Blood on the Corn : from King Arthur and Me - The Opera

In AD 60, at the time of Boudicca's revolt, the Romans slaughtered the druids, unique to Britain, on their holy island of Mon (modern Anglesey). Mon (Roman Mona) was the druids' stronghold and the druids gave the British Celts their only shared sense of 'Britishness' . They were otherwise a collection of warring tribes, easy to divide and rule, initially as client kingdoms. Destroying the druids and their unifying spirit - which Boudicca mobilised into an actual British army of united Eastern British tribes - was key to Roman Imperial annexation of Britain. The legend of King Arthur is an enduring and ever-developing expression of that Celtic Britishness through many centuries, two different faiths, two different genres (mythology and romance) several invasions, different ethnicities and languages not to mention transmutations through Brittany and Normandy into the whole of Northern Europe and back to Britain form Europe after 1066 and from Tudor Wales after 1485. It has a reality beyond reason and historical intellectualising. In a way it is a phantom but as CS Lewis said no less real for that. Besides, legends have to start somewhere. Real people got killed. As with the druids, behind the mists of history, there was blood on the corn.

Who Killed Cock Robin? A Norfolk Noir. All 9 episodes. Farewell Performa...

THE TEXT

 (“Who Killed Cock Robin?”)

Act 1.

I.  The End of the Line

Squire Peacock lounges over the white marble floor,

No rope round his neck; no knife in his back,

No candlestick pestling his little grey cells,

Just the world in a virus, a corona attack.

All the wanna-nobs flocked to Cock Hall( ) last night

Snob-noshing beneath feudal chandeliers,

Watching Cavalier points under courtesies, 

Filles fiancéd, fillies fielded, fences, finance, feudings, fears.

Now, as still as his statues, their host lies dead,

His white palace frozen and under a cloud

His Olympian, cut-diamond, snow queen is caught:

Clytemnestra clutching a red-handed shroud.

DI Ken Hill, DS Len Wade, in Conservatory with masks,

Bag up the hanky, "If you’re on there, we’ll find ya!”

"But one dropped it in Argos – no, Iceland - with one’s lover.” “He

Was picked up last night, with your diamonds, in China!"

Lady Peacock protests, to Chief Constable Melton, 

"Why would I murder the Last of the Peacocks?

He's the father of half of my children," (she snorts) “my 

Cock, lock and stock; (sniffs) my chocs, rocks, and frocks."

Mrs White, the Housekeeper, pure as driven snow

Blockading the Mistress from 'these lowlifes', steps up:

"Ditch the Peacock au vin, box the Snobside of Brexit 

And keep all these doors to the Outside shut."

Old Iceni crime scenes and Welsh caravans

hurtling East on Celtic routes to Little England in the Styx 

through a privatised transport of isolated bacterial cultures going West

(carrying the murder hanky) not to mention Postmodern Post-man 

Pat’s bright red van, its owner arrested 

by a masked Private Plod for ‘letterboxing’ 658 properties

and 2 metres up Snow White’s elephant SUV rear 

stockpiled with shopping while the NHS serves on empty

and her souvenir edition of the Daily Authoritarian Past Tense Straight Linear Cause-Effect Oxygen-Supply-Demand Semi-Detached Bourgeois Realist Plot In-My-Beginning Is-My-Middle-England-Ever-After Revenge Narrative  

heavy with the story of Mrs White’s extinction- 

replacement by Dr Orchid, Dr Black's secret daughter,

behind a self-serving fox in a diva’s dj  

jeering in from the hard right down the middle of the road

to upstage White’s extinction rebellion 

biting the empty hands that don’t clap it

snarling who’d sniff THAT orchid? (“I thank you!”)

and barking about National Health Servants who “need to be applauded to do their jobs”

Block the Boudicca Trail up the B666. "This

Ain't the road to ‘Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch’ *

This is the road to Dis."

The Brown Lady appears with a headless Dr Black,

Are you seeing ghosts, milady, or old sins coming back?

Snow White takes them out in a panic attack:

"Not part of the cult-cha; not part of the pack!" 

* “The church of St Mary in a hollow of white hazel, near to the rapid whirlpool and to St Tisilio church, near to a red cave” (A vital clue revealing the entire narrative of the murder and the identity of the murderer in an ancient encryption. Not lost on Chris Rea).

 

II. Cock Hall

When Dr Blake was murdered, I knew I’d be next,

“There IS a society.” Black wrote it. I ran it. My Eden

Was his word plot until Eve let the Colonel in. Mustard’s

Speechless-rage counter-plotters killed Blak to kill the vision;

Killed me for my kenning Hall: its Saxon foundation;

Its Civil War change of hands; its New Age victory diggers

For Boudicca’s grave Gone West, her wild la mére chariot reined

Like a drop into timeless Ocean, clocked in Roman figures;

My built-on-Boudicca’s grave (hence the diggers can’t find it)

Roman-floored; Saxon-earthed; Viking-treasured; Norman-castled;

Priory-rubbled; black corpse cellared, mad wife atticed; 

Heritage theme-parked, ancestral seat of Little England;

Its Camelot-Spooked Room 101 A, filled with death kites from China;

Its Dorothy Walpole Townshend Whig Brown Lady’s

Dis-Embody of a sunset on a huge pink map

Dis-Honouring its debts in the East and West Indies;

Its levelling reputation as the nest of a Robin Hood 

Gone Green on growth, employment, health, social justice

And of a Walpole, lending world colossus perspective

To Mustard’s private-I-sations; his pigmy Empires in the Styxes.

‘Super’ Market-Law of Bourgeois Realist Plod slams my casket; 

‘CRACKS’ the case. Deaf to my howlings from beyond the grave,

Blind to Ken Hill’s hidden depths of Celtic gold

And looking in all the wrong places for a motive.

Arthurian Ladywell flood-rocks out in the Styx 

and crossroad crews of freezing immigrant field-slaves

feeding credit crunch into inflated bankers

behind Mrs White, private mask off 

blowing away the cobwebs

20 virus-people-carrier miles from lockdown

along Mustard’s Golden Guinea Sands into the public’s face 

behind Joyce, Dr Black’s typist, singing 

“a Blake more born in Barbary” by William Bloke

at the wheel of her green man van (an Odyssey 2019)

behind the Clued Ouija Board late for a meeting

securing a pale horse crime scene that’s already bolted

past a testing kit convoy that isn’t there

and a video surveillance police unit chasing

a missed apocalypse call around the bend

into the long right arm of the law

waving its amputated left

STOP! YOU ARE SURROUNDED 

BY ONE-

ARMED POLICE!

Block the Boudicca trail up the B666.

This ain’t the road to the Holy Grail.

This is the road to Dis.

The Brown Lady appears with a headless Dr Black,

         "You built this pile on African slaves, give it back."

Snow White takes them out in panic attack.

Not part of the culture, not part of the pack.

      

 

III. Ken Loses The Plot

"Boss, we need this result, all the Lounge Billiard Ballrooms;

All the hounds on The Eastern Daily Mail;

All the Skulthorpes and Death-Creakes of self-isolation

Will cue our coronas to Cock, if we fail.”

"Have a night off in Lynn  with the Neighbourhood Watch,

Catch the best show in town on their CCTV

Watch the Linnets. Relax. The CC's brought in two of his own,

Old Agatha Christ-Eyes from AC/OCD..."

"We’re the Freud Squad, n’est ce pas?" bows ol' Ercule to Jane.

She drops a purled stitch and smooths her church lace,

Jumpy as a polter in Guist,"Oh indeed!" going pink,

"Cock Hall, like Hell Hall, is a very lonely place."

"And a Chaos of flowerbeds, imbecile that I am,

My ideas as deranged as PC Plot’s rouge-stained collar."

"There’s a fire in my brain and an ache in my heart,” 

Coughs Jane, "of what does that remind me, I wonder?" 

His grey cells detain her woodland-nymph foot

In a slender Paris shoe that mounts a soft stair

Of Victorian passion through seven dropped veils,

L'amour a la mode… Achoo!... avant la Grand Guerre....

An Herculean stud exploding from tight city trews

Hits smartly the small of Miss Marple's back,

 “J’ai désole! C’est le crime de passion, ca!" But she’s hooked. 

 “Two Eyes,” hers answer, “to follow the murderer’s tack.”

Old Roman Remains and self-Brexit car jams

jarring up a beach road

 through Little England in the Styx 

jerkily mis-directed around the ruins of ‘Jerusalem’

Dr Blake’s visionary folly, originally a chapel;

since the Death of the Author, a shrine,

and, after serial deconstruction, 

a pocket-sized postmodern pastiche of Styles holiday home

for Mrs Wight’s beach whale SUV

parked outside her fridge and TV

to save her the trouble

of having to waddle

and closing the public highway to the sea

by California-dried matinee private idol CIA heart-throbs 

Frank and Mark Adams filming

Thought for the Day with Private Fraser

(“WE’RE ALL DUMED!)

Midwinter Murders 

and an episode of Top Cat 

where he gets the world back

‘for not liking me’

with the President of the United States

Block the Boudicca Trail up the B666. "This

Ain't the road to La Dolce Vita in Paradiso Elysium.

This is the road to Dis."

The Brown Lady appears with a headless Dr Blake,

Tarot card Britains facing forward and back.

Snow White takes them out in a panic attack:

"Not part of the cult-cha; not part of the pack!" 

 

IV.  The Seat of Power

In a waking dream of un-buried murder,

Christie’s Argus ‘Eyes’ descend to the gun room below,

"Under all the tall storeys and ivory towers, 

At the base of the noble mind, here, we know.

 

The viral Prof Plum has Scarlet’s software on his hard-drive!

"In your what-happens-next, whodunit waits upon 'I would'

Your class is the village's vampire, my child,

The dead past sucking its rosy future's blood.

"Now your father lies dead in a corona of thorns,

Evil future injected in God’s old lead money veins,

Play their Roman church candle shtick Fall Guy- and boom!

Nothing on earth to lose but your chains."

  

"All those grey, blue-rinsed, white lies they told me, Aunt Jane!

For that ethical farmer, so reverend Green

Just to ravish Dad’s blood-watered crops, not me!

Plumski's deep-frozen spirit was never so mean."

"But his youth’s fever dream in an old man’s fevered crown,

 “Through your guilt”, Poirot cries, “is controlling your brain!"

"Life is Evil Made Do ('Made Old, You Old Maid!' sobs the Prof) 

Or Made Good. Be the star of her fallen morning!" pleads Jane.

Prof remembers that spring atop the winter palace, 

The warm youth he was… she has now. And then

To save her young heart, he blows out his brains. Poirot ducks.

Marple sighs, "An heroic, unhappy, almost English (dead) end!  "

Old Saxon boneyards and island-nation-sand-rammed 

white builders' man-vans behind a fallen apple tree

not to mention Postmodern Post-man Pat in a moonstone-bright 

Ghost Office delivery juggernaut for Mrs self-island Wight -

in her self-unconscious authoritarian past tense

daily dis mall newspaper that hates Britain showhome 

straight linear cause-effect oxygen-supply-demand 

semi-detached bourgeois realist plot in-my-beginning 

is-my-Middle-England-ever-after revenge narrative 

planetary-extinction-with-farm-views cul de sac -

of Argos ventilators; Amazon vaccines;

morgue suites from Iceland; gowns and masks from China; 

and a private hospice the size of a small town 

from Dis Mall Bathware, Kitchen & Hall 

behind a rather remote-looking doctor 

to whom she just gave her symptoms

being tracked 20 gridlocked miles out of Lee Harvey Oswald Drive, 

Washport, by THE CYBERTROLL SHOUTING “WHODUNIT!”

HE CARRIED HERE IT IN HIS TARDIS! HE’S A NASTY MAN!

(“we all dunit! says Ken Hill. Non, Noes Poirot

“we are all the murderer and all the victim, oui, 

but the self-isolation in the public spirit, 

and the self-isolation of the self-interest, 

are not at all the same

there is one here who murders society itself,

who is not at all le good bourgeois 

he appears on the surface;

in his Chelski-blue shirts and his boots of Bahrain

and his Mend & Make Do & Die PPE Kits 

of Little England in the Styx.

he is the one to blame; as the coroner will explain; 

HE is the Cain;” “or SHE,” coughs Jane)…

Block the Boudicca Trail up the B666. "This

Ain't the road to Midsomer Maidens In The Woods Next The Tavern.

This is the road to Dis"

The Brown Lady appears with a headless Dr Blake.

She’s running late with all the traffic; she’s speaking through the flak,

"Krishna's Eyes in your Peacock tale: give them back!"

Snow White takes them out in a panic attack:

"Not part of the cult-cha; not part of the pack!"

 

Act 2.

I.  Colonel Mustard's Counterplot 

After life's chokes and splutters, the Squire sleeps well,

(Mustard's unconscious death-wish to be Squire can't stop him)

But the Christie slams shut and England’s unsolved,  

Not coughing in its sleep, more asleep in its coffin.

Dick Sparrow, a Super Head in the Clouds of (un)Doing,

Out of office (all) hours, baton-slick, born to run,

Guards the van of a new charge, retraining the House guides

In HERITAGE HOMICIDE HOLIDAY FUN!

"It's political correctness gone m-mad!" trumps the Colonel 

As his bust of Dr Black is burned. "That pike-lip: it's

An original colonial design!" "Norman, you're political in

Correctness gone mad," says Miss Scarlet, "you’re Auschwitz.

"Your ‘omniscient’ Nazi counterplot with private alib-Eye

Would 'remove' PC Plot (and lady suspects from his scene

To your kitchen/bedroom ) wipe your hand from the Blade , unbreakably 

Frame: Black for Dad, Brown for Plum, and petrol-tank Jack Green!”

The Colonel’s private Market Force glides over from Burnham 

In a fleet of Chelsea tractors, each the size of his mother’s hearse

(As Eve falls) private wealth-cushioned against the potholes

To the Common, where a cold cougher pinches his private purse.

“When my Vikings scythed Blake’s head off at your Norfolk Noir launch

Of his PRIVATE I'S-ATION AND THE MURDER MOST FOUL

OF ONE NATION BRITAIN , I ‘solved’ the Death of that Author

But his ghost possesses Cock Hall, damn his black bestseller soul!”

Old Viking murders and self-escape yachts

through titanic migrant waters 

spilling Undead Rule Britannia landslides 

of beached red herring 

yanked out of the frying pan of Europe

into a twin tower safety burger to take out 

live far eastern markets 

and kit-supplied far eastern science

from these global-virus-conquered, 

Nelson Victory lanes

by double cross-eyed 2020 vision 

under-cover commie chefs Frank n Mark Adams

 (“Government contracted on a private number.”

 “You’re a marked man, Frank”; 

“You’re a franked man, Mark”)

behind the Black Shuck Headline Hell Hound 

of The Baskerville Telegraph 

chasing a wild goose: 

a big game bargain-hunter in a mask

shooting 30 miles up to a Lidl in another town 

in a top-of-the-range rover (clapping the NHS out of one window; 

taxing its leave-to-remain out the other;

driven by no kind of need except ‘GREED IS GOOD’

keeping the wheels of capitalism and coronavirus turning;

chuntering “there IS no society

it’s up to the individual not the State how we risk our bodies

and those of our neighbours and colleagues…

until we need the NHS, the BBC, the RAF

to save our little I-land of alien nation)

Block the Boudicca Trail up the B666. "This

Ain't the road to Valhalla in the Havens on the Haystacks next the Sea. 

This is the road to Dis."

The Brown Lady appears with a headless Dr Black,

Ghosts of an Empire Colonel Mustard wants back;

Snow Wolf takes them out in a panic attack:

"Not part of the cult-cha; not part of the pack!"

 

II. Captain Hastings’ Elimination 

I’m snowed in at The King’s Head by holiday Homers 

Who park three 4 by 4s EACH in lanes built for the horse!

And a Berlin Wall roadworks winter-timed by the council 

To suit this Public House not the PUBLIC of course.

It can’t be Scarlet, though she Nayed the squire her father

And his bridal nomination, she loved them both (sur)really; 

Her flirtation with the Prof was just a lovely filly’s folly

With an NHS-under-bed Red, a free and PPEasy.

“Nor Royalist Lady Peacock, though she ‘Dissed’ the squire her husband’s

Agreeing their daughter’s union with Radical Green Jack

Well, we know who wore the jodhpurs in the Peacock marriage.

No need to kill a spouse she could whip to Dis - and back;

“Nor the Colonel with his Nasser-splintered one-eye Eden glass

And private fly that saw him die for Eve’s attention since Eton,

Private selfies on the Oedipus  trail, rewarded then, as now,

With Abel’s Caining and that private after-healthcare with matron.

(“Not on our NHS that hawks, with bright crack-papering bills,

ALL FOR SOME; SOMME FOR ALL; NO FUTURE; NO VACCINE; NO ANTIBIOTICS

But why we need an implant and a whitening root canal

And ALL the latest BARGAINS in surgical cosmetics!!!)

“Nor Black & Brown, whose Looks could, couldn’t Murder in a Library 

From which they’ve been expired. Nor Jack the Public Green  

In a Scarlet Study: he gave me his Old School word. And so

Beyond our DI Ken, a Last Trump over Poirot… it can only… have been:

M-m-m-AAAAAAAAGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH -”

  

Old Civil War siege-works and laughing Cavalier

one eyed lockdown-breaking 

Good King Charles Interpretation of History pub-tours 

sponsored by Specsavers (should have gone to Oedipus) 

2020 vision private double-cross four-eyed by Kentucky-fried,

California-dried CIA agents Frank n Mark Adams 

(“Government contracted on a private number” 

“You’re a marked man, Frank”; 

“You’re a franked man, Mark”)

staking out a lost Castle of Perseverance

in an angel-wing mirror

cracked from side to side

between the Word on the street 

and a Marlow hip-pocket vision of the bay 

It’s a paradise… lost:

fig leaves and Freudian slips 

on the new line between the public

and the private

              I

still working the First Murder case 

from dawn to dewy Eve like

FOREVER because WE dunnit, Mark.

(you mean like Oedipus, Frank?

Oedipus is all right if you like modern. 

I mean like CAIN, Mark)

gridlocked 

behind a coffin cul de sac

parallel nosy parker

in a white elephant SUV

with out of real estate plates

Block the Boudicca trail up the B666.

This ain’t the road to a New Model Millennium of the Saints.

This is the Road to Dis.

The Brown Lady appears with a headless Dr. Black

And an All-in-all Saints commonwealth, plain English Jill and Jack.

Snow White takes them out in a proud boy panic attack.

Not part of the cult-cha, not part of the pack.

 

III.  PC Plot’s Arrest

"THERE'S BEEN ANOTHER MURDER!" over-acts the Superhead

In the dug up Saxon boneyard, then sees the grave’s for real:

Captain Hastings in the trench, a Norman arrow through his 'I'

Ghost-written there by Mustard as 'The Squire' who cuts this deal:

“I’m your born-to-be-General and life’s dealt m-me a loaded hand.

You can put your m-mortgage, children’s centre, white & blue shirt on me.

You can bank on another M-Mayfair house, another Grenfell hotel,

A neo-liberal M-murder case unleashing m-my Land of the Free

To trump as one (Mrs White too loud) “Build a Great Wall around China.

Send all the corona-sick yellowbellies; owlish Gretas; fires, bugs, rains; 

Locusts, floods, foreign bodies, nasty reporters; hurricanes (you want 

Fries with that vaccine?) back where the virus  came…

 

“Mustard’s Holiday Hearths (with Chef ‘Gammon’ White) the new Kings

Of Cock Hall, will keep all our outlets open; all our inlets closed.

Together, we can carpet bomb the pinko out of this commie corona 

With our hyper-ventil, market-leadin’, privateer overdose.

“Comme les généraux de mon pauvre capitaine Hastings à la Somme,

Your Private I’s too narrow, a troll’s blind glare at the Sun,”

Cries Green Eyes, glowing. “Game’s Up, ‘General’! Come into Mummy

For Supper,” pleads Jane. “NO! Let’s get this M-murder done!”

STOP THE TEXT!

“We harrest this minimalist counter-plot against Who Killed Cock Robin

For asset-strip/un-solv/ing the Excalibur Brand of Britain,”

Truncheons (W)PC Plot, “No account for the Cat what killed ’im

Could be so far behind the lines, so blithely underwritten…-” 

First World War Aerodrome man-shells Somme-being Back from the Front to be blown up the ammo-box stairway of their Safe Bilayati Homes 

behind a ten-seater-one-man bandwagon right up its own ass 

underwritten off through an ambulance

accelerated to a standstill by a Stop Cat

wall-eyed and simpsons-complexioned in the headlights

undertaking the middle of the road to conduct

Scheidt’s Symphony N. 2 in D Trump Major

with a riot gun and a bottle of thick bleach

and a big white Lie to cancel every reckoning

round the bend 

of toilet creek

 down the

 free

way 

to hell 

mouth 

first

“i will make you 

phishers of men

- that’s phishers with a PH

 world-sellers

 - and PH WITHOUT the science -

if you follow

 ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME

to the End 

of the World”

(NO thank you, says Frank.

No. Thank YOU, says Mark)

Block the Boudicca trail up the B666.

This ain’t the road to the New Jerusalem Without the Walls of Gaza.

This is the Road to Dis.

The Brown Lady appears with a headless Dr. Black

And the ghost of the brave new world of the young, which no wall can attack.

Snow White takes them out in a panic attack.

Not part of the cult-cha, not part of the pack.

 

IV. The Reveal

Colonel Mustard, in the Dining Room with smoking Revolver, 

Asks where any secret passage to Happiness is.

"There's no Way Out," sighs Eve Lady Peacock, "no 4-cornered flights

From this Clued-Ouija Board, just the Night Train to Dis.”

DIS APPEARS! The plot convenes. The Freud Squad Argus-pans. “We indict!

In every room. With every weapon...  The Snow Queen of Has-beens,

The Black and Cock Robin, breakfast cereal murderin’ … MRS WHITE!" …..                           

"I ’AD TO BLEACH THE ’OUSE OF ALL THE BLACKS, BROWNS AND GREENS!”

“You’re not Lady Peacock!” Mustard tears off her mask, 

“What have done with my Lady P?” “I AM her and shall forever be

Eng-land as it is in Heritage! Your Lady Daily Male, your buried Hastings,

Your Mustard-servin’ Cod-Psycho Private I, survivin’! Your ‘Me.’ Marry Me!”

Mrs White is marched away and Winter goes with her.

Spring is back on the menu, multi-coloured and diverse.

Dis approves as Jack Green is betrothed to Miss Scarlet;

Dis agrees as Poirot blossoms and a primrose Jane demurs.

Dis untangles the Brown Lady, reveals Parvati-Proserpina

In a Wife-of-Turnip-Townshend ghost-disguise!           

Dr Black blows his trumpet, England's foundations rock,

Green Eyes dances Blue Eyes into the sunrise.

 

V Finale: The (Happy, Everliving) End

raised stone age axings, raised bronze age barrow murders; 

raised iron age death-works 

and plastic age illiterate-banner-capitals 

get-my-own-back-private-enterprise- 

against-the-world plague wagons

(that’s my name on there)

behind a nose-trussed eve peacock in a broken ambulance

accelerated to a standstill

refusing colonel mustard’s death-bed proposal

of “a public stage for our private parts”;

overtaken by a hearse full of plum burnt red herring

undertaken by a hell’s angel 

bat-released from lockdown

cresting the hill on one wheel above happy valley 

blowing the last trump 

THE HUMAN RACE IS OVER

AMERICA FINISHED FIRST

behind chlorinated cia agent frank and mark adam,

‘to be frank, mark, with a marked frank, and a franked mark,

we’re plucked’; 

‘to be mark, frank, with a marked frank, and a franked mark,

we’re -; 

behind dick sparrow spotted on a mobile

serially murdering squire peacock’s reputation

in the daily mall,

cancelling culture from the curriculum

(delete who killed cock robin; 

insert advert studies for colonel mustard’s businesses;

delete break the class ceiling;

insert tom jone’s fielding, pupil self-assesed good writting

and speeling; how animals runed poor mr jone’s fram;

delete literature;

insert the ‘striving for comp

etence’ market brand academy 

‘now the third best sponsored numbschool in dis on sea south!’

spinning sunset west down a progress-listing poster)

while serially overtaking himself overtaking

the long slow coach to diss

down a diversion marked ‘this ain’t the road to helhoughton

this is the road to FLOOD

into an oncoming agriculatural juggernaut…

leave the boudicca trail down the b666

to bronzed, new-aged, post-modern diggers jack green and miss scarlet

at the altar in the greenwood with the bluebells. this

ain't the road to hiraeth, that long-longing-logres-home-grief to be elsewhere. this 

is the road to bliss.

“it’s going to be all right!” ejaculates dis

as scenes from the passion in an easterly procession

line the walsingham way 

and heavens above

turn st mary's snowdrops through an orientation 

to daffodils of fire

in the grail woods around all in all saints

through death, jane remembers, 

with poppies, 

             to love.

dis ceases; frees parvati and the head of dr. black

as little england’s shell starts to crack.

its self- i-solation, its dracula virus-attack,

re-i -dentified with the all in all, re-i-dentified with the anti-drac

who gives the lifeblood back…. 

            LOVE

rolls the die; his dying role; his ace, king, queen and jack; 

ALL part of the culture, ALL-IN-ALL of the pack. 

Appendix: The songs.

Who Killed Cock Robin? (traditional nursery rhyme)

"Who killed Cock Robin?" "I," said the Sparrow,

"With my bow and arrow, I killed Cock Robin."

"Who saw him die?" "I," said the Fly,

"With my little eye, I saw him die."

"Who caught his blood?" "I," said the Fish,

"With my little dish, I caught his blood."

"Who'll make the shroud?" "I," said the Beetle,

"With my thread and needle, I'll make the shroud."

"Who'll dig his grave?" "I," said the Owl,

"With my pick and shovel, I'll dig his grave."

"Who'll be the parson?" "I," said the Rook,

"With my little book, I'll be the parson."

"Who'll be the clerk?" "I," said the Lark,

"If it's not in the dark, I'll be the clerk."

"Who'll carry the link?" "I," said the Linnet,

"I'll fetch it in a minute, I'll carry the link."

"Who'll be chief mourner?" "I," said the Dove,

"I mourn for my love, I'll be chief mourner."

"Who'll carry the coffin?" "I," said the Kite,

"If it's not through the night, I'll carry the coffin."

"Who'll bear the pall? "We," said the Wren,

"Both the cock and the hen, we'll bear the pall."

"Who'll sing a psalm?" "I," said the Thrush,

"As she sat on a bush, I'll sing a psalm."

"Who'll toll the bell?" "I," said the bull,

"Because I can pull, I'll toll the bell."

All the birds of the air fell a-sighing and a-sobbing,

When they heard of the death of poor Cock Robin.

Lockdown (© Gareth Calway 2020)

Don’t go to work
Don’t go to school
Stay in your homes
Keep the 2 metre rule.

From the council estates
To the posh ones with parks
From high fashion high finance
To its slave kids in the dark

From the poles to the equator
Supermoon into eclipse
From the fjords to the deserts
Temperate zones to the tropics…

Can’t breathe…

Come and heal us with your caring
Then go back where you came
You’re not from round here
We don’t know your name.

From the centre of the cosmos
To Little England in the Styx
From the heart of Little England
To each human breath’s limits.

The world has come
To Little England in the Styx
Little England is the world
We’re all together in this

Except we have no test kits
We shut down too late
We didn’t quarantine
We didn’t track and trace.

We didn’t take the test
Now we’re top fo Death’s calss,
Lord Hee Haw dressed as Churchill
We are such a silly ass.

Blitzing Brits for Blighty
As the Beast in the East
Spits his cold War into Salisbury
The we go off piste.

Covid’s knee in the throat
Of your healer and your bro;
In this world war for survival
Every ally is your is foe.

Can’t breathe…

Except we have no test kits
We shut down too late
We didn’t quarantine
We didn’t track and trace.

We didn’t take the test
Now we’re top of Death’s class
Lord Hee Haw dressed as Churchill
We are such a silly ass.

 

No Future (The Ballad of Boudicca)

Boudicca's revolt of AD 61, part of our celebration of Norfolk and Greater Icenia and a signature track on our forthcoming double album Done Different.  All details in the press release appended to the film on You Tube.

It All Comes Out In The Wash by Bardonthewire ( solo album released)

Press Release

This is my arty arty solo album - poems set to Norfolk soundscapes,  including an epic musical account of the 1819 Thunderstorm in Sedgeford (performed in Sedgeford on its bicentenary last July); some vistas of Norfolk autumn; a Greek Choral Ode; comic songs; some elegies; my long delayed Welsh Rock Symphony (all four moments and a coda!!!!)  and a charmingly set Sedgeford Christmas poem and a charmingly set satirical one. 

By the end, we're a long way from the Wash in my Welsh/West country boyhood but by then it should be clear 'Wash' is a metaphor as well.

This digital album is available online only on this link - https://bardonthewire.bandcamp.com/album/it-all-comes-out-in-the-wash-album

Sleevenotes below.

Very congenial listening at this time of the year (autumn into winter/Christmas) I've let myself go wherever the words took me, boldly going into soundscapes and scores and whatever else is needed to bring the poems alive for the listener as an audio experience. Lots of experimental sound poem things including the finally realised ambition of a full blown rock symphony (tracks 13-16).

The title is fairly geographical for the first 'side' (tracks 1-11, though beginning to wander across Norfolk from the Wash by the end) celebrating and enjoying the country of Norfolk where I've lived for the past 40 years but broadens after that to include all the stuff pumping out from deeper levels of memory and experience. And in general to indicate the wash of an artist's palate, splashing about all over the shop. 

Cover pic by Bhas Allan 

Norfolk gals

Norfolk is a very understated region. She has unsung heroes and many of these are women. Here, hand on heart and shooting from the male hip, is my homage to some of them. Each character has a scene and then the cast does the chorus as in a Greek play.

 

read my EDP cover feature on Boudicca here

Note: Ickeni (Iceni) is a Norfolk dialect word meaning 'awkward, troublesome, unmanageable' - as in difficult horse.
Looking for a classroom activity on Boudicca? Try this, Warrior Queens

A breezy general introduction to Mother Julian of Norwich and her sister mystic Margery Kempe of Lynn, written for the EDP Weekend pullout, may be read here.

A full length musical playscript and newspaper features on Margery and her times - including her sister mystic Mother Julian of Norwich and her parish priest the Lollard martyr William Sawtrey - may be read here.  Read some general context about the Hanseatic age in Lynn here. 

Hear Anne (Boleyn) in dialogue with Tom (Sir Thomas Wyatt)'s verse here  and read the full Tom and Harry script here

An EDP Weekend feature on Charles and especially Fanny Burney may be read here.

Author's Note: Some say you can only tell your own story - I've been telling my wife mine for 35 years and I'm sure she still finds it as fascinating as I do. But these stories are much more interesting (and besides what are we but our imaginings, dreams, heroes, sense of history, fascinations etc etc?)
 

Norfolk gals

A five woman show (with musical accompaniment) 

The Antagonist Sallies - ie male fall guys - should be played as trouser roles by the gals themselves. (Women will have much more fun playing these than men.) We know who wears the tights in this house.
 

(enter the cast in a tragic chorus of Iceni ghosts)

We're the restless ghosts in the winds and rains,

Funneling the valleys, sweeping the plains,
Inlets and warrens that run underground,
Unbridled pathways, unquiet streams,
Haunted hidden corners of rootless sound,
Hives of Iceni, dead and unqueened,
By bronzebreasted redcrests violently weaned
We're the baby who wails for her dead mother's breast.

We are dead keening women, whispering grass,

The breath in the lilac and bluebells, the blast

Through the pale yellow oak leaves, hawthorns

And nettles. And that shout, queen of warriors,

From your victory chariot with your triumphant

Horsemen around you! And that salt chill of a winter's

Reprisals that blighted twice twenty summers.

We're the mother who wails for her new baby's death.

 

We are the cries in the corn, the harrowings hooted

Under moons of hunger, in the squeals of the hunted,

The creaking of geese through night-forest fears,

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!

The unresting dunes and the moaning wave-break,

We're the memory that's cankered two thousand years

Of Celtic blood with an unhealing ache,

We're the oracles lost in the noise diggers make.

We're the dead daughters wailing for the end of the world...

Boudicca emerges from the Chorus:
 

Boudicca is a punk shocker


Allow me to introduce to myself.-

Queen Victoria, of Icenia

The matriarchal Britons called me buddug, Boudicca, VICTORY.

The patriarchal Romans called me mad.

Aunt Sally: (Roman historian)

‘She was huge of frame, terrifying of aspect, with piercing eyes and a harsh voice, a great mass of red hair hanging down to below her waist’

Boudicca:
–the very picture of the Cleopatra dysfunctional woman in power, the Medusa Head of State.

In AD 60, on the death of my husband, King Prasutagas, (lash) I am dispossessed, flogged, my nobles enslaved, my women sold, my daughters... plucked and plundered...by Procurator Decianus Catus.

Provincial governor Suetonius Paulinus – later recalled to Rome for excessive bloodlust – quite a feat on the front line of empire - is absent in North Wales, slaughtering druids and desecrating the Oak Groves of Mona. Doing his bit for the environment.

when suddenly, out of the blue, the sky falls in and the forests erupt again through the nice tiled floors of Colchester.

My hazel-wattled people are in revolt. The Eastern half of Britain rises with me.

Iceni Chorus:

Kick over the wall cuz governors can fall

How can you refuse it?

Let fury have the hour anger can be power

You know that you can use it

 Boudicca:
 

I ‘redeveloped’ the Rome Counties. I burned down Colchester, a London left tactically undefended  - on the Provincial Governor’s orders- and the old Catavellauni capital of St Albans.

My army got larger with every victory.

Procurator Decianus Catus, flogging off the forests, garden-grabbing the graves, making a killing in the City (lash) finds himself staring at the end of civitas as he knew it. Norfolk, the guardsvan of Roman history, ploughing my fleet pony and wickerwork chariot through the heart of London.
 

(sings, with punk Chorus)

There’s no future in your Roman dream

Your traffic lanes and your shopping schemes

Your soapless baths and your manly steam

The Iceni queen bee is making free

With your city.


Boudicca:

He flees to Gaul, his smacked Roman backside smarting with the humiliation.

Now, as a summer dawn paints the ripening Iceni corn a battle-blood red,

I turn my attention to Provincial Governor Suetonius Paulinus…. (drum)

This seasoned professional soldier, marching hotfoot from his rout of Welsh tribes in the West, concentrates his army at a place never really identified but possibly near Fenny Stratford on Watling Street.

Despite my eloquent passion for annihilating every last Roman in Britain,

some of the tribes I had united beneath me now went home with their war loot, thinking enough had been done.

Tacitus, reporting me in the Latin of my conquerors 100 years later, gives me this speech.

‘We British are used to women commanders in war.

I speak to you not as an aristocrat but as a woman of the people.

A woman of yourselves.

Think how many of you there are, and why we are fighting.

Then you will win the battle, or die.

That is what I, a woman, plan to do – let the men live in slavery if they want.’

 

Suetonius chose a position in a narrow defile, protected from behind by forest

Sure that there would be no cover for ambushes.

Yah!

(drum, sings with punk Chorus)

Boudicca Boudicca

There is no safe European home.

This is no vestal valium Rome.

Boudicca Boudicca (drum)

Aunt Sally (Suetonius):

‘Pay no attention to the noise and empty threats these savages make.

There are more women than soldiers in their ranks.

They are not warlike and they are badly armed.

The battledress is a birthday suit, pudenda covered only by woad. The infamous blood streaks in the lime bleached hair, ha...the juice of rowan berries.

When they see the weapons and courage of troops,

They will turn and run.

Keep the ranks. Throw your javelins. Strike with your shield bosses.

Then drive on.

After the second javelin,

Close ranks for the testudo.

[Chorus TESTUDO! ]

A giant... sword-jabbing... tortoise... formation,

A 6 deep, 4 square human armoured vehicle

Defensive and offensive,

Tightly shielded on all sides.

The nearest the Romans could get to a tank.

And our ‘tactics’?

Chorus: Heads and dugs will rock and roll (x3)…and Roman dudes will bleed.

Boudicca:

My warriors, the customary male hordes swollen with raging women

Swarmed into the vice of the defile

And up towards that butcher’s yard of javelin volleys,

Every volley adding dead or javelin-struck Britons

To the labours of the lines behind

Maybe after they’d slithered through the first half dozen

Dead and writhing the passion for vengeance faded.

Then that Roman tank rolled forward and tin opened

The whole helpless throng of us against our wagon line.

The kids stopped watching Mam and Dad win the final dream victory

And became the meat in the sandwich of the final bloody screaming defeat.

All I had room left to do was chariot charge my own people….
 

Silence

Boudicca: (joined by Chorus on the refrain)

I am history, not myth, but remember

History is written by the victor

And I neither wrote nor won

No freedom, no future, no fun.

 

Rome had to win or risk the Empire,

Britain had to win or simply expire,

And with it the Western horizon,

No freedom, no future, no fun.

 

Procurator Decianus Catus

Spoke down his nose, spoke down his anus,

 (Aunt Sally) "The Emperor claims the dead king's kingdom"

(Chorus) No freedom, no future, no fun.

 

(Aunt Sally) "Our Roman matrons have a place too

In a civilised home: I could offer you

A place in mine: dresses, baths, decorum."

(Chorus)No freedom, no future, no fun.


Boudicca:

I danced to the wardrums, warhooves, hornwhine,

Exhorting, as Romans were drilled into line,

My race to fling back the squares of London

(No freedom, no future, no fun.

 

Now my rebels hole up, where home is none,

On roots thin as hope and a dream of Britain

Hunted through nettles and thorns, their soles stung:

No freedom, no future, no fun.

 

My hard core Iceni's last stand and fall

Is the longest, fiercest, stubbornest of all

But is crushed - like flint - in The Battle of Thornham.

No freedom, no future, no fun.

 

Death-and-glory queens, country dragons:

(Become) Whores of fashion in Camolodunum,

In Roman roses our own scent gone.

No freedom, no future, no fun.

 

‘My salts that I sowed in the Squareheads' wounds

Return in a wash that will sour our lands.

I loosen my tongue on its poison:

I loosen my tongue on its freedom’

 

Because they could not find me, bury me, kill me

chain me to their story,

Drag my defeat through the streets of Rome.

That is why I can be your moon-white goddess walking between Celtic daughters in Cardiff,

Why I can ride that moving, oak-gracious

There-and-not-there at the heart of Government,

Iron coach to nowhere the Victorians invented for me in Whitehall, getting every single detail wrong and the spirit absolutely right

The mother of Britain giving the mother of battles

to the frontier cowboys of Nero.

Why I must have a statue here

in the heart of Icenia:

The maddened mother making a chariot stand

on the stolen innocence of her children,

The matriarch martyr dying for her people,

The great British rebel with a cause,

A Norfolk hero-tale, a wild, turning North Sea tide,

A woman

who

would

not

lie

down.


Chorus: ( the North Sea)

                                                                        (strophe) I am the sea

                                                                        and its deep sullen anger

                                                                        is my anger

                                                                        and its grey endless spaces

                                                                        are my spaces

                                                                        and its icy depths

                                                                        are mine

                                                                        I am the coast

                                                                        and its sticky glitter

                                                                        its sludge and seawrack

                                                                        its holiday oasis of bright blue and yello

                                                                        its seagulls and shallows

                                                                        are mine

 

                                                                       (antistrophe)  O but I am the sea

                                                                        and its monstrous swell

                                                                        its elephant surges

                                                                        its charge and retreat

                                                                        are mine

 

                                                                        I am the sea

                                                                        and its blind destruction       

                                                                        its timless sculptures

                                                                        are in my gift

                                                                        and its welling compassion

                                                                        is mine

                                                                        I am the sea

                                                                        and its rocks and rivers

                                                                        its wrecks and reelings

                                                                        its sharks and cockles

                                                                        are mine

 

                                                                        (epode) I am the whale

                                                                        that’s devouring the world

                                                                        I am the gull

                                                                        with wings of icecap

                                                                        I am the nimbus

                                                                        dissolving in thunder

                                                                        I am cold as death

                                                                        and quick as the morning

                                                                        blind as surf

                                                                        sharp-eyed as salt

                                                                        I am Neptune and Necros

                                                                        driftwood and bedrock

               

                                                                        I am every drop

                                                                        on its boundless adventure

                                                                        across Illusion

                                                                        I am the sea

                                                                        and my jeweled infinities

                                                                        are in each ripple

                                                                        and my boundless whims

                                                                        are in each droplet

                                                                        and my fathomless urges

                                                                        are in your blood.

The late 14C anchoress Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe (another Aunt Sally) emerge from the Chorus

Nut Job in a Nutshell. Ye Page 3 interviews Mother Julian of Norwich.

AS:

Well, Julie-

Julian:

Julian.

AS:

Julian. Where do you see yourself in five years?

Julian:

Now-here. 

AS:

Why the bloke’s name? You after a bishopric?

Julian:

Anchoresses don’t need names. St Julian’s is the name of my home-church.

AS:

So you get in here a lot, yeah?

Julian:

I’m in here all the time. We’ve kind of grown together.

AS: 

Nice. Like flint and mortar?

Julian:

Like ship and anchor.

AS:

So are you going all the way with Norwich or are you looking for a move?

Julian:

I’m not going anywhere.

AS: 

Do you have a life? - I mean outside of church?

Julian: 

I never leave this cell.  And no-one’s allowed in.

AS:

Except a doctor of course?

Julian:

No-one. I am beyond the grave already.

AS:

So how did you get into all this ‘Death and Dis-after Dante’ stuff? And how old were you?

Julian:

Thirty and a half. I opened Death’s door and saw Christ’s blood trickling down from my Last Rite crucifix under the crown of thorns hot and fresh and right plenteously... like the drops of water that fall off the house’s eaves after a great shower of rain-

AS:

Can we nail it down to an exact place?

Julian:

Norwich but not. Nazareth but not. Nowhere.

AS:

Norwich. Can we nail it down to an exact time?

Julian: 

Eternity.

AS:

3 pm.

Julian

May 8 1373.

AS:

May 11 1373. And you had this… double vision?

Julian:

Sixteen visions.

AS:

In one day? Jesus! Will you be having any others?

Julian: 

God knows.

AS: 

The same God who wanted you walled you up against the church with the burial service read over you?! Dead to the world!

Julian:

But attached to it. My visions weren’t just for me but for everyone.

AS:

So what do you do with yourself in there all day?

Julian: 

Give counsel to visitors through this aperture. Meditate on the meaning of my visions. Write my book Revelations of Divine Love.

AS:

So what does Divine Love feel like? Nice?

Julian:

(patiently) Like a thorn in God’s side.

AS:

Which side?

Julian: 

(pats left side) His female side.

AS:

Nice. And has God’s female side got a message for Page 3?

Julian: 

God said not, Thou shalt not be travailed, dis-eased

Tempested, just not be overcome. I saw Him

Shew into my mind a nut. And perceived

This is the reason we are not at ease

Of heart and soul, that we seek in this thing

That is so little, where no rest is in,

Its Maker, Who is very rest….Yet we

May run to Him (and all shall be well)

As a frightened child to its mother and he will lead us

By his open side to his blessed breast,

Bearing us on the Cross, giving birth to us,

The Father truly our Mother in Christ Jesus,

And all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well.

AS:

Can we get a picture of the breast?       


CHORUS RE-ENTER:

          Somewhere mellow between

 

                               the end of the overblown blackberries

 

                                         and

 

                               the start of the harvested leaves

 

          fused flies

 

                     on clinical sills

 

                               hint at bleached sun

 

                                         and 

 

          in the hedges

 

                               thistle winds to come.  

 

To eyes trained on histrionic heights,

 

                 this stubborn serenity,

 

                     these mediaeval colours

 

                     are

 

          endlessly reassuring:

 

a great grey blanket billowing unbroken from the North Pole,   

 

                     wild chords of geese in its folds;

 

                               the flinty, dependable noun

 

          behind mists of adjectives

      Margery Kempe  emerges from Chorus, the housewife-visionary of early 15C Bishop's Lynn. 'Mother Julian' plays the Aunt Sally role of Priest.

Margery of Lynn

Margery: It was not just my firstborn that issued from my womb. Hell followed after. Devils opening their mouths all alight with burning flames of fire, pawing at me, hauling me about both night and day. Until I saw Jesus. I said to Our Lady- Blessed are the breasts that Jesus sucked! And Our Lady smiled, Yes.

Priest: Which is precisely while you’ll never be a proper visionary like Mother Julian of Norwich. A maiden doesn’t labour the vagina, pontificate to the pontificates; put a pussy among the patriarchs. She has a wall around her; sits peacefully behind it, serves her community; counsels, comforts; follows doctrine-

Margery: Julian’s Jesus was a woman! He ‘gives suck as a mother to her young’ – ‘bears us on the Cross’. She doesn’t even believe in evil. Or the Trinity!

Priest:  (at Margery) Heresy!

Margery: You’re calling Julian of Norwich a heretic?!

Priest: No, you for saying so. (vexed) It doesn’t sound like heresy when Julian says it.

Margery: I didn’t say it. I’m -

Priest: A steeple-stalker, a Bishop botherer! A monk manqué in a housewife’s body.  Seeing Jesus in a marriage bed. Hearing the Holy Ghost in a common or garden robin. A heretic.

Margery: What?! I live for Orthodoxy, (weeping at the thought of this) the Crucifix, Images of Holiness, Pilgrimage, the Seven Sacraments of Baptism, Confirmation, Eucharist, Penance, Orders, Unction and… (she’s forgotten one)

Priest: (supplying it) Marriage. (vexed) And you make orthodoxy roar like heresy.

Margery: (weeps)

Priest: And your holy roaring is the devil!

Priest reverts to a woman and joins with Margery in singing:

Margery:       The Prick of Love is in my heart,

A bellows in my ear

And love enflames another part

They cannot see or hear.

I bend my will to holy men

Confessors, clerks and seers

Yet drown their prayers and sermons in

A Noah’s Flood of tears-

I take Christ to my marriage bed

As chaste as any maiden

A love-struck Mary Magdalene

Face to face with heaven

And kiss him sweetly on the mouth

His head and darling feet,

And wash away my sins with tears

That heaven and earth should meet.

This Book I weep in blood

Up from the heart’s deep well

Would drown the earth in heaven tears

And church the tongues of hell.

The Prick of Love is in my heart,

A bellows in my ear

And love enflames another part

They cannot see or hear.

I weep at every sacrament,

At every human sin,

At holy nails and blood and Cross

And lepers’ suffering.

I cry more loud than heart, or ear,

Can bear, at such a loss:

My Holy Husband, Son and Ghost,

In agony on the Cross.

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.’

This Book I weep in blood

Up from the heart’s deep well

Would drown the earth in heaven tears

And church the tongues of hell…

The Prick of Love is in my heart,

A bellows in my ear

And love enflames another part

They cannot see or hear.

 

Each babe in arms this creature sees

Is Christ the child to me

And every handsome man in Rome,

Is Jesus on the tree.

God sails my soul to Holy Lands

Through world and priestly storm

And tunes the bellows in my ear

Into a robin’s song.

And if your Table hates my noise,

I’ll pray or dine alone

Where Mother Mary homely says

 ‘Sweet, make yourself at home.

 

‘Lend Martha there a hand to sweep

The hearth and tend the vine

And give my baby Jesus suck

And serve this bread and wine.

This Book I weep in blood

Up from the heart’s deep well

Would drown the earth in heaven tears

And church the tongues of hell- 

The Prick of Love is in my heart,

A bellows in my ear

And love enflames another part

They cannot see or hear.

For long ago I sinned a sin

That’s never been confessed,

-Except to God - a Lollard sin

To hold it in my breast.

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, priest,

A single life I choose.’ 
 

This Book I weep in blood

Up from the heart’s deep well

Would drown the earth in heaven tears

And church the tongues of hell- 
 

The Prick of Love is in my heart,

A bellows in my ear

And love enflames another part

They cannot see or hear.

You chambered me, then ceased, and now

You fall and break your head

Where gossips say my separate life

Is leaving you for dead.
 

How fallen is the flesh I wed

And bred with, kissed and urged

That now discharges old man waste

So flesh by flesh is purged

Yet flesh of flesh, I wife and nurse

The once-young parts I craved

With hands more faithful than my youth’s

Temptations had depraved.
 

And every pilgrim step I trudged

From wedlock’s grave mundane

And churchman’s plot, was heaven-winged

By doves that sang God’s name...

This Book I weep in blood

Up from the heart’s deep well

Would drown the earth in heaven tears

And church the tongues of hell- 

The Prick of Love is in my heart,

A bellows in my ear

And love enflames another part

They cannot see or hear. (exeunt) 

Re-enter fourth actor as Anne Boleyn
 

Anne Boleyn of Blickling Hall

ANNE               (in her pomp as queen of the hive ) The queen bee must provide an heir to the colony in earnest and lead the dance of the hive in the game of courtly love.  Like the king, I flirt with everyone but in earnest I am faithful. (darker, privately). Unlike the King.

Pause
 

ANNE               How quickly it changes. God blessed Jane Seymour with a son and killed her with Tudor surgery 12 days later.   Four short months ago, Henry and I wore yellow to celebrate Catherine’s death and he stroked my pregnant belly. And waking beside him the next day, the terrible truth dawned: with Catherine gone, he no longer needed me. (holds empty womb) Then my last best hope miscarried.   When he came to me at Easter, he was already gone. At the May jousts, as I Queened it for the third and last time, six gentlemen and pages were arrested for plots against the king and carnal knowledge of me. Including you, Tom, Esquire of the Body and master of mine long before Henry knew it. They will let you go, after watching me die: you have Cromwell as your pillar. They wracked confessions from the others. Yesterday, on the scaffold, my brother Rochford, also accused of being my lover,  said: “From my mishap learn not to set your thoughts upon the vanities of the world, and least of all upon the flatteries of the court. The higher we rise, the harder we fall.” Keep your head down, Tom, lest you lose it.

Music

Anne.................All six of my ‘lovers’ died confessing their sins, though not the ‘sin’ they were executed for.  Here today, dead tomorrow, I swore on the sacrament, that I am pure. Shall I die without justice? I asked and the lieutenant said the poorest suggest the king hath, hath justice. And I laughed. A dying old Lady of the  bedchamber whom I never meant to offend, Lady Wingfield, called me a whore on her deathbed. She told our young love story, Tom, as if it were happening now.  Blame the Duke of Suffolk, my sworn enemy, for your arrest: the Wingfield family are his clients.  I am 29, too young to die, guilty of nothing but youth. I indulged ‘pastime in the queen’s chamber’ giggled at tales of the king’s impotence. Henry said I was unfaithful with a hundred men and this last six no worse than the rest. Truer than he meant.
 

Music

ANNE               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. I felt his jousting fall deep in my heart. It cost me the baby. A boy. The court flew from my weakness. I refused to smile on Henry’s affairs.  She showed ‘gentleness’ in this, I ‘cursedness’ – like Catherine. 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.

Pause. She is thinking of Henry leaving her.

ANNE                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 Boleyns  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. Pray for that softness now.

(Music: a minstrel sings) 

 

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.

Enter fifth actor as Fanny Burney.

Fanny Burney

'I remember well that, when I was preparing....I had such an idea I should undergo an examination and I was fearful of some wry question that might discountenance me, that I learnt nearly the whole common prayer book by heart! - Besides reading the Bible quite through three times! I was so indefatigable, I rose to nothing else; and never went to rest while I could procure light for my labours. … (and) after all this hard work - the fat clumsy stumpy worthy Bishop of Norwich clapt his hand upon my head, and off it, as fast as he possibly could, and never made a single interrogatory, nor uttered a single doubt or demur upon my fitness or unfitness for his blessing.' …

 

‘I offered some few words in favour of my poor abused town the land of my nativity - of the world’s happiness – we discoursed a little time and Hetty suddenly cried out ‘Hush hush, Mama’s in the next room. If she hears us we two will be whipt. And Fanny will have a sugar plumb’ ‘Aye cried Maria tis her defending Lynn which makes Mama (Fanny’s stepmother, Mrs Allen, Lynn born and bred) so fond.’  

                                                                           

Let’s have a line for the Lynn literati,

Poetry was born here – and autobiography

But who’s that shy creature with Geoffrey and Margery?

It’s Charles Burney’s novel-bearing little daughter Fanny!

 

The high-spirited teenage girl

‘Confirmed’ by a stumpy

Fathead Bishop of Norwich

Holy as Humpty Dumpty,

 

Loved her ‘poor abused town,

The land of her nativity’

With a sugar plumb tongue

That would flay the great city:

 

This child of Lynn St Margaret’s

Vicarage garden cabin

Is grandmother to the Novel

Received from Jane Austen.

 

This shy ‘little’ Burney,

Turned the gentlemen pale,

Johnson called her a ‘toadling’

With poison in her tale.

 

Let’s have a line for the Lynn literati,

Poetry was born here – and autobiography

But who’s that shy creature with Geoffrey and Margery?

It’s Charles Burney’s novel-bearing little daughter Fanny!

 

From Toads in the Halls

Of her riverside Lynn -

Harpies amid the harpsichords -

To High Society and Sin

 

Up the Ladder of Charlotte’s Robes

And those Blue Stocking works,

Joshing the Georgians with Johnstons,

Garricks, Montagus and… Burkes

 

Of bad manners and bad hearts,

Of a King completely mad,

Her tongue lashing down

Between the ingénue and cad.

 

This sly ‘little’ lady

‘Pretending to know nothing’

Cracked a whip of a tale

And each with a sting.

 

Let’s have a line for the Lynn literati,

Poetry was born here – and autobiography

But who’s that shy creature with Geoffrey and Margery?

It’s Charles Burney’s novel-bearing little daughter Fanny!

 

Her arms so much more gentle

Than Madame Guillotine

Love-Napoleoned by a General

Of the Ancien Regime,

 

Her eye and ear much sharper,

Her well-cut stories fit

Of the innocent youthful Eve

Blessed with beauty and wit

 

Falling through Society

And aching adversity

To Higher Degrees of Love

At the Heart’s University

 

While her creator took tea

With the gossip and the coquette

And endured the small talk

And the paralysing etiquette.

 

Let’s have a line for the Lynn literati,

Poetry was born here – and autobiography

But who’s that shy creature with Geoffrey and Margery?

It’s Charles Burney’s novel-bearing little daughter Fanny!

 

And when a ‘dreadful’ French blade

Plunged into her breast’s

Unaesthetised arteries,

Veins, nerves and flesh

 

And sent the balls of her eyes

Into white cheeks indented

And blood-sprayed Napoleon’s surgeon

As she courteously fainted

 

And they – needlessly - told her

‘Madame, do not restrain

The cries’ the twenty minute scream,

The described indescribable pain….

 

There, where Shelley’s monster genre

Ran out of breath,

Her irony in the soul survived

The romantic death.

 

Let’s have a line for the Lynn literati,

Poetry was born here – and autobiography

But who’s that shy creature with Geoffrey and Margery?

It’s Charles Burney’s novel-bearing little daughter Fanny!

CHORUS: