It lures, ignores, manipulates, leads, abandons. It’s his other hand you’ve got to watch, the one stroking a pregnant belly. The world he imagined he made real: plots everywhere, the strong to his side, or his bed, the weak to the scaffold. The only defence is to counter-attack first, like Thomas Cromwell. We were too slow. I watched my brother hanged, drawn and quartered, spilling the guts he’d shown before. This morning, I will ‘be beheaded or burned at the king’s pleasure.’ All the pleasure I once gave Henry’s body has won me this mercy: a blade instead of the flames. The king never had my heart, he says, and he will have my clever head on its stiff Protestant neck for it, while Norfolk my accuser blooms like a rose in June, all the offices, grants and honours in the world vouchsafed by that one failsafe: royal favour. Tom, you had my fickle heart once and kissed my neck like you meant it, praising its yielding softness. (hands on neck) Pray for that softness now.
The Ghost of Anne Boleyn
I stole to the door of Blickling Hall
On the nineteenth night of May
And met the ghost of Anne Boleyn
Shining bright as day.
Six headless horses drew her coach
A headless coachman drove,
‘Give them their head!’ she laughed, then turned
On me her look of love.
‘Oh lordly, learnéd, manly face
Where force and beauty meet
Oh sport, debate and war with me:
Renaissance man complete.
I sought you once, who later flew,
I stalked you in your chamber
With night gown slipping from my arms
Before my lips spelled danger.
How like you this? I whispered then
And kissed you wild and free
As blood-red roses, soft and sweet,
Before the King took me.
I lost my head for the rose of the world
And the rose withered on the thorn,
A hunted hind whose fickle heart
Died for the loudest horn.’ –
Her white hands stole around my neck,
I screamed with stolen breath
‘O save me from this dreadful witch
And a fate much worse than Death!’
Her Lutheran brow as bright as the moon
A smile like the blossom of May
Her hair raven-black but her lovely head
Twisted the other way.
Her neck of worm-picked bones was ringed
With a bloody royal band
Engraved ‘I am Caesar’s’ in diamonds chaste,
And King’s gold on her hand.
‘I am wild to hold, though I seem so tame,
More fair than mortals can say
And I sold my heart for a worldly crown
And I’ll take your breath away.’
‘I am not your True Thomas!’ I cried in dread.
And her witch face turned away
‘Ah! You’ve named the angel who guards my grave
I can no longer stay.
I lost my head for the rose of the world
And the rose withered on the thorn
A hunted hind whose fickle heart
Spiked the largest horn.
© Gareth Calway 2012
And here’s the old villain himself, a man who made history in his own giant image if anyone ever can.
Henry VIII You’re looking at the biggest in England, whatever she said to her ladies of the bedchamber. The first thing I learned was never trust a courtier. Back-watching ministers like Sir Henry Wyatt feathering his own nest. I grew up over-protected, watchful, wary. But they’re all wary of me now. What Dad grabbed at Bosworth wasn’t the glorious England of Henry V. It was a farmyard stuck in the Middle Ages: deserted, backward, inward, a dunghill on France’s doorstep still recovering from the Black Death about 100 years slower than the rest of Europe. Edward III ruled five million people. Richard II, twenty five years of Black Death later, half that. Now, after twenty five years of me, everything’s soaring: population, rents, prices, land speculation, commerce, enclosures, evictions. Consumables at 231%. Uprooted peasants flooding the towns and wages falling. But my Tudors: the landowners, commercial farmers, property investors, the nobility, the gentry, the merchants, the land-grabbers making it yield: all rich and getting richer. We’ll be conquering Europe again soon like the knights of old. Meanwhile, my Renaissance men – handsome soldier- scholars strutting Italy and France - sing Italian sonnets to my Tudor rose and their hearts out to ladies they can’t have! Hands off, Master Wyatt, she’s mine! (laughs) What did the Irishman say? The foundation stone of the Protestant Church are the balls of King Henry VIII’ ? If that’s true I’m a Dutchman. Erasmus was writing his Greek and Latin New Testaments at Cambridge when I was a young king dancing Spanish steps on the graves of my father’s councillors. The Renaissance had come to Little England, closely followed by Luther’s Reformation, not mine. Ann’s circle brought Lutherism to my court but it wasn’t her Bible I married her for. Luther said priests should give up their concubines and marry: their balls, not mine.
© Gareth Calway 2012
The Ruined Hall (Fye Bridge House, Norwich, in the Romantic Era)
Strange that an Encyclopaedic Age
Leaves Fye Bridge House un-reckoned on its page.
But wait! A lace-cuffed bard with limpid eye
Is haunted by a spirit thrilling by.
“She walks in beauty, like the night
In ages past when full moon shone
Upon the helmet of the questing knight
As if it were his lady pale and wan.
She haunts the former greatness of the Hall,
The heavenly night-flights of a higher age,
Her skin is white as death, her spectral
Figure rises from the poet’s page.
She seeks that Ruined Hall and sings
An elegy for days before a floor
Plucked window’s eye and clipped the wings
Of church-like spaces walked before.
She plays a dulcimer and on her lips
The milk of Paradise is glowing still
And rosy-red the wine... or blood, she sips
With eager thirst beyond a mortal’s fill.
Her cup is charged again, again, and ever:
Her road to wisdom’s Palace is excess;
Her rose lips wailing for her demon lover
And dark eyes staring in her naked breasts!’
The poet sings his verse with heaving breast
And swoons upon the vision he evokes
And heaves his fainting heart into his mouth
And on her milk of Paradise he...chokes.
‘A restless spirit! Wild! Unbounded! Free!
A waking beauty past all human measure;
She falls upon my thorns of life. I bleed!
Her gates of Eden open at my ple-….”
Alas! A pounding at the door, the vision flies!
The Vicar calls on business, and the poem ...dies!
© Gareth Calway 2006
A...men.
She Loves You. (chorus, sung in fifths)
Spectre: I’ve always loved that plucky bastard. Ever since we were boys miming his three cool cat choir, great clunking guitar solos and Cavernous drum from Mam’s laundry slats. Raw whoops of joy in four-part harmony. Anything that you want. Ushering in a decade that lost the plot but found the music.
- The French aren’t sure about The Beatles. What do you think of them?
Beatle: Oh, we like the Beatles.
- How can you bear teenagers imitating you by wearing Beatle wigs?
Beatle: They’re not imitating us because we don’t wear Beatle wigs…
Spectre: I cried when the Dave Clark Five toppled them along with the Christmas decorations in 1963 and Mam said it was All Over. When the Fabs were Christmas Number One again in 1964 she said it again. She said it again when they were Christmas Number One in 1965. I thought for an awful moment that when she said it again at Christmas 1966, a Christmas without a Beatles Christmas single after a year without a Beatles British tour, that she was right. When the YEAHverly brothers were back at Christmas Number One again in 1967, she stopped saying it. For Christmas 1969, she bought me my first, their last Christmas Number One album. She called it Happy Road. I was twelve then and, unlike Father Christmas, they hadn’t let me down. They were still here, holding hands that wash dishes, hands that cup faces, hands flung at diamonds, hands ringed with dreams, shake-it-up baby faces, sweet little teens. Filling Nowhereland with the soundtrack of luv.
“John, there is a Stamp Out The Beatles movement under way in Detroit. What you going to do about it?”
Beatle: “We have a plan to stamp out Detroit.”
There is also an Adopt the Beatles movement in the British royal family.
The Queen (in a Christmas Day party hat): Where are you playing next?
Beatle: Slough.
The Queen: Oh that’s near us.
It is looking down its hooter at John. ...
The Queen: “And which one are you?”
Beatle: “I’m the one with the big dick!
Spectre: ‘Those in the cheap seats, clap your hands. The rest of you just rattle your jewellery.’
The Queen: “Oh haw haw haw!”
Spectre: Oedipus Sex. Conquering the planet. Saving the city. And getting the girl.
Beatle: She loves you (both) Yea Yeah Yeah
© Gareth Calway 2012
That’s from It Was Fifty Years Ago Today, our Beatles show. Frightening to think that exactly 50 years ago, Love Me Do was at No. 17 in the charts and Beatlemania was about to seize the world. We’d like to end with a more distant history associated with that great water that surrounds us in Norfolk: the North Sea. We started with King Arthur: here’s the story seen from the point of view of the villains in that piece, the Angles who have given their name to East Anglia and to Angle-land. What was it like to for a young Angle to cross that dreadful ocean and then face the British?
Angle
The fire’s flames flee from dark’s dagger drawn,
trees’ twigs tremble my blood runs cold,
death-dread from deeps from hills, from hollows, through night-silence numbs my axe-aching arms…
Now darky-feet drumming sheep-feet, horse-feet,
wolf-howl, bear-roar, rain-start and rain-stop;
today’s crop of slaves stir by my lord’s boat,
the half-clearing crowds with ghosts from bad dreams;
no light now but starlight fierce as gods’ faces
to kindle my blood or make sure my sight:
a witch of a watch slumped in snake-fern
and no song of heroes to cheer my chilled cheeks.
When I boast man’s beard I’ll bear with my kin
the boat-gorging wave-road’s spite-spitting storms
and go from this fell ground back to the faderland...
© Gareth Calway 1991
Finally, a millennium after those doughty English, the unsung heroes who kept England fed at a key time in its growth: the cod fishers of the Iceland fleet, many drawn from Norfolk. Not only did they have to face the boat-gorging wave-road and a summer anchored six miles off Iceland, they were heavily taxed on their return and the price of their cargo kept artificially low. As English as cod and chips before the chips and natural recruits for the Royal Navy, this is our tribute to those old salts.
The Ballad of the Cod Fishers
A tribute to an unsung group of men (and their families) who delivered artificially cheap nourishment to England at a time of booming population and unprecedented economic growth from the Elizabethan period ot the Industrial Revolution. Survivors were natural recruits to the Royal Navy. The Oliver here is Cromwell. The Mayor is Thomas Toft (Mayor of Norwich 1654)
The Mayor he sits in Norwich town
Eating his snow-white cod
‘This fair meat of the northern wastes
Is English as our God.
We need a fleet to bring it home
To feed our growing nation
Of salts who sail close to the wind
And closer to starvation.’
The frozen price of Iceland cod
Is Norwich Market cheap
But the rising tax on catch and salt
Makes tar and fishwife weep.
Oh these chippy men of Nelson’s breed
Who braved the northern seas
They paid the highest price of all
And the meanest price received.
The Iceland fleet sails north in March,
Great ships of forty men,
The doughtiest hearts in England’s shores
From Eastern shire and fen.
Such crews as drive the men of war
To English Victory
Cured by these waves, the saltest men
Who ever put to sea.
Fierce winds and tides have blocked for weeks
Their course through Pentland Firth,
The nearest place to death and hell
On all God’s Christian earth.
Oh these chippy men of Nelson’s breed
Who braved the northern seas
They paid the highest price of all
And the meanest price received.
And the Danish King sits like a storm
That broods upon a shore:
‘Six miles off Iceland you must toss
Nor trade nor fish there more!’
‘No time, sea-lads, for those native cures
And cods hung out to dry,
Our summer catch is steeped in salt
To keep it from the fly
And salt is taxed at rising rates
By Oliver’s excise
And ten score cod per loaded ship
His officers will prise.’
Oh these chippy men of Nelson’s breed
Who braved the northern seas
They paid the highest price of all
And the meanest price received.
Widows and traders who keep afloat
These ventures seal their loan
With a premium more than twice the mean
For so many come not home.
O long the Jack Tar’s journey home
And deep the briny ocean
And toothsome was the bone-white cod
That fed a hungry nation.
And long the Norwich fishwives stand
With wood combs in their hair
In August at the river’s edge
When fish nor men appear.
Oh these chippy men of Nelson’s breed
Who braved the northern seas
They paid the highest price of all
And the meanest price received.
Gareth Calway 2012
Broadcast text(except where indicated) copyright Gareth Calway 2013
November 18, 2012
Bound For Jamaica Press Release
West Norfolk ex-teacher Gareth Calway’s first children’s novel is published this November. Bound for Jamaica is part of the new Collins Education Read On series whose aim is to encourage reluctant readers to get excited about written fact and fiction. Bound For Jamaica is both, combining an exciting story about a young African boy’s kidnap and transportation into slavery with a real history of the Atlantic slave trade in supporting non-fiction chapters. Gareth first got interested in challenging received views of history while a student of English and American Studies at UEA in the 1970s and married an Ely woman (and fellow UEA graduate) in 1979. They moved to Sedgeford in 1986: their daughter was born at QEH at the end of that year. Gareth taught English and History at KES from 1986-1994 and later at Smithdon High School, Hunstanton, until retiring to write full time in 2007. During his teaching career he had written and published seven volumes of poetry and a comic schooldays novel River Deep Mountain High which has also sold well.
“The main thrust of Bound For Jamaica is to tell the truth about a period of British history we understandably shrink from owning. While a teacher, and as a parent of a daughter motivated by a strong social conscience, I noticed that our history curriculums and stories tend to examine endlessly how we licked Hitler ( yes we did and I’m as proud of it as anyone but...) and avoid how we behaved during the 100 years when we led the slave trade. I wanted to emphasise that while Bristol for example earned 40% of its great wealth in the 18C from the slave trade, there were also heroically moral battles fought against it by Bristol people like Hannah More and John Wesley as well as by English-based Africans like Olaudah Equiano. Also, (what I never realised) the research revealed that it was Africans who were selling other Africans into slavery in the first place, however appallingly racist and inhuman the treatment of slaves once they were on white ships and plantations. And (despite the way the word is often used as synonymous with slavery) under our Empire (as opposed to the unregulated horror of colonial exploitation by individual entrepreneurs buying and selling human beings as cargo) the trade was made illegal and the British Navy actually spent 50 years blockading the slave coast to stop other countries continuing a slave trade that by 1800 had sold 12 million into slavery. Finally, I also derived some satisfaction from the fact that men and women from places like Heacham, Norwich and Lynn were signing anti-slavery petitions as early as the 1770s.
* The CRE was engaged in a completely new initiative at the time - it was part of their work to promote teaching and learning on the Transatlantic Slavery Trade in the school curriculum. My contact was Sharon Walker who read every draft of the present book and continued to advise and encourage me for the 5 years of its composition.
September 04, 2012
Cromwell's Talking Head launched.
My new book 'Cromwell's Talking Head' was launched to a sell out (plus a few more) at Oliver Cromwell's House last night, his lucky day and anniversary September 3. The sun shines on the righteous and everyone else gets their heads chopped off! A fascinating tour with a costumed guide of the house as well. Stay tuned for news of how to buy the book.
August 31, 2012
Review of Cromwell's Talking Head (Siren FM podast)
I'll just pick a sentence at random from this thoughtful and perceptive review shall I?
'Calway's performance was a triumph of narration and vocal colour.'
The link is: http://www.radiodramareviews.com/id1161.html
'I look forward to listening to further monologues.'
Laurence, good to make your acquaintance and before we get on to any further ones, you can hear this one live at the Cromwell House Museum, Ely at 7 pm on Monday night Sep 3 if you're in the area. You will be particularly welcome!
August 27, 2012
Cromwell's Talking Head
Press Release
Cromwell's Talking Head Diggers ISBN 978-0-9573960-0-5
Book launch of Cromwell’s Talking Head by Gareth Calway at the Oliver Cromwell House museum in Ely, 7 pm Monday Sep 3. The true ghastly story of what happened to Cromwell’s severed head after his body was dug up by vengeful Royalists in 1661. Told by the head itself!
History lovers, families, kids both big and little, come and hear a tale that will make you squirm. This is history as you have never heard it before!!
Norfolk based children’s author Gareth Calway is reading his new story, Cromwell’s Talking Head, the gruesome tale of what happened to Oliver Cromwell’s head after his death, at the Cromwell House museum in Ely on 03/09/12, the house where Cromwell actually lived. Included in the evening will be a tour of the museum by museum staff. This horrible history tells the true but bizarre story of Cromwell’s head in his own voice with his own unique take on the events that lead up to his death.
Gareth has been writing for many years and has seven books of poetry and a novel published. His children’s book, a story of the transatlantic slave trade ‘Bound for Jamaica’ is due to be published by Collins later this year.
The live reading at Cromwell’s House is also the launch of the book ‘Cromwell’s Talking Head’.
Cromwell’s Talking Head was also broadcast by Siren Radio and is available on a podcast at www.garethcalway.co.uk
July 25, 2012
Balls
(thinking about forthcoming Olympic football and the different meanings of the word 'balls' - with reference to the first ever Women's World Cup and two unforgettable occasions Stuart Pearce has been on the spot in the men's game)
Football is balls: needs pumped up balls to play
And all the hype comes down at last to balls
And as that US star Reveals Her All
(Well, sponsor-labelled sportsbra anyway)
To breathless world photographers, to say
WE’VE WON THE WOMEN’S FIRST WORLD CUP! it’s all
The culture of the buck, sharp market stalls
Of bluff and thrust, done derring deals, wha-hae!
But, O, when Stuart Pearce was on the spot
He’d failed to hit in World Cup Italy
(His name in running blood on England’s walls)
And flew across the Wembley turf and shot,
A nation’s trembling heart in mouth, to see
The world he kicked thump in, what - massive- balls!
Football is balls: needs pumped up balls to play
And all the hype comes down at last to balls
And as that US star Reveals Her All
(Well, sponsor-labelled sportsbra anyway)
To breathless world photographers, to say
WE’VE WON THE WOMEN’S FIRST WORLD CUP! it’s all
The culture of the buck, sharp market stalls
Of bluff and thrust, done derring deals, wha-hae!
But, O, when Stuart Pearce was on the spot
He’d failed to hit in World Cup Italy
(His name in running blood on England’s walls)
And flew across the Wembley turf and shot,
A nation’s trembling heart in mouth, to see
The world he kicked thump in, what - massive- balls!
July 08, 2012
Fiddlers' Hill Binham
From the Bronze Age to the Ballad Age was a very creative and collective event. It started with a new ballad written by me and Adrian Tebbutt. It led to the formation of a lively new folk band, The Fried Pirates, who now have their own website and itinerary - and to many other creative partnerships, books, songs, dramas and radio concerts featuring the participants for the rest of the year, and also to my new folk ballad about Binham Priory (below) which was retrospectively commissioned and is now part of Binham PDC's guided tours.
The Ballad of Fiddlers Hill
Ye feasters up on Fiddler’s Hill
Where crossroads meet the harrow
Take care you don’t disturb the sleeping
Bronze Age burial barrow.
O shun this ground between dusk and dawn
Or live a dreadful tale
Of a Black Monk at the tunnel’s mouth
To turn your red lips pale.
Don’t follow the fiddler and his dog
To Walsingham under the hill
To lay the foul Benedictine ghost:
That fiddler lays there still.
“I will play
through the tunnel!” cried the jolly fiddler
To the cheering
local crowd,
“Stamp time
and follow my tune above,
For I play
both brave and loud.”
And so he fiddled and so they stamped
His three mile course underground
But his fiddle stopped under Fiddler’s Hill
In the silence of the mound.
Each dared the next down the tunnel’s mouth
But none would dare themselves
And at midnight the fiddler’s dog emerged
Like a hound bewitched by the elves.
His tail thrust down between his legs,
His frame a shivering wrack,
He howled and pined at the dreadful hole
But his master never came back.
“I will play
through the tunnel!” cried the jolly fiddler
To the
cheering local crowd,
“Stamp time
and follow my tune above,
For I play
both brave and loud.”
A violent storm drove everyone home
And when they awoke from sleep
The entrance was gone, the fiddler too,
Into a Nameless Deep.
The moral of this, and it’s old as the hill,
Is that mounds aren’t for tunnelling,
If a grave tune plucks the strings of your
heart,
Keep the devil under your chin.
In this county of beet and barley and beer,
This county of fish and farrow,
There’s folk you can trust, there’s London
folk,
And there’s folk who come out of a barrow.
“I will play
through the tunnel!” cried the jolly fiddler
And half his boast came true,
“Stamp time
and follow my tune above!”
But he lost them half way through.
© Gareth Calway 2011
Dissolution Row: The Ballad of Binham Priory
Call their names from the rubble: Alexander de Langley,
Mad as a scholar – ‘here’.
William de Somerton, William Dyxwell,
Priors and bad boys - ‘here.’
A mad monk in solitary’s dungeon-chains,
Tortured to brake his devil;
Alchemy funded by holy sales,
Sieges, arrests and trouble;
Monks eating bran and drinking rain
Till King John raised the siege;
A wanderlust prior, administ-truant,
Deposed and then reprieved.
As the leaves of summer break in spring
From forest, field and tree
So let the spirit’s freedom burst
From the walls of this Priory.
The peasants were revolting here
In 1381
When Master Lister led the charge
And derring does were done.
‘Enough!’ he cried, ‘of fattened bishops
Fed on Priory rolls,
Enough of tenants, rents and lords
And serfdom’s heavy loads.’
‘I’ll join that fight!’ said Binham John Lister
To his name-sake of Felmingham
George whose Norfolk Peasant Spring
Brought mayhem into Binham.
‘As the leaves of summer break in spring
From forest, field and tree
So let the spirit’s freedom burst
From the walls of this Priory!’
In Norwich, the Bishop Dispenser caught wind
Of the peasants’ merry fire,
And the Fightin’ Bishop’s fist of stone
Killed it with his ire.
‘Lister of Felmingham, for sins against
Your betters and your King,
I’ll have your guts for my Bishop’s garter
And the serfs can kiss my ring.’
‘You can have my neck and guts’ said Lister
But my soul flies straight to heaven
When Adam delved and Eve span, ‘lord’,
What rents were recked in Eden?
‘As the leaves of summer break in spring
From forest, field and tree
So let the spirit’s freedom burst
From the walls of this Priory.’
The old order stood another six generations,
A flint face carved in art
Then Lister’s spirit came back to haunt
The Priory’s stony heart:
He laughed as King Henry’s Inspectors Called,
‘Found fault’ with the Priory rolls,
‘Down with these rood screens, saints and crowns
And idol Gods on poles;
‘Whitewash these saints from the walls of the nave,
A clear new page for the Word,
Your bishops’ bank is ruined now
There are no serfs to herd!
‘As the leaves of summer break in spring
From forest, field and tree
So let the spirit’s freedom burst
From the walls of this Priory.’
This high Notre Dame of Norfolk shrunk
To a nave-sized Parish Church,
Abandoned wings sold off for stone
To men scarce more than serfs
But when Paston quarried the haunted pile
To build a house in the grounds,
A wall killed a workman and none to this day
Will build in Priory bounds.
Three miles to the West, Roman relics and smoke
Rise again from Celtic Earth
Like the re-appeared saints whose rooted gaze
Reclaim the walls of this church.
As the leaves of summer break in spring
From forest, field and tree
So let the spirit’s freedom burst
From the walls of this Priory.
Let the holy rain of autumn fall
From the solitary tree
And the grass grow wild and the four winds blow
Through the grounds of this Priory.
© Gareth Calway 2012
From The Bronze Age To The Ballad Age (original Press release of the event)
Bronze Age burial mound plays host to new music and art
A fortunate break in the weather allowed a long-planned collaboration between archaeologists, artists and musicians to finally come to fruition at Fiddler’s Hill, a prehistoric barrow mound on the boundary between the parishes of Binham and Warham in North Norfolk, on the afternoon of 8 July.
From the Bronze Age to the Ballad Age: Digging the Folk Roots of Norfolk was the brainchild of West Norfolk poet and author Gareth Calway. Gareth had been asked by folk musician Adrian Tebbutt to write a lyric about the legend of Fiddler’s Hill which he could set to music as a ballad.
The evocatively-named Fiddler’s Hill was recently acquired by the Norfolk Archaeological Trust and is now open to the public daily, free of charge. Its name comes from a local legend which tells how a tunnel once ran from Walsingham to Binham Priory. A brave fiddler named Jimmy Griggs entered with his dog, Trap, while others followed his music above ground. But silence fell as their course drew near to the mound and the fiddler was never seen again. People feared that the ghostly Black Monk had taken Jimmy and his dog, and henceforth the barrow was known as Fiddler’s Hill.
Time passed and the project grew as other people became involved: musicians, poets, an actor, a performance artist and a local prehistorian. All of them were fascinated by different aspects of the 4000-year-old burial mound. Their work together culminated not only in a live art event on the mound itself but also a public concert at Binham Memorial Hall that same evening. This allowed a longer programme celebrating different aspects of North Norfolk’s history and folklore to be presented.
On the mound, under skies that threatened rain, folk music trio The Fried Pirates (Adrian Tebbutt, Roger Partridge, Katy Fullilove) gave the first public performance of The Ballad of Fiddler’s Hill, which features the refrain:
‘I will play my way’, cried the jolly fiddler
To the cheering local crowd,
‘Stamp time and follow my tune above
For I play both brave and loud.’
In the lead-up to this big moment, Reepham prehistorian Trevor Ashwin recounted the Fiddler’s Hill legend and gave a short history of the mound, and Gareth Calway chanted two of his poems - chosen to relate to the site and the occasion - The Ballad of Fiddler’s Hill and the Iceni Chorus from his performance-poem Boudicca. Artist Imogen Ashwin had devised a new site specific performance piece, Bridge, which took place on the burial mound itself, accompanied by Katy Fullilove’s haunting lone fiddle.
That evening, the performers played to a full house at Binham Memorial Hall, with sets by The Fried Pirates and by singer/songwriter Mark Fawcett who was mesmerising as he performed Norfolk-themed historical ballads co-written for the event with Gareth Calway. Trevor Ashwin gave an illustrated talk on the prehistory of Binham and surrounding area and Imogen Ashwin showed a digital projection based on her performance piece Bridge accompanied live by Katy Fullilove’s solo fiddle. Gareth Calway and actor Dawn Finnerty brought the house down with a vibrant two-person performance of Gareth's drama Boudicca - ‘ the punk version of what happened in AD 61’! The duo also brought their magic to a ‘synchronised’ reading of Wood Dalling poet Kay Riggs’ English Heritage, a poem about Oxnead Hall.
The evening had commenced with the chanted lyrics of The Ballad of Fiddler’s Hill, and the ‘journey’ was brought to a close by The Fried Pirates’ performance of the ballad complete with its haunting tune.
Both events were filmed by Emma 'Captain' Withington, the hill event in an artful black and white collage.
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