The flats were old and the rooms were cold
But I didn’t have much choice,
I hadn’t the money for anything else
Since the spat I had with Joyce,
I’d walked the streets for almost a day
Just to find a place to stay,
When I finally found a flat to rent
The building was old and grey.

Dust was grimed on the windowsill
And mud was tramped in the hall,
Whatever was left of the carpet there
You just couldn’t see at all,
The caretaker in the bottom flat
Handed out the do’s and don’ts,
The rent on time on the topmost line,
Ahead of the wills and won’ts.

I didn’t know it was partly share
Till I’d paid, and taken the key,
Until I entered the bathroom there
And found there was more than me.
A woman sat there, painting her nails
Come in from the flat next door,
Said, ‘You’re my share?’ as she patted her hair,
‘You’d better prepare, there’s more.’

We not only shared the bathroom there
But the key to the only Loo,
There was only a single kitchen there
And it looked like we shared that too,
I wasn’t impressed, was more than depressed
And I kept on thinking of Joyce,
How could I sink so low, I thought,
But she didn’t give me a choice.

I lay in bed the following morn,
Lay in till a quarter-past two,
Why should I get up early when
There was nothing I had to do.
I thought I’d cook me a rasher or two,
Some eggs, and a slice of bread,
Till I walked out into the kitchen, then
And into a land of dread.

There were bats hung over the fireplace,
And a great big *** on the hob,
And something thin that had just been skinned
Lay over an iron ****.
There were piles of bones on the platter board
And some fingers left on a plate,
Their rings were on but the hand was gone,
Off to a dismal fate.

I whirled about in despair, in case
Someone was stalking me,
And checked the grate of the fireplace
Where the ashes glowed redly,
The *** was bubbling on the hob
And some things that looked like ears,
Kept bobbing up to the surface
Like some headless bombardiers.

I spun away to the kitchen sink
And I gazed into its depths,
Peered on in with a single blink
And I fought to keep my breath,
For staring up was a grinning skull
As the girl I saw last night,
Came leaping in like a beast of sin
And I lost my appetite.

‘It isn’t what you might think,’ she said,
‘I should have warned you, right!
We use this room for the local Rep
To rehearse their play tonight.
I set it up for the witches scene,
It’s only a plastic skull,
And plastic bats and toy skinned-cats,
Want to eat?’ I said ‘I’m full!’

David Lewis Paget

The fire began in the cobbler’s shop
In a terrace of shops that day,
And spread right through to the milliners
That was owned by Mrs. Gray,
It leapt up into the rooftop beams
And galloped along the street,
Burning a swathe through the fodder stores
And the blacksmith, Simon Fleet.

The smoke rose into an Autumn sky
And blackened the old clock tower,
It didn’t pause, it was far too dry
For even an Autumn shower,
And Simon said, as the embers fell
To the household servant, Gert,
‘The courtyard’s starting to look like hell,
Get out of that silken skirt.’

He hadn’t looked twice at Gert before
And she was so awful shy,
While he was never the greatest catch
With his horseshoe-looking eye,
But once he saw that the embers fell
He was more than kept alert,
He knew the fabric would burn like hell,
The silk in the servant’s skirt.

She’d bought the skirt, it was second-hand
From a Drapers along the street,
It felt so silky and smooth, she’d said
From her waist down to her feet,
She liked the line of the skirt, the lads
Would see her pass, and stare,
So like the ladies she aped, she swore
To wear no underwear.

So Gert had blushed as she heard the words
Of the Blacksmith, Simon Fleet,
She wasn’t going to show her legs
To Simon, out in the street,
The skirt went up with a sudden roar
And he heard her pitiful cries,
So trying his best to douse the flames
He wrapped canvas round her thighs.

The blaze was stopped by the corner shop
Where the fire engine stayed,
And kept from running its rampant course
Along the Grand Parade,
But Simon said it was Gertie’s legs
That had failed her, in her pride,
But caught his eye with a tender sigh
As they fed the fire inside.

Whenever they speak of the shopfront fire
It’s as if it paved the way,
The two have said, to the day they wed
And their happiness today,
For Gertie doesn’t have charming looks
And he’s ugly too, says Gert,
But Simon says it’s a treat, that heat,
Under a silken skirt.

David Lewis Paget

It was after the funeral service
In the church at Calder Rise,
Hoping to catch a final glimpse
Of you, where your coffin lies,
I’d waited until the others left
And the church was quiet and still,
Then crept on round to the vestry door
And felt a sudden chill.

The coffin lay unattended on
The bier, by the font,
But someone was standing over it
Not someone that you’d want,
He raised the lid and he looked on down
Where you lay in your wedding dress,
Then reached on over your folded arms
And placed some bread on your breast.

He bowed his head and he muttered words
Of some Slavic, Eastern State,
I wanted to interrupt him, but
By then, it was too late,
He took the bread and he wolfed it down
And gagged on the slice of rye,
And as he did, your body heaved
In the coffin, and gave a sigh.

‘My God,’ I gasped, as I staggered in,
‘What awful thing have you done?
What spell could possibly interfere
With death, but an evil one?’
He turned to me, was taken aback
That I’d seen the thing he did,
‘Don’t mess with what you don’t understand,’
He said, then closed the lid.

He started to walk back up the aisle
But he choked, then doubled up,
He started having convulsions
Then his face became corrupt,
His brow was furrowed, his jaw was locked
With his mouth, an evil grin,
‘I’ve taken away her path to Hell,’
He groaned, ‘I’ve eaten her sin!’

While back on the bier the coffin lay,
Began to open its lid,
And you sat up in your shroud of death
And fluttered each dead eyelid,
You stared at me with a great intent
And muttered, with words like ice,
‘He’s eaten the sin of you and I,
So meet me in paradise!’

Your corpse collapsed on the coffin’s side,
Your arms were reaching for me,
I backed away in a panic then
And hid in the church vestry,
We’d lain together the month before
And the sin was deep in my heart,
The Sin-Eater was dead on the floor,
My guilt would tear me apart.

I knew I would have to cleanse my soul
If you were to meet with me,
Though you were headed for paradise
I didn’t know where I’d be,
I came again when the church was dark
And knelt, where the man was dead,
Crossed myself, and I laid it down
On his chest, a slice of bread.

David Lewis Paget

I knew that something was going on
When she went to walk each night,
Just on dusk when the tide swept in
With the blue moon of delight,
She never asked me to tag along
Though at times I thought she must,
We’d once been close, but the time was wrong
And our closeness turned to dust.

I stayed back up in the dunes while she
Took on the darkening shore,
It triggered memories held when we
Had walked it once before,
That gentle rise where the sand had dried
And we sat awhile and kissed,
Now I sat lonely and cold aside
Bemoaning what I’d missed.

I didn’t follow along the beach
Too scared what I might find,
A lovers tryst in the dark I feared
That might upset my mind,
I knew my temper was short and so
I feared what might be done,
Out there, and under a hasty moon
Might see me overcome.

The moon was skirting the ocean’s rim
The stars were riding high,
My only thought as she disappeared,
In a single word, was ‘Why?’
I wondered what the attraction was
That would take her away each night,
Would leave me sat alone in the gloom
Like a pensive troglodyte.

It had to come to an end, I knew
So I strode along the beach,
Followed the trail of footprints where
The tide had failed to reach,
Till sudden, there was the sweetest song
On the wind, I ever knew,
And there was Isobel, sitting rapt
While the notes came fast and few.

And on a rock set above the tide
Sat the singer of the song,
The perfect form of a sweet mermaid
With her tail, so curved and long,
But then she gave out a sudden cry
When she saw my shadow fall,
And slithered back off the rock, to swim
Below to the mermaids’ hall.

‘Why did you come,’ said Isobel,
‘Why did you have to pry,
She’ll never come to the shore again
To sing to the empty sky.’
I turned and ran from her angry gaze
But at least I now know why,
She sits at night in the moon’s half light
And I often hear her cry.

David Lewis Paget

He’d never forgotten the heap of ****
That sat beside the mine,
It blocked the sun from his morning walk
With its shadow, so sublime,
It grew to hover above his home
From the time that he was three,
Its overpowering vastness grew
Not slow, but steadily.

And every time that the wind would blow
Its dust would fill the air,
Would saturate every cranny, even
Darken his mother’s hair,
The coal dust strangled their garden bed
So not a thing would grow,
And filled up his father’s lungs with dust
Each time that he went below.

The more that they mined the deeper coal
The higher it grew, the heap,
It spread away from the poppethead
Was covering up the street,
They tried to manage the monster but
It grew out of control,
With every truckload of **** they dumped
From where they mined the coal.

At night it loomed like a giant bat
With its shadow on the ground,
Gleaming black in the moon’s pale beam
It terrorised the town,
‘I don’t like walking at night out there,’
You’d hear the women say,
‘That heap is covering Satan’s lair
We need to get away.’

But nobody ever got away,
At least, not with their soul,
They’d sold their souls to the devil, and
Were tied to the monster, coal,
The men came home with their faces black
And their hands all scarred and torn,
For coal mining is the sort of job
You are cursed with, when you’re born.

And he was taken to work the mine
When he’d barely turned just six,
His father said, ‘Well, I think it’s time,
You can leave behind your tricks,’
They showed him how he could work the fan
To fill the mine with air,
And there he worked twelve hours a day
While he learned the word ‘Despair’.

His father died when a prop collapsed
And they had to leave him there,
Under a hundred tons of coal
But the owners didn’t care,
They simply began another drive
To make up the owner’s loss,
Whether the miners lived or died
Their lives were seen as dross.

So Andrew, that was the orphan’s name
Went down between the shifts,
He took some fuel and matches down
He’d long been planning this,
He managed to start a coal seam fire
That roared by the morning sun,
And smoke poured out of that poppethead,
While they raged, ‘What has he done?’

But Andrew never emerged again
To pay for the thing he’d done,
He’d told his sister to write a note,
‘I did it for everyone!’
His bones lie charred where his father fell,
Under a hundred ton,
They couldn’t put out the coal seam fire,
The father lies with the son.

David Lewis Paget

We went to live in Smuggler’s Cove
Near a cave, right on the beach,
Where once they’d hidden ill-gotten gains
In the cave, and out of reach.
The locals said two hundred years
Since the smugglers came ashore,
Carrying casks of Spanish wine
And a chest of gold moidores.

Led by a man called One-Eye Red
For the only one he’d got,
He’d lost the other, the locals said,
To a random pistol shot,
He wore a patch on the missing eye
For the wind blew in at the hole,
And froze his brain till he went insane
When the winter winds were cold.

He hung with Sally, a thatcher’s wife
Who would meet him in the cove,
And he would sample her plain delights
Till the time came round to rove.
She kept lookout on the cliff top there
For a glimpse of Revenue Men,
And would fire her flintlock pistol where
She had thought she’d sighted them.

My wife, her name was Sally too
And I’d rib her there in jest,
‘You’d better not hug a smuggler, Sally,
Dressed only in your vest.’
We’d laugh back then in those early days
As we worked to settle in,
But sensed some dread foreboding there,
In the air from old past sin.

It came on strong in the winter time
When the cove was filled with mist,
The mouth of the cave was grim and dark
It would almost seem possessed,
Then Sally started to walk at night
As the waves crashed into the shore,
She said she needed to beat the fright
That she’d suffered from times before.

I’d watch her walk to the darkened cave
Then halt to stare in the mouth,
It opened onto the northern shore
Then she’d turn, and wander south,
She’d come back shivering, pale and wan
And would warm up by the fire,
Then come out with the strangest thing
That it filled her with desire.

She’d strip right off by the glowing hearth
And I’m not one to complain,
She’d not been so very down to earth
Since the Lord invented rain,
Then one night when the mist was thick
I could barely see the cave,
When a ghostly figure stepped from the sea
And walked all over my grave.

Then Sally turned and she spoke to him
As my stomach churned inside,
They walked together into the cave
Like a bridegroom and a bride,
I left the cottage, the door ajar
And I ran down to the beach,
But when I got to the mouth of the cave,
Sally was out of reach.

Sally was out of reach that day
And has been each day since,
The phantom that walked her into the cave
Was One-Eye Red at a pinch.
I called and called for her to come back,
I even tried to insist,
But all that I’ve seen on a winter’s night
Are their shadows, abroad in the mist.

David Lewis Paget

He met his Dad for the first time when
His father came marching home,
After the war to end all wars
From London through to Rome.
He’d never seen him before he stooped
As if to pluck out a thorn,
And asked his Ma in his army suit,
‘Just when was the young one born?’

He hadn’t been home for five long years
And Jeremy then was four,
He constantly seemed to be adding up
The years that he’d been at war,
His Ma would say, ‘He’s a miracle,
Young Jeremy went full term,
I carried him for a year,’ she said,
‘It must have been wartime *****!’

Then his father growled, and his mother howled
As he placed her on his knee,
And running his hand on sacred ground
Said, ‘all this belongs to me!’
His mother cried when he said she lied
In the years of his growing up,
And treated him, apart from the rest
When he called him a ‘scoundrel’s pup.’

His father clung to his Khaki suit
It was washed and pressed each week,
‘You never know when they’ll call me up
If this treaty doesn’t keep.’
He worked back down in the coal mines where
He’d emerged to answer the call,
Black from coal like a demon’s soul
But he’d gone, to fight for them all.

But Jeremy never saw him smile,
He never could do enough,
The others would go on trips the while
But Jeremy got a cuff,
‘What have I done,’ he’d often say
As his father sat and yawned,
‘Don’t come bothering me today,’
And mutter of ‘wartime spawn.’

The years went on and the son had gone
To live on his own, nearby,
But always came to visit his folks
Each month, till the one July
He came around to the house and found
That the dust his father choked,
Was sat so deep in his lungs that he
Had suffered a massive stroke.

‘Your father’s down in the hospital,
He might not ever come out,’
His mother cried, while his brother, Clyde,
‘He’s all washed up,’ he’d shout.
The others wouldn’t go visit him
They had much too much to do,
So Jeremy took his favourite book
To visit him in Ward 2.

His father sat in a wheelchair there
And he looked up in surprise,
‘Nobody’s come to see me, lad,’
He said, with tears in his eyes.
‘Why, of all people, would you come,’
As he helped him into his cot,
‘What do you think, you silly old man,
You’re the only Dad I’ve got!’

And he read to him from his favourite book
And he sat and held his hand,
And the years of hurt that disconcert
Lay buried in No Man’s Land,
For the feeling came back in his limbs
As the father did atone,
And Jeremy came, the spawn of war,
‘Come on, I’m taking you home!’

David Lewis Paget

‘It’s coming in every night,’ she said,
‘And creeping across the floor,
It gives me an awful fright,’ she said,
‘Though I’m sure to lock the door.
I hear it shuffle, and then the creak
As it starts to climb the stair,
It stops outside on the landing then
And listens for me out there.’

‘And I’m aware of my breathing then
As it’s rattling in my throat,
I’m hiding under the covers when
I scream, in a long high note,
But still it’s there and it tries the door
For the handle slowly turns,
Then I hear a ‘pop’ as my heart will stop,
As my face and my forehead burns.

‘The door will creak on its hinges then
As it swings, and opens wide,
And I see a shadow dim and black
As it slowly comes inside,
I can’t make out any features though
I think that it wears a cloak,
And a velvet mask of a black damask
As the scream dies in my throat.’

‘It’s like the Devil has come for me
Though it’s way before my time,
I feel I’m starting to suffocate
In a coffin, filled with lime.
Oh why, Oh why don’t you come for me
When I’m screaming in the gloom,
You’re only just down the hallway
And asleep in another room.’

I sit by her and I pat her hand
And I make some soothing sounds,
I know why I’m never there for her
I’m coming in from the grounds,
I slide the key in the outer door
That she thinks I haven’t got,
And creep on slowly up the stairs,
Whether she sleeps, or not.

I know that I’m mentioned in the will
That is under lock and key,
The house and all of its acres will
One day, devolve on me,
So I sit and soothe, and hold her hand
And I pat her on the back,
For one day soon, it won’t be long
She’ll die of a heart attack.

David Lewis Paget

I’m not into modern music since
The Spyders came to town,
One of those painted-tainted groups
That you often see around,
But Anne-Marie was younger than me
And she went with every craze,
She called me a boring dinosaur
At the height of those Spyder days.

I’ve always been a conservative,
I don’t get carried away,
I know whatever is going down
It won’t be there next day,
The house was full of discarded things
That had lost their first allure,
The moment she saw the Next Big Thing
Come barrelling through the door.

The Spyder thing was over the top
I said to her more than twice,
‘They’ll be forgotten within a month,’
She replied, ‘That wasn’t nice!
Why do you always bring me down,
You’re turning into a grump!’
So I wasn’t allowed to criticise,
She put me under the pump.

She came back home from the hairdresser’s
With a bouffant type of style,
Sprayed and lacquered so it was hard,
She slept upright for a while.
She said that it was the Spyder look
That the girls all thought it great,
With hair like a spider’s legs each side,
Bobbing around her face.

I shook my head, but I held my tongue
There was nothing to be gained,
For anything that I said just then
Would bring me future pain.
The following day, she went away
And she came back home that night,
With a square of plaster on her neck
And I thought, ‘This isn’t right!’

She said that she’d got a small tattoo
And I nearly had a fit,
I said, ‘That’s going to be there for life,’
So she wouldn’t show me it.
She kept me waiting a week to see
The blue-black spider there,
Crawling up the nape of her neck
And heading into her hair.

‘How shall I ever kiss you there,’
I howled, while shaking my head,
‘That’s the end of our necking days,’
‘Oh don’t be soft,’ she said.
We barely spoke for a week back then
It was just the early Spring,
She spent her time round the roses with
Her bouffant, and that ‘thing’.

There’s always a lot of spiders webs
Outside, at that time of year,
And Anne-Marie must have brushed through them
And got them caught in her hair,
For days she said that she wasn’t well
That she must have had the flu,
But then one morning I woke in bed
To see that her lips were blue.

Her head fell back on the head rest, and
Disturbed the bouffant style,
And thousands of tiny spiders rushed
On out of her hair, meanwhile,
They swarmed on over her shoulders,
From the nest she had on her head,
But Anne-Marie was beyond it now
For Anne-Marie was dead!

I never listen to music now,
I turn off the radio,
Whenever the Spyder’s music’s played
On the Old-Time Late Late Show.
The band broke up a decade ago
And the lead is doing time,
He said that his skin began to crawl
With the tatts all down his spine.

David Lewis Paget

He told me that once he’d killed someone,
A long, long time in the past,
He’d held him down and he’d used a gun,
I said I was just aghast.
He said it merely to threaten me,
I don’t know if it was true,
He said if I kept on seeing her,
‘In future, that could be you!’

He shocked me so that my hands had shook,
I reached and grabbed at his coat,
I said, ‘Don’t ever dare threaten me
Or you’ll feel my hands at your throat!’
His face went white and he backed away
He wasn’t the bravest one,
But turned to say as he walked away,
‘Next time, I’ll carry a gun.’

I asked Joanne if she even knew
Just what he was really like,
She laughed, and said it was said in fun,
‘Just tell him to take a hike.’
She’d once gone out on a party date
With him, but only the once,
He seemed to think they were drawn by fate,
‘But really, he’s such a dunce.’

‘Do you think that we should tell the police,
You know, it might have been true,
How would you feel if someone died
And all on account of you?’
‘Believe me, he wouldn’t have the guts,
He’s just a weasel at heart,
Put him next to a skunk, you’ll see,
You couldn’t tell them apart.’

Joanne and I went our different ways,
It hadn’t been working out,
I found her nice but her heart was ice,
That’s not what it’s all about.
She passed me by with a man called Guy
And I wished them well to begin,
She said that Ted had gone off his head,
Had started his threatening.

It must have been only a month or more
That I heard how Guy was done,
His body lay in the city morgue
After a hit and run.
Joanne was almost beside herself
In fear, and took to her bed,
‘It’s true, I should have listened to you,
It must have been Ted,’ she said.

The Spring had faded to Summer when
I ran into her again,
Clung to the arm of the hated Ted,
I couldn’t believe it then.
But the fear was there in her startled eyes
It was all too plain to see,
He looked at me with a faint surprise
And he said, ‘Now look at me!’

I wasn’t surprised when the news came down
Along with the winter flood,
A woman ran from a house in town
Upset, and covered in blood,
A man lay stabbed in the bed in there
It seems that she’d cut his throat,
She said it was more than a saint could bear
In a hasty, scribbled note.

I don’t know what will happen to her
They say it’s up to the court,
But I’ll be there as a witness for
Joanne, and the justice sought.
She’d known it wasn’t an idle threat
When she saw what happened to Guy,
And said that he had her terrified
When he mouthed the word, ‘Goodbye!’

David Lewis Paget

He’d go to the Square each afternoon
And sit on a bench, near me,
The one that stood in the shaded gloom
Of a brooding maple tree,
He’d roll his brolly and doff his hat
And scatter his bits of bread,
Then when the Keeper would tut, he’d say,
‘The Starlings have to be fed!’

He’d watch them come in a darkening cloud
And scare the sparrows away,
Then sit and listen to what had risen
At this loose end of the day.
He’d sit and nod, and he’d take it in
As if he could understand,
This Starling patter that passed as chatter
Concerning the world of man.

I never once saw him take a note
Or even record the sound,
He didn’t acknowledge the presence there
Of anyone else around,
He totally focussed on what they’d say
And **** his ear to their cries,
Then nod and smile in the strangest way
And shake his head at their lies.

Then after dark he would walk the park
And head for the studio,
That one dim lamp on the outer wall
Would show him the way to go,
And once inside you would hear him slide
On up to the microphone,
Where he’d tell his tales of success and fails
In a drawn-out monotone.

But you never felt a part of the tale
You were always shut outside,
Peering in from a ledge or bin
With a window open wide,
Then sometimes you were looking down
On the action from on high,
It could be from the bough of a tree
Or a wing in the azure sky.

He must have muttered a thousand tales
Of brooding, joy and despair,
The type of roles that would feed the souls
Of the folk who listened there.
They were light as vim, they were dark and grim
They were sown like seeds in the night,
And at the end, a beating of wings
As a bevy of birds took flight.

He entertains through the winter months
With a new tale every eve,
But stops as soon as the Spring comes in,
As the Starlings begin to leave.
They all return to their northern climes
With their tales to their Viking den,
While he will wait on the same park bench
For the winter to come again.

David Lewis Paget

We picked up a coal-fired steamer
From a graveyard of ancient ships,
It had lain, beached up in the Philippines,
Sat on the rusted slips,
The ship was covered in surface rust
But it hadn’t gone right through,
So with elbow grease and some paint at least
My friend said, ‘It will do.’

We registered it in Colombia,
And we flew the Colombian flag,
We couldn’t afford to insure it,
And Derek said, ‘That’s a drag.
But we only need a single trip
And a cargo in the hold,
Like tractor tyres and some copper wires,
We’ll be rich when they are sold.’

He brought his girlfriend, Mary Anne,
Which I thought was a mistake,
He said that she’d come in handy when
We had to cook and bake.
‘I hope that she’s not bad luck for us,’
I muttered, when she came,
‘You mean those superstitious tales
That a woman is to blame?’

The bosun hired was a Robert Legg
Who had been at sea for years,
We didn’t know, as the trip would show,
He’d bring my friend to tears.
He helped to paint the rusted hull
In just one colour, black,
But leered when Mary Anne appeared
And behind Derek’s back.

We hired a couple of Lascars
To shovel in the coal,
Then ventured out for a cargo,
And ended up in Seoul,
We picked up a dodgy cargo,
Enough to make a run,
Over to western Africa
With computers, and with guns.

We named the ship the ‘Avant Garde’
And we braved the ocean swell,
It rolled and creaked, and even leaked
Like the cargo ship from hell,
But Derek’s mood was grim and dour
As we fought to hold the wheel,
‘Let’s hope that it doesn’t fall apart,
There’s a buckle in the keel.’

We spent our time up on the bridge
With Mary Anne below,
It doesn’t take a genius
To know how that would go.
For Legg spent too much time down there
Ensconced with Mary Anne,
When Derek questioned her, she said,
‘The bosun’s quite the man.’

He sent Legg down to the engine room
And he said to keep his place,
He wasn’t there for a holiday
Or to chat up a friendly face.
But Legg was sour, and Derek dour
When he caught them down below,
And said Legg’s hand was in contraband
Where he knew it shouldn’t go.

The Avant Garde had then burst a seam
Just above the waterline,
The water had started slopping in
We knew we were short on time,
By then Legg quarrelled with Derek, said
His girl was a free for all,
Was there to satisfy base desires,
Derek pinned him against the wall.

He hit the bosun across the head
With a long steel marlin spike,
Who fell at once and was good and dead,
I was told to take a hike.
I think he carted the body down
To the lascars down below,
Who bundled him into the furnace there,
No corpse, so who’s to know?

He told me later he’d fixed the leak
But he didn’t tell me how,
The ship then shuddered against a rock
That bent and burst the prow,
Before it sank I went down below
To witness a nightmare scene,
The body of Mary Anne was jammed
In tight, where it burst the seam.

David Lewis Paget

My friend signed on to a coastal ship
His name, John Escobar,
He said, for only a week long trip
On the Steamship Southern Star.
While I worked out of the office of
The Southern Shipping Line,
To keep in touch with our fleet of ships,
But the Southern Star was mine.

They said that ship was a special case
It was fitted out so well,
They joked of equipment so refined
It could sail clear through to hell.
I’d noticed bulges down on the hull
But under the waterline,
They told me to keep an eye on it
When they said that it was mine.

It sailed on out of Ascension Bay
When the tide was running high,
The motor gave out a whisper like
The sound of a woman’s sigh,
It wasn’t supposed to leave the coast
But it went far out to sea,
And kept in touch with the dit-dit-dit
Of John on the morse code key.

He tapped a message out every hour
And I let him know I knew,
The ship was sailing way off its course
And lost to the coastal view,
He said the Captain was acting strange
He was locked up by the wheel,
That all the maps had been rearranged
And that something wasn’t real.

At midnight there was a message came
To me in a darkened room,
It said, ‘I don’t know what’s going on
But we just sailed past the Moon.’
I sent, ‘Just lay off the Bourbon, John,
If this is John Escobar,’
And he replied that the Captain died,
‘And I don’t know where we are.’

He sent more messages on the hour
And they seemed to grow apace,
By midday out on the second day,
‘We’re somewhere in outer space.’
I didn’t know if he’d gone berserk
But we’d lost the Southern Star,
It disappeared, and the thing was weird,
When I lost John Escobar.

The messages gradually petered out
So I don’t know if he lied,
He said some things about Saturn’s rings
And then the battery died.
I lost my job at the shipping line
For they put it down to me,
They said, ‘your ship was the Southern Star,
And you’ve lost the thing at sea.’

David Lewis Paget

At night I walked in the winter months
By the banks of an old canal,
Where the barges lit their ghostly lamps
Like the wake of a funeral,
They would glide in those silent waters
With their silence like a shroud,
The horse at the end of the towrope
Passed me by, its head unbowed.

They sat so low in the water with
Their tons of pitch black coal,
The coal dust covered their livery
And of course, the paint was old,
A single steersman sat aloft
At the rear, and he looked ahead,
The black cut-out of a silhouette
Of a man that could be dead.

One night ahead of a ****-backed bridge
Where the towpath passed below,
The mist was a thick grey swirling mass
As the horse passed by me, slow,
I saw the glow of the ghostly lamp
And then as the barge appeared,
Just nosing out of the bank of fog
I thought that the bow looked weird.

For glistening under the ghostly lamp
And over the cabin door,
I saw a stream of something damp,
Was it mud, or blood, or gore?
I waited until the barge had passed
With the steersman, in my fright,
And I called out ‘****** ******!
‘You should look to your bow tonight.’

And the steersman muttered ‘Carolyn’,
In a voice both muted, low,
His voice came whispering back to me,
‘She shouldn’t have used me so.’
I saw his cardboard cut-out turn
In the glow of the ghostly lamp,
But then the barge slipped into the mist
Along with its ****** stamp.

I didn’t know where it disappeared
On its voyage into the mist,
Along with its grisly cargo though
Its name was ‘Amethyst’,
But Carolyn lay aboard somewhere
In a pool of her blood as well,
As that barge would nose its way through mist
To enter the gates of hell.

David Lewis Paget

Since ever he came to live at our house
We’d never felt safe or sure,
So late at night we’d turn out the light
And block up the bedroom door,
We’d slide a heavy old chest in place
That he never could push right in,
We knew, with just one look at his face,
The man was riddled with sin.

Our mother, bless her, was long divorced,
Our father was gone for good,
He never called, and we were appalled
That he never came when he should.
‘Why do you need that man in the house,’
I said, ‘You have me and Drew.’
But she would smile, ‘Well, it’s been a while,
And there’s things that you can’t do.’

We didn’t know what she meant back then
For we were too young to know,
How a woman’s won, or she bears a son,
Where a man and a woman go.
We only knew he was far too nice
When he first came into our home,
His creepy fingers, they felt like ice
So we wished he’d leave us alone.

He’d wander about the house by night,
We’d hear him mounting the stair,
And feigning sleep, not let out a peep
When we heard him breathe out there.
He’d come to a halt by our bedroom door
And stand and listen, we thought,
The tears in my brother’s eyes would glisten
In fear that we’d be caught.

His frightful stare gave a mighty scare
When he fixed on Drew and I,
Our mother said it was really sad
That he had just one good eye.
His other eye, it was made of glass
He had lost that one in the war,
It never closed, so we both supposed
That he slept, but still he saw.

Our house lay at the top of a hill
And a milk cart stood outside,
Its great cartwheels were covered in steel
And to hold it, it was tied.
One day we loosened the holding chain
As he came out into the street,
And watched the cart as it rolled on down,
Knocking him off his feet.

A wheel rolled slowly over his head
As he gave a deathly sigh,
His brains on the road were grey and red
And the pressure popped his eye.
It lay and stared at the two of us,
Was accusing us then, and still,
The memory sits and stays with us
For we’d never meant to ****.

Our mother wailed, and our mother mourned
And she kept his one glass eye,
She propped it up on the mantelpiece
‘So he’s with us still,’ she’d sigh.
Drew would shudder and I would shake
As it followed us round the room,
We both grew up with a complex that
We’ll never get over soon.

David Lewis Paget

I always knew there was something strange
About that farmer’s stile,
For no-one ever climbed over it
And I’d watched it for a while.
The field beyond it was out of sight
Behind a hawthorn hedge,
I didn’t know till I tried to go
It was perched along the edge.

The edge of history, edge of time,
It may have been the gate,
That hell was hidden behind in that
It saved us from our fate,
I threw a stray dog over it first
To see what would transpire,
It came back ravening, racked with thirst
And it set the hedge on fire.

I wasn’t going to risk my health
Nor even my sanity,
But somebody else would have to go
For my curiosity.
I passed young Ann in the marketplace
And I thought she’d be no loss,
I talked her into crossing the stile,
She did, at Pentecost.

Now Ann had been unattractive when
I sent her over the stile,
I didn’t hear from her straight away
But hung around for a while,
Then out from behind the hawthorn hedge
She suddenly poked her head,
A ravishing beauty Ann was now
When I’d thought she might be dead.

‘Could that be possibly you?’ I said
When I saw her pouting lips,
Her stylish sash and fluttering lash
And her painted fingertips,
I hadn’t noticed her dimples when
I’d looked at her before,
But now she was drop dead gorgeous,
And the word was, ‘I adore.’

I tried to get her over the stile
But she said to me, ‘No fear,
For everything is so beautiful
I think I’ll be staying here.’
And then if I really wanted her
I would have to cross myself,
She said there was gold and rubies there
Amid signs of untold wealth.

I conquered my inner demons and
I took the step at a run,
Leapt over the farmer’s stile to Ann,
There in the midday sun,
But all I found was a battleground
Littered with heads and hands,
The ******* of seven centuries
And a pile of old tin cans.

While Ann was dressed in a peasant gown
And had lost her pouting lips,
Her stylish sash that had turned to ash
And her coarsened fingertips,
‘What did you really expect,’ she said
As she pinned me to the ground,
‘Now you’ll be mine, though it seems unkind,
As long as the earth turns round.’

I’ve tried to escape for seven years
But I cannot find the stile,
The one that I jumped up over once
In response to her woman’s wiles.
I really thought I had played the girl
When she wasn’t much to see,
But she found me in the marketplace
And she ended playing me…

David Lewis Paget

They call it the Tall-Ship Pier, because
It hasn’t been used since then,
Its timbers rotted and barnacled,
And black since I don’t know when.
The storms it’s weathered have taken some,
You can’t reach it from the beach,
A hundred yards of its length have gone
The rest is stark at the breach.

But nobody goes there anymore
There’s not much left of the town,
Just a couple of old stone walls
The rest is tumbling down,
It sits forever beyond the Point
Where the sailing ships came in,
A crumbling wreck of years gone by
With a hint of forgotten sin.

The winter storms were a testing time,
The seas flooded over the pier,
The ships sat out in the bay, in line
Rode out, this time of the year,
Til when a black-hulled barquentine
Came in with a Dutch command,
The Captain, Herman van der Brouw
In charge of the ‘Amsterdam’.

They tied her up to the bollards, just
As a storm was coming in,
A woman stood on the quarter-deck
And the lines in her face were grim:
‘You said we’d head to Jakarta,
Not to this god-forsaken place!’
‘I told you, stay in your cabin,’
Was the reply, with little grace.

The Captain turned to the bosun,
‘Make her secure, but down below,
She’s not to come on the deck again
While still in the port, you know!’
The woman struggled, was taken down
But she flung a curse at his head,
‘Your time is limited, van der Brouw,
When Dirk finds out, you’re dead!’

The wind blew up and the storm came in
And the sea began to swell,
The sky was black and the ‘Amsterdam’
Would grind as it rose and fell,
It tore the bollard away from the pier
At the stern end of the barque,
Then slowly swung from the prow out wide
Side-on to the waves, an arc.

It kept on swinging around until
It crashed right into the pier,
Taking a section out with all
The cabins, back at the rear,
The wind was howling around the bow
As the barque sank low at the stern,
A voice screamed, ‘Get me the hell from here,
Or van der Brouw, you’ll burn!’

The crew were swept off the quarter deck
Were drowned right there to a man,
While van der Brouw had leapt to the pier,
The part that continued to stand,
The woman rose to the surface for
One moment more in the storm,
And screamed from the top of a breaking wave,
‘You’ll wish you’d never been born!’

They found him lashed to the planking
After a day or so of dread,
His eyes were staring, his face was white
He was just as surely dead,
But something curious came to pass
As they took his corpse ashore
The flesh on his hands was burned and black
With his fingers shaped like a claw.

And she, her body was swept on out
For she’s not been found ‘til now,
And all that’s left of the sailing ship
Is the figure, set on the prow,
A woman, carved as a figurehead
That creaks and groans in a storm,
And seems to mutter against the pier,
‘You’ll wish you’d never been born!’

David Lewis Paget

I was sitting, deep in my study
Under a single desktop light,
Listening to the patter of rain
As I wrote, late in the night.
The other sound was the scrape of the nib
As it traced ink over the page,
A setting on out of the mood within
As I traced McMurtrey’s rage.

I often would write at night back then
For the house was dark and still,
With none of the interruptions that
The day would seek to fill,
So the world outside would fade from view
As the Moon came out to shine,
Then I could re-visit the world I knew
In the latest storyline.

Each tale I told from a birds-eye view
As I watched from my secret place,
A god’s perspective of what I knew
Of despair, or a saving grace,
My characters hung from puppet strings
That I dangled down from my pen,
And I teased and taunted with sufferings
In the way that I did, back then.

I never would share with the world outside
What happened within these walls,
Or open up to their prying eyes
My visions of haunted halls,
For that would take them into the light,
Out here where the world is real,
And men could see what a cruel pen
A storyteller reveals.

The night that I sat there, pondering
How to make McMurtrey fail,
He’d been obsessed with the girl Mei Ling
She was like his Holy Grail,
The storm outside was gathering
And the thunder brought more rain,
When after a lightning flash, I heard
A tap on the window pane.

It made me start, I must admit
My skin had begun to crawl,
I very slowly swivelled my chair
Around, aside to the wall,
I pulled the curtains apart just then
And I peered out into the night,
But the face that stared in back at me
Was stark in the pale moonlight.

I heard him say, vaguely, ‘Let me in!’
As the lightning flashed once more,
Despite myself, I got to my feet
Unlocking the outer door,
He strode on into the study, stood
In a stance, most threatening,
‘I’ve come in search of my lady love,
As you well would know - Mei Ling!’

The room had shimmered and shifted then
And it faded from my sight,
We stood in the Hall of Gordonstall
And I thought, ‘This isn’t right.’
The hall was hung with the tapestries
They’d brought from an old Crusade,
But nothing was real, I knew it then,
They were things that my pen had made.

‘Mei Ling’s betrothed to a Mandarin
And she wears his dragon ring,
The last I heard she was headed out
On her way back to Beijing.’
‘Then you’d better pull out your pen, old man,
Ensure that the lady stayed,
Or you’ll never get out of your mind again
While this storyline’s delayed.’

I wander the Hall of Gordonstall
And I see no way outside,
I hadn’t written the doorways in
And the walls are high and wide,
I need someone from the real world
To knock at my study door,
But I fear that I’ve lost myself inside,
As I pace the flagstone floor.

David Lewis Paget

He sat in a small compartment by
The window, on a train,
The passengers huddled around him
Saying, ‘Tell that one again!’
He spoke in a low and measured voice
As they held their breath, to stare,
Watching his hands, as they described
Vague circles in the air.

There wasn’t a sound outside, except
The carriage, clickety-clack,
A sound that would tend to hypnotise
As the train sped down the track,
In every one of his listeners
Was a picture, in each mind,
That spoke to them of that better life
Which had been too hard to find.

And seagulls circled the skies above
As he primed their minds with ‘If…’
And led them all in a straggly line
To stand at the top of a cliff.
The sea was blue and the clouds were grey
And the rocks below sublime,
As they teetered there for a moment where
They stood, at the edge of time.

For then he’d show them a garden, with
The form of an only child,
Who seemed to be so familiar
That most of them there had smiled,
The scent of a pink wisteria
Had wafted the carriage air,
And then their tears rolled back the years
As they whispered, ‘I was there!’

He showed them a woman in mourning
With a cape, and a darkened veil,
Who knelt alone by a headstone,
Each listeners face was pale.
The bell of the church began to toll
As it sounded someone’s knell,
His face was the face of the gravedigger
As he held them in his spell.

The carriage was filled with waves of fear,
The carriage was filled with joy,
He’d tell of the death of a mountaineer,
Of a child with a much-loved toy,
Their tears they’d dry as the train came in
To the tale of a Scottish Kirk,
And one by one they would rise to leave
And head off the train, to work.

But the Storyteller would stay on board
And close the compartment door,
His restless hands were trembling still
As his eyes stared down at the floor.
The train heads into the future while
The past is deep in his well,
He sits and weeps in the corner for
The tales that he doesn’t tell.

David Lewis Paget

I called her once, then I called again
And I called throughout the night,
There wasn’t a message from Olwen’s pen
Nor the answering ‘ching’ of delight,
I’d begged forever her not to go
But she must have gone and went,
Down to the Fair at Cinders Flo
And into the strongman’s tent.

We’d been together to see the Fair
When the sun was riding high,
And all the rides and the Ferris Wheel
Were reeling up in the sky,
We rolled a ball at the grinning clowns
And we won a Teddy Bear,
The hairy woman and legless man,
All of the freaks were there.

But then we got to the Strongman’s tent
And I saw her eyes go wide,
He picked her up with a single hand
And I’ll swear that Olwen sighed,
I found I couldn’t drag her away,
She paid for a second show,
And after stroking his biceps once
She waved for me to go.

I had to drag her away from there
Or she would have stayed all day,
‘What do you find so interesting?’
I finally had to say.
‘Isn’t he such a mighty man
And his muscles ripple so,
He makes me feel like I want to squeal
Like a Tarzan’s Jane, you know.’

I finally went to Cinders Flo
In the middle of the night,
Thinking the end of me and Olwen
Seemed to be in sight,
I got to his tent, and there she was,
A-stare, a look aghast,
For what she had woken up was slim,
She saw the truth at last.

For there hanging up within the tent
Was the Strongman’s muscle suit,
With every ripple and every bulge
And a chest that was hirsute,
But he sat up in his lonely bed
And was pale and thin and white,
With a certain wiry toughness, though
He could never cause delight.

I think that it cured my Olwen though
She’s never been so still,
She spends her mornings and afternoons
Hung over the window-sill,
I try to get her to walk with me
But she can’t, she says, she hates,
She’s staring down at the guy next door
As he’s working out, with weights.

David Lewis Paget

It floated ashore one pitch black night
We hadn’t seen it before,
All covered in barnacles and scale
Cast up from a distant war,
It gently rolled as the tide came in
And hit the rocks with a ‘clang’,
Then settled down as its scuppers cleared
The decks, all covered in sand.

The conning tower was an evil sight
Its paint was peeling away,
Ribbons of black, as camouflage
Peeled off in the light of day,
And there we could see the *******
Look down with an evil leer,
As once it looked on its victims when
It ruled in a sea of fear.

The storm that had brought it to the shore
Took far too long to abate,
It raged and roared for a week before
We’d take the risk on its plate,
But then we found that the rust had hid
All access into its gloom,
We walked the whole of its length but found
No way to enter the tomb.

There must have been twenty men inside
Or what was left of their bones,
But all I’d hear when the night was clear
Was a chorus of shrieks and moans.
We smashed the hatch in the conning tower
And a sailor ventured in,
We hauled him out in a quarter hour
But his mind was wandering.

I saw some movement deep in the hull
And I called out, ‘Who goes there?’
But then a guttural German voice
Had answered, in despair,
‘Stay well away from the conning tower
It’s a type of evil well,
Once within you are caught in sin
And you’ll find yourself in Hell.’

The sea rose up and covered the rocks
And it floated off the sub,
While all the bones in their shrieks and moans
Screamed ‘Mercy’ - there’s the rub,
They called for mercy they never gave
When they sank each helpless crew,
Now roam forever beneath the waves
In a sub, now sunken too.

David Lewis Paget

The woman walked up to the prison gates
But the guard wouldn’t let her through,
‘We only have room for the prison inmates
There’s certainly none for you.’
‘But I need to get in, I have to get in,
My love’s to be hanged at the dawn,
If you could show pity, show pity for me,
I need one more kiss, then he’s gone!’

‘You want dispensation, then talk to the judge,
His chambers are only next door,
He’s cold and he’s heartless, a hard man to budge,
Tell him what you’re looking for.
He came to the judgement that fastened the noose
Of death round your lover’s throat,
There’ll not be much pity to see in his eyes
As he watches your lover choke.’

She went to his chambers and knocked at his door,
He opened it up in surprise,
‘Why would you come knocking, it’s late in the hour?’
‘Tomorrow my lover dies!’
‘The judgement is given, it can’t be reversed,
He’s condemned by the law of the land,’
She looked for compassion, his message was terse,
‘When he dies, it is by his own hand.’

She quailed at his hardness, went down on her knees,
‘I just need to see him once more,
I’m willing to pay with whatever you please,
I’m begging you, down on the floor.’
The judge saw his options and wickedness gleamed
In the eyes of the law of the land,
He offered an avenue by which it seemed
She’d get one more glimpse of her man.

She’d made up her mind to not shrink from the task
That she’d set herself, nor would she slip,
From offering everything that he might ask
For her man was the prow of her ship.
He took his advantage, it was as she’d feared
On the bench of his Chancery Court,
And left with a pass he had signed as he leered
At the precious few moments she’d bought.

The guard let her in where her man was condemned
And he let them alone for a while,
Her urgency stemmed from the moments they hemmed
In between both a kiss and a smile,
The guard noticed nothing amiss when she left
Her tears hidden under her hair,
Not even a glance at the prisoner in rags
Who crouched in the corner in there.

The figure they dragged to the gallows floor
Was weak and unusually soft,
The judge had been waiting to see the despair
He had caused, with the figure aloft.
Then out called the hangman, ‘it isn’t a man,
You’ve brought me a woman to hang,’
A woman who’d already cut off her hair
And given her wig to her man.

‘Someone shall pay,’ cried the judge in his ire,
‘I’ll not have the law over-ruled.’
‘That someone is you when the things that you do
Allow you to ****, and be fooled.’
The judge then had bellowed, ‘we’ll hang her instead,’
And the hangman had knotted the noose,
She cried as the trap dropped, ‘My love is not dead,
And your law is of no further use.’

David Lewis Paget

We were swept up onto this rocky coast
By a storm in ’93,
There were thirteen passengers and crew
And a stowaway, that’s me!
The ship was holed on the jagged rocks
And it sits still out in the bay,
We’ve never been able to fix the hole
So it looks like here we’ll stay.

It sits forlorn when the tide is low
But is covered when it’s high,
As the breakers beat on the after decks
Though the ship is never dry.
The water pours from the cabins, and
Lies deep in the forward hold,
While the rust is eating the hull away
And the cargo’s turned to mould.

We thought that we’d soon be rescued
By a ship just passing by,
But all we saw for a month or more
Was the lonely sea and the sky,
We made our camp on the beach where we
Could watch for a passing light,
And cook our fish on the signal fires,
But the trouble came at night.

The crew of seven were restless and
The passengers were few,
For only five of us men were there
And the women, only two.
One, the wife of a clergyman
The other a girl called Gail,
And she was sweet on a man called Deet
That she’d met before we sailed.

But Deet had fought with the bosun
Over the fish he said were his,
They moved away, went around the bay
To seek their Island bliss.
That left the clergyman’s wife with us
Who was praying we’d be found,
But late one night, in another fight
The clergyman was drowned.

The bosun dragged her away from us
With Froggat, Jones and Lees,
They took the struggling woman with them
Deep into the trees,
There wasn’t a thing we could do for her
So we went out to the ship,
And armed ourselves with iron bars
While we told ourselves: ‘They’ll keep!’

We moved our camp from the other crew
For the feeling there was mean,
The three the bosun had left behind
Hid out where they’d not be seen,
But then, at just about midnight we
Were hearing an eerie wail,
For down at the beach they’d murdered Deet
And dragged off the weeping Gail.

From deep in the trees we saw that Lees
Was trying to reach our spot,
His head was covered in blood, but then
He fell from a single shot,
The bosun was dragging Marie, the wife
To the open, by her hair,
Her dress was soiled and her face was spoiled
With the tears of a deep despair.

We didn’t see Froggat and Jones again,
They’d fallen to the knife,
But I had to run from the bosun’s gun
In order to stay alive,
Then under the cover of darkness we
Went after the weeping Gail,
And beneath the stars with our iron bars
We left a bloodied trail.

We caught the bosun asleep one night
And we beat him with our bars,
He didn’t have time to wake before
We dispatched him to the stars,
That left just Jeremy Leach and I
And the women that we’d saved,
For Gordon died of a fever then
And we dug his sandy grave.

It looks as if we’ll be here for good
So I’ll sign this bloodied screed,
Place it safe in a bottle then
And commit it to the seas,
We won’t fight over the women for
Marie is now with Leach,
And Gail has a tiny stowaway
As she wanders along the beach.

David Lewis Paget

He’d been tapping away at the keyboard
So he could get the ending straight,
A labour of love he’d called it
But it was dark, and getting late,
The villain had to be sorted out
By the heroine, called Cath,
He wanted it all to jell before
That final paragraph.

The Moon had risen outside and shone
In a strange and subdued light,
He should have finished before, so this
Was not a welcome sight.
He backspaced over a typo, then
He looked hard up at the screen,
But all that he’d typed was gibberish,
In a font he’d never seen.

It must have jumped to another font
Was the first thing that he thought,
So he scrolled back up, to see how much
Of his work had gone for nought.
The font looked vaguely Arabian
With a hint of Russian too,
Had taken all of his storyline
So he didn’t know what to do.

He tried to highlight the paragraph
And switch to the font he’d used,
But when he read what the wording said
It had left him quite confused.
‘You’ve stumbled in to a place of sin
Have opened an ancient page,
Locked down for over a thousand years
You’ve opened the world to rage.’

‘Delete the whole of the manuscript,
Don’t let it stick in your head,
The more you read you will feel a need
And will probably end up dead.
Delete the curse, and the final verse
And destroy your hard-drive too,
Be sure, if you wish to stay alive,
To do what I tell you to!’

He thought of the work that he’d put in
And the rebel within him stirred,
‘Why should I wear some other’s sin
When I only have your word?’
The screen grew misty, and Cath appeared,
The heroine of his tale,
‘Take no notice of him, my dear,
I’ll die if his will prevails.’

His villain pushed her out of the way
And snarled at him through the screen,
‘Where do you think my evil comes from,
Not from some fictional scheme!
You drew me out of an ancient well
Of lies, of sin and deceit,
To clear me out of your sub-conscious
You’d better hit the delete!’

He heard the footsteps pound up the stairs
And beat on his garret door,
‘You’d better not have my wife in there,
Or else, I’ve told you before!’
And Cath appeared for the final time
In the tale that wasn’t complete,
His neighbour beat on the padlocked door
As he sighed, and hit the delete.

David Lewis Paget

The footsteps echoed on cobblestones
When a chime rang ten of the clock,
As a sailor making his way back home
Was walking up from the dock,
It was cold and dark for the lights were out
And the street was wet with the rain,
When he came to an old red telephone box
At the side of a narrow lane.

The clouds were black and they opened up
So he stepped in out of the wet,
Dropped his swag as it turned to hail
And lit up a cigarette,
The box was ancient, was George the Fifth
And hadn’t been used for years,
But stood in a lane that time forgot
When the rot set in, and worse.

For most of the houses were boarded up
And the weeds had grown outside,
Some had embarked for a tree-lined park
And some of the others died,
It was lonely there in the dark of night
As the sailor waited, he sang,
But stubbed his cigarette out in fright
When the telephone next to him rang.

He stared at it for a while before
He raised it, stopping the bell,
It had an echoing, ghostly sound
Like you hear in a deep sea shell,
The sound of sobbing came to his ear
And he cried, ‘Who’s there, what’s wrong?’
‘Oh God, I’ve waited forever my dear,
I’m locked in the basement, Tom!’

The sailor said that he wasn’t Tom
But she didn’t appear to hear,
‘He’s got an axe, attacking the door,
Be quick or he’ll **** me, dear!’
The sailor didn’t know what to say
But a chill ran up his spine,
‘Tell me, what’s your address,’ he said
‘Before you run out of time!’

‘I’m straight across from the telephone box,
You usually meet me here,
He’s found us out, and he screams and shouts
That he’ll **** you as well, my dear!
He just came home from a spell at sea
And called me a cheating *****,
If you don’t come over and rescue me
He’ll have smashed his way through the door.’

The sailor wanted to say, ‘Enough!
It’s nothing to do with me,’
But flew on out of the telephone box,
Leapt over a fallen tree,
He raced right in through the open door
And he called, ‘I’m here, just wait!’
Then made his way to the cellar door
But all he could feel was hate.

The door was shattered, he walked right in
It was dark, there wasn’t a light,
He felt around for a candle, lit
And stared at the terrible sight.
A man lay dead on the basement floor
Where an axe had taken his life,
And there with her throat like an open sore
Was the body of his dear wife.

He staggered, stopped, and fell to his knees
And sobbed like a man insane,
‘Oh God, it’s true, I did this to you,
But my mind’s been playing games.
I thought if I went away to sea
I’d return to find they were dreams…’
As he sliced a razor across his throat
He thought, ‘Life’s not what it seems!’

David Lewis Paget

‘I would if I could but I can’t,’ he said,
‘Though I know it would be sublime,
I’m spoken for, and it does my head
To think that you could be mine.
I made a vow, and I don’t know how
I could break it, and feel right,
But though I’m true, I’m thinking of you
As I do, each sleepless night.’

He shook his head and he walked away
As she clutched the verandah rail,
She turned her face away when the trace
Of her tears had left a trail.
‘I don’t know what the attraction is,’
She said, as she wiped her eyes,
‘But it must be true what I say to you,
Anything else is lies!’

He walked back into his hotel room
And held his head in his hands,
And as he did the temptation grew
For a taste of contraband.
She’d met him there as she always did
For she serviced all the rooms,
His monthly trip, and her heart would flip
As the day of his coming loomed.

And he would think of her sparkling eyes
The set of her moist, pink lips,
Her flaxen hair and her pointed stare
And the sway of her ****** hips.
Her image was burnt upon his brain
Though he still loved his woman too,
It left him sore and confused, he thought,
What was a man to do?

He fell at last in a deep, deep sleep
And Rhianna entered his room,
She saw him peacefully lying there
Quite unaware in the gloom,
She lay down quiet beside him, just
To see how it felt to lie
Next to the one that her love was on,
He woke, his hand on her thigh.

The silken feel of Rhianna’s thigh
Had put him into a trance,
He thought that a dream had come to life
Til he opened his eyes, by chance,
Her lips were hovering over his brow
Her flaxen hair in his face,
Her strange perfume permeated the room,
He rolled off the bed in haste.

‘I would if I could but I can’t,’ he said,
‘I need you to understand,
If I were free, with just you and me
But I’m not, and this wasn’t planned.’
He left, drove home in the early dawn
To arrive unexpectedly,
And saw the light in the bedroom on,
His woman had company.

She wept as the man had gathered his clothes,
And made poste haste for the door,
While he just stood as if turned to wood,
His feet fast glued to the floor,
‘Well, you’re always off on your travels, John,
You must consider my plight!’
‘That may be so,’ as he turned to go,
‘But I know where I’ll sleep tonight!’

David Lewis Paget

She didn’t want her to be with him,
She wanted Anne for herself,
Since ever he had been on the scene
It was like she was on the shelf.
Anne never called for a girl’s night out
As she’d done in the days before,
So tears had streamed in her nightmare dreams
And Cathy had said, ‘it’s war!’

She painted her lips and shortened her skirt
And tied her hair in a plait,
The hair that now was a lustrous blonde
Not the straggly brown of a rat,
She sprayed some perfume under her arms
And more down under her skirt,
Then pulled on stockings with straightened seams,
A suspender belt that hurt.

She rouged her cheeks till she looked quite flushed
Like an innocent girl at play,
So when she wanted, it seemed she blushed
Pretend to be looking away,
Mascara darkened her cunning eyes
And dimples formed in each cheek,
A pencil arched where she’d plucked each brow
And her lips would pout when she’d speak.

She tried it out when she went to town
And bumped right into her friend,
For he was hanging on Annie’s arm
Like a drunken man on the mend,
He clung so tight it was surely love
She’d be lucky to tear them apart,
And Annie smiled as she told her friend,
‘My man has a lovely heart.’

But Cathy stood in the fellow’s way
Her bodice spilling her *******,
He seemed to stare at  her open cleavage
This was the ultimate test,
He didn’t flinch then or look away
And Annie gave her a frown,
But patted him on the wrist, to say,
‘He seems to be looking down.’

Cathy turned as to walk away
But then looked down at her shoe,
And bent right over, her skirt rode up
He looked, but what do you do?
‘You should be careful,’ then Annie said,
‘You’ll show someone your behind,
It doesn’t matter to me, or he,
My darling lover is blind!’

David Lewis Paget

We hadn’t been in the house for long,
We’d moved in overnight,
I hadn’t explored the neighborhood,
As a kid, that wasn’t right,
But the only time I had to see
After the daily chores,
Was after dark when my bike and me
Were free to roam outdoors.

I’d had to go to a brand new school
And I met this creepy kid,
He seemed to be breaking every rule
With the crazy things he did,
But I was the only friend he had
So he’d meet me after dark,
And we would ride through the neighborhood
And down through the Chestnut Park.

He said that he’d lived there all his life
Did I really want a thrill?
He’d take and show me where Noah’s Ark
Was buried under the hill,
Or maybe I’d like to see the train
That they called the Ten-0-One,
Whose boiler blew in the evening dew
And dismembered everyone.

The night was right for a ghostly tale
There was neither Star nor Moon,
In truth the sky had been overcast
Since the early afternoon,
We rode our bikes to the railway track
On the far side of the park,
I couldn’t see either path or tree
As we rode there in the dark.

At almost ten we could hear the train
As it laboured up the hill,
And then the sparks from its stack were seen
In the smoke it chuffed out still,
It loomed up black, and covered in soot
And I looked to see my friend,
Who stood on top of the tender coal
As it passed me on the bend.

I called out, ‘How did you get up there?’
As he danced, while looking scared,
A crazy look in his eyes up where
The glow from the fire box flared,
‘Come up,’ he screamed, ‘or you’ll miss the fun,’
But the train ran down the hill,
And left me stood by the bike he left
While I felt a sudden chill.

The sky lit up with the brightest light
That I’ve ever seen, I swear,
But even so, there wasn’t a sound
As the train blew up out there,
It left me shivering in the dark
There wasn’t a thought of fun,
I’d caught a glimpse of my watch before
It was just on Ten-0-One.

I rode back down the following day
To dispel the fear I felt,
My creepy friend had gone away
Though his bike lay where I knelt,
The railway line from a distant time
Was rusted and lay undone,
For never a train in eighty years
Had followed that Ten-0-One.

David Lewis Paget

He never came out in the daytime, though
He’d always come out at night,
I’d hear his feet, pass in the street
By the gaslamp’s feeble light,
He’d peer through the frosted window glass
And I swear that he always hissed,
Whenever I opened the trap, he’d gone
A-swirl in the yellow mist.

We huddled under the chimney piece,
We huddled under the stair,
Whenever his steps were echoing
From here to the you-know-where,
I tried to protect my Carolyn
Who would shut her eyes and ears,
He had the power, for over an hour
To bring Carolyn to tears.

He’d come when the frost brought icicles
He’d come when the wind would blow,
He’d come when I left her tricycle
Outside, and covered in snow,
And then when the ice on the window ledge
Began to go crack-crack-crack,
She often hid, right under the lid
Where the firewood lay in a stack.

And then when the door blew open, from
A gust in the wind out there,
We’d lie, with fears unspoken
As the creaking rose up the stair,
Then Carolyn shrieked, while I couldn’t speak
For hearing her cries and moans,
As terror spread, from under the bed
And chattered through teeth and bones.

I swore that he wore a ******* hat
With a brim that covered his eyes,
Carolyn wrote that he wore a cloak
As part of his dread disguise,
But nobody would believe us, ‘til
We heard he was coming back,
His hobnailed boots on the cobblestones
Approached, a-click and a-clack.

They’d slow, and stop by the outer door
Our hearts in our mouths, alas,
And then his shadow would fall right there
He’d peer through the frosted glass,
The knocker had an echoing sound
As he knocked, went rat-tat-tat,
And mother leapt to the door in a bound,
‘Dear God! It’s Uncle Jack!’

David Lewis Paget

We’d all been out to the Carnival,
Had chilled and thrilled and cried,
And Patsy laughed that she’d wet her pants
On the killer Monster Ride,
While Orville’s face was covered in floss
In a pink and sticky goo,
And I limped past the Penny a Toss
With something stuck to my shoe.

I’d won a horrible Voodoo Doll
That I tried to pass to Kate,
She said, ‘No fear, if I took that home
I would just lie there, awake!’
We’d had our fun on the Octopus
Though the Mouse had made me sick,
And the Big Wheel stopped in a passing cloud
At the height of a laughing fit..

A spider deep in the Ghost Train came
Unstuck in Patsy’s hair,
And Kate had shrieked, for Patsy had
No clue that it was there.
We threw it one to the other, first
To Orville, then to Jack,
But then it landed on some old dear
And gave her a heart attack!

We laughed and pranced and we danced beside
The sideshows – ‘Way to go!’
But Orville fumbled the rifle and
He shot some guy in the toe,
We had to run but were laughing there
So hard, and fit to bust,
That Richard ruptured himself out there,
And now he’s wearing a truss!

The time it had come to wander home
So we wiped off Orville’s goo,
But I had trouble in walking with
That thing, still stuck to my shoe.
I slid and wiped and I scraped at it
But nothing would make it budge,
Said Jack, ‘Just what do you think it is?’
I replied, ‘some sort of sludge.’

We got to the edge of the fairground
And the others wandered home,
But I was stuck, I couldn’t move,
I was standing there, alone.
And then my foot had begun to turn
Back to the lights and sound,
I felt myself, being impelled
By my shoe across the ground.

I tried to twist and I tried to turn
But my shoe was saying, ‘No!’
I had to follow wherever it went,
Wherever it wanted to go.
It took me back through the alleyways
Still lit with a thousand globes,
I felt a bit like a Brahman Bull
With a steel ring through my nose.

It dragged my foot through the mud and slush
And the other followed too,
I didn’t have much of a choice, I thought
As long as I wore the shoe,
It led me in to a darkened tent
With a dais, up on high,
Where a shadow sat in an old top hat
With a single gleaming eye.

The shadow opened its mouth to speak
And its teeth were long and sharp,
‘What have you brought me now to eat,
Some dross you found in the park?’
The voice was deep, was a muffled growl
And it shook the earthen floor,
The shoe was dragging me forward as
I turned for the flap of a door.

I felt a wrench and the shoe came off
So I hopped and ran like mad,
The growl of the shadow had freaked me out,
It had to be more than bad!
My father gave me a hiding when
He found that I’d lost my shoe,
He wouldn’t listen when I exclaimed:
‘You would have lost it, too!’

Next day the shoe was sat at my door
Its prints deep pressed in the lawn,
I couldn’t have put that shoe back on
If the Devil had blown his horn.
I took a stick and I picked it up
And dropped it straight in the bin,
I couldn’t go near a Carnival now,
I’m too attached to my skin!

David Lewis Paget

The man had a terrible temper,
Would rage at the skies above,
Would screech and howl, like a midnight owl,
He’d been unlucky in love.
He’d stomp about in the village square,
Go out, and look for a fight,
The villagers always avoided him
When he’d roam around at night.

Then he’d come and knock at my own front door
Demanding to talk to Jill,
I’d hear her say from the passageway,
‘I don’t want to talk to Bill!
I’d had enough when he beat me up
And my heart would never heal,
Just tell him I’m sticking with you, my love,
I know that your love is real!’

He’d punch the door, then he’d stand and roar
So I’d slam the door in his face,
He kicked a panel across the floor
And I said I’d call the police!
I heard him muttering as he left,
‘Come out, I’ll give you a fight,
Tell Jill she’s dead if she’s in your bed,
I’ll call in the dead of night!’

I took the hammer and nails outside
And battened the shutters down,
Then strung an electrical tripwire that
Would pulverise the clown,
‘The man’s as mad as a meat axe, Jill,
Bi-Polar, that’s for sure,’
‘More of a schizophrenic, Jim,
‘Be sure to bar the door.’

We’d sit in a petrified silence in
The cottage, every night,
Listening for the slightest sound
If something wasn’t right,
The roof would creak as the timber cooled
And the wind soughed through the eaves,
We even strained by the window panes
At the patter of Autumn leaves.

‘How long are we going to put up with this,’
I said to Jill, one morn,
‘He’s tempting fate by the garden gate,
He’s been there since the dawn.’
‘I’m going to have to confront him,’ said
The darling of my life,
I hadn’t proposed to her just then
But I hoped she’d be my wife.

She walked on out to the garden gate
And I heard him raise his voice,
I couldn’t quite make his words out, but
He was giving her a choice.
Then Jill I heard in a voice that stirred
From the depths of a gravel pit,
And he went white with a look of fright
And he left, and that was it!

‘What did you say to the maniac
That he turned and went away?’
She smiled, and cuddled on into me,
‘I think I made his day.
I said that I’d go back home with him
But I’d poison his meat and drinks,
Or slit his throat when asleep one night…’
He hasn’t been back here since!

David Lewis Paget

He sat on top of the headland in
The driving, pouring rain,
The way that the clouds were gathering,
He’d never be dry again,
He thought of the girl at Windy Tor
Who had screamed at his only sin,
‘You’d better beware of that witch’s stare
For the tide is coming in!’

And down in the river valley, there
Was a cottage, made of stones,
Where a temptress with a gleam in her eye
Was juggling spells and bones,
She called the lightning out of the sky
With a book full of ancient tricks,
And blasted the heath round Windy Tor
While lighting her candlesticks.

But up at the Tor, Myfanwy raged
And bubbled and boiled the sea,
She churned it into a raging storm
That her lover could plainly see,
He thought of warning the temptress who
Had entered his eyes and ears,
But heard instead his Myfanwy say,
‘It only will end in tears.’

He couldn’t go down to the valley, and
He couldn’t go up to the Tor,
He could feel his life unravelling
From the bliss that he’d felt before,
A wind soughed up from the valley floor
Full of tempting overtones,
But from the Tor there was something more
An ache, and a Wake of moans.

The sun went down and he turned to go,
He made his way in the dark,
The spell that he was enchanted with
Had finally made its mark,
He turned his back on the love he’d lost,
Went down to the valley floor,
But all he could hear when he got quite near
Was the sea that beat on the shore.

The sea rose up and it poured right in
As it flooded over the plain,
The tide had entered the valley, it
Would never be dry again,
And under the flood of Myfanwy’s mood
Was the cottage, made of stones,
While all that was left of the temptress was
A gaggle of spells and bones.

Myfanwy’s still up at Windy Tor
And nurses a constant ache,
While his regret hasn’t left him yet
For his foolish, one mistake,
He’d sought a spell that she’d love him well
Then fell to a mortal sin,
And always he heard Myfanwy’s words,
‘The tide is coming in!’

David Lewis Paget

He found a little frequented cove
As he sailed the Southern Seas,
An island, not on a current map,
But one bereft of trees,
I only know, for he left a note
In that cave, way up in the cliff,
And it’s had me wondering ever since
Not how, or why, but if?

What was left of his boat was there
Washed high, out there on the shore,
Battered and beaten by storm and tide
Ten years, or maybe more,
The Isle was barren and treeless, not
One thing would pleasure the eye,
Except the cave in the towering cliff
Well up in the face, and high.

I anchored there and I rowed ashore
Then I walked around to the face,
Somebody else had been there before,
A rope was still in place,
I’d never been much of a climber, but
I scaled that rope all right,
Just as the sun was going down
So I had to spend the night.

The face of the cave was sheltered, and
The weather, it wasn’t cold,
I curled up deep in a corner ‘til
The dark had entered my soul,
I dreamt of many a sailing ship
And men of a stately mien,
Who stalked grim-faced through a whirlpool race
In a land that I’d never seen.

And up above was a starlit sky
That had seemed to spin and curve,
Taking the glow of the Pole Star south
With the curvature of the earth,
I woke when the first few beams of dawn
Shone in from a blighted sea,
Where my boat had tugged at its moorings
In an effort to cast it free.

The cave led into a passageway
That was dimly lit in the dawn,
I ventured along it gingerly
Over moss, as green as lawn,
Then I came on a line of candles, set
In the rock to light the way,
Into the heart of a grotto there
Where a pool of water lay.

The pool was glowing an azure blue
From a light reflected below,
That shone back down from the ceiling rock
In a shifting, glittering show,
And beyond the pool was an altar there
That hadn’t been made by man,
Of shining stars and a crescent moon
And a figure that looked like Pan.

I tip-toed cautiously round the edge
Of the pool til I came to stand
Right in front of the altar there,
Half covered with silt and sand,
And lying crouched at the side of it
Was a huddle of ancient bones,
That lone seafarer who’d left his yacht
And followed these stepping stones.

The bones lay there in a deep despair
As of one who’d given up hope,
He must have come with the boat out there
And climbed with that length of rope,
But the bones were grey, looked terribly old
Too old for that boat, it’s true,
With the fingers gripping a note, half ripped,
The one that I’ll read to you.

‘You’ve come to an Isle where there is no time,
So take this note and be gone,
I came, like you, from out of the blue
When I woke, time travelled on.
The stars spin crazily every night
And they ****** me into the past,
I woke to find that my boat had gone
And the cove was covered in grass.’

‘It could be a million years ago
It could be a future time,
The sea has receded, that I know
And the year, it isn’t mine.
The altar glows with the crescent moon
When a major shift occurs,
And the devil man that looks like Pan,
I think that his seed is cursed.’

I took the note and I stumbled out
Of the cave, and slid the rope,
Then ran back over the beach, and rowed
Back out to my world, my boat.
I hadn’t been more than an hour away
When the heavens went black, and weird,
I looked behind and I feared to find
The Island had disappeared!

David Lewis Paget

He was known as the local Mycophagist
In the dales, the woods and the hills,
What happened was sad, for he wasn’t so bad
Just a tad underdone, Toby Gills,
They say that the cord was around his neck,
He was born with a carroty mop,
And a pale white head, he was almost dead
When the doctor had called out ‘Stop!’

They cut the cord and they let him breathe,
The damage was already done,
The blood had been stopped to his carroty top
So they said that he’d always be dumb.
But he found a niche where the fungi creeps
And went out collecting the spore,
In a year or two he knew more than you
And the college Professor next door.

He studied his mushrooms with loving intent,
He knew about hen of the woods,
He knew about bracket and shaggy manes, magic
And paddy straw, they were the goods;
He fostered his lobster and hedgehog and oyster
And coral fungi and stinkhorns,
But didn’t discern between fly agarics
And toadstools that grew in the lawn.

He grew his spore in a deep, dark cellar
And sold to the folk who came by,
And never would judge between Widow Weller
And the ordinary witches of Rye,
He’d sell death caps, and pigskin puffballs
Not thinking to question them why,
Or who would be eating his laughing Jim’s
And whether they knew they would die.

The air was thick and the air was damp
And he fell in the dark one day,
Scattering toadstools into the air
And their spores had floated away,
He breathed the spores right into his lungs
For he hadn’t been wearing a mask,
But ****** them in right over his tongue
And they came to his lungs, at last.

I happened to see him out in the street
He was finding it hard to breathe,
He could only take a couple of steps
Then sit on the kerb, to heave,
I tried to help but he waved me away
And his eyes were yellow and cruel,
Then I saw what he’d thrown up on the kerb
Some yellow and red toadstools.

The man was a walking toadstool spore
They were popping up out of his hair,
Pushing their way though his carroty top
In a bid to get to the air,
And his skin was blotched like a puffball, he
Looked up at me, and he cried,
As a giant toadstool grew from his throat
And he lay on his side, and died.

David Lewis Paget

The city was laid like a wasteland
Like a rusting, crumbling sore,
Half of the houses were boarded up
Along a neglected shore,
The spirit had long gone out of it
That had made the city great,
Men fifty miles to the south of it
Were determining its fate.

Way up on the Presidential floor
Was a group of greedy men,
The czars of the old industrial core
Who had bled the town back then,
‘The real estate’s a disaster,’ said
A man who had been the Mayor,
‘The auto plants are a rusting heap,’
Said the man who held the Chair.

‘We’ve got more pensioners on the funds
Than workers in the plants,
There’s crime and violence in every street
And the Unions make demands.
So what’s the conclusion, gentlemen,
Do we give this plan its head?’
‘Whatever we do, it’s much too late,
The city’s as good as dead!’

And that’s how they came to build ‘The Tower’
To illuminate the sky,
‘There’s plenty of work for everyone
At a hundred storeys high!’
Nobody knew just what it did
Or what they were building for,
They only knew that they had a wage,
Could hold up their heads once more.

A central lift in The Tower went up
And down ten times a day,
Taking tools and materials
To restrict the Tower’s sway,
‘They say we’re going to go High-Tech
And they’re closing down the Plants,
The days of auto’s have gone for good
But they won’t tell us their plans.’

The Tower was built within the year
With a gaping hole up top,
A semi drove through the streets one day
And by The Tower, it stopped.
It carried a massive box-like thing
With a mass of flashing lights,
Was loaded into the lift, and sent
Up on its maiden flight.

They took it up and it crowned The Tower
While the people watched in awe,
There hadn’t been people in the streets
Like this since the Second War.
A massive counter was counting down
As the people stood and cheered,
‘I hope it’s not what I think it is,’
Said a man with a long, white beard.

While down in the Presidential Suite
Just fifty miles away,
A group of men put their sunnies on
And stood by the window bay,
‘Well how do you clear a festering slum,’
Said one, as he watched the clock,
While back at The Tower a sign lit up
And the word was ‘Ragnarok!’

David Lewis Paget

We went to sit at the front of the train
In seeking that extra thrill,
Marlene and me, and a guy called Kane
Who came from Mulberry Hill,
I hadn’t known him at all till then
He said that he knew Marlene,
And she had smirked when he said he knew,
She didn’t know that I’d seen.

Now this was one of those super trains
And we knew how fast it could go,
Over two hundred clicks, they said,
They certainly put on a show,
We sat in the very front window seat
Could see where the driver sat,
He wore a coat of orange and green,
A ridiculous pork pie hat.

Well, finally someone had signalled ‘Go’
And we rumbled off down the line,
To start, the engine was going slow
The driver had plenty of time,
But then, once out in the countryside
He must have been feeling the heat,
For it went so fast, down the track at last
It threw us back into the seat.

The trees and the meadows were flashing by,
No sooner there, they were gone
The little farms and the rustic barns
Like the gardens of Babylon,
Marlene was pale, I looked at her face
And Kane he was almost white,
‘I think we’d better move back,’ he said,
‘I’d like to get home tonight.’

I said I’d stay, when they both got up
And moved to the back of the car,
I didn’t want to give in to fright
We wouldn’t be travelling far,
But we missed a stop, went roaring through
And I looked where the driver sat,
He was slumped on over the speed controls
With his pork pie hat in his lap.

When the speedo said a hundred and ten
I first thought of throwing up,
It reached a hundred and ninety when
I did, in a paper cup,
The driver lay there, dead on the stick
As far as anyone knew,
We couldn’t get into his cab to check
And as for the train, it flew.

I joined the others, up at the back
And wrapped myself round a pole,
So when the rescuers got to me
At least they would find me whole.
The others stood, and clung to a rail
That passed up over their heads,
I said, ‘Get down, that metal will fail
And both of you end up dead.’

They wouldn’t budge in their deadly funk
Their eyes were popping and white,
We hit the buffers at General Trunk
And both took off in their flight.
Kane headfirst like an arrow flew,
Marlene went more like a ball,
So where Kane went through the windscreen first
The hole was narrow and small.

Marlene, there wasn’t a piece intact,
A rescuer known as Krips,
Said he had just been checking around
And found her child-bearing hips.
I got a terrible rupture where
The pole almost cut me in half,
Since then, I don’t ever travel by train
But stick to a horse and cart.

David Lewis Paget

We’re all down here on a long, long train
To be taken for a ride,
As the signs flash past each year, we gasp
At the changing countryside,
Each mile is a passing minute, and
Each year is a passing mile,
The further we get from the starting point
The more that it seems worthwhile.

Each coach is numbered a different year
It depends when we got on,
Each coach was first hooked on at the back
But then it will move along,
The train gets longer with every mile
As we slowly move to the front,
And nothing can stop this railway ride
He gave as his covenant.

We know there’s a tunnel coming up
It’s somewhere around the bend,
We left our names at the starting point
There’s a headstone at the end.
I drop my poems along the track
For the ones that are far behind,
In hopes that they might remember me
As a man who was simply kind.

My children are twenty coaches back
My parents further ahead,
They’ve both gone into the tunnel now
Past a light that’s showing red.
That tunnel’s ahead for all of us
As each coach will end its ride,
But isn’t it going to be glorious
When we pass out the other side?

David Lewis Paget

The train chugged on in the darkness
Past meadows and cattle asleep,
And the night revealed its starkness
Puffing smoke on the backs of sheep,
Its livery was as black as the soot
That covered its ageing paint,
It couldn’t be classed as beautiful,
Though it might have been thought as quaint.

The night was such an inky black
As a cloud obscured the stars,
The train was sensing a nothingness
In the vast expanse to Mars,
The fireman sprayed its feed of coal
As the boiler felt the strain,
As tired pistons and tired wheels
Drove on the exhausted train.

A thought came out of the empty sky
And mixed with the sulphur stream,
‘Why can’t I be like the other trains
That little boys love, and dream,
Instead, I’ve spent my whole life long
Tied to an endless rail,
I’ve done all the driver wanted to
But I may as well be in jail.’

There was only an empty signal box
Unmanned at that time of night,
And miles and miles of dark ahead
With never a single light,
So an angry feeling was building up
At that Great Train in the sky,
That only commanded, ‘what thou shalt,’
But never explained, ‘but why?’

So into the dark it chugged along
With carriages in its wake,
While deep inside, the fireman asked
‘Did anyone fix the brake?
The driver shook his gnarled old head
As if in a quick reply,
‘There hasn’t been time for the loco shed,
But they’ll fix it, by and by.’

The boiler started to grumble so
They stopped at a water trough,
The fireman pulled the spout across
And turned it on, then off,
They pulled away with the tender full
Though the train was feeling pain,
‘I’m always doing the same old things,
I’m not going to stop again.’

So on they steamed to Hunterdown
Where at last the brakes had failed,
All they got was a steady sçream
As the wheels spun on the rails,
And though the driver cut the steam
Still along the track it sped,
While the driver and the fireman
On the footplate, stood in dread.

‘The rail runs out at Dead Man’s Eye
Said the driver to his mate,
If we can’t slow down this blessed thing,
I’m afraid, it’s much too late.’
They chose to jump as the rail ran out
But the train still plunged ahead,
Over the untamed landscape
Riding on meadow grass instead.

The carriages piled behind it
Were detached in an awful wreck,
But still the locomotive drove
On a joyous final trek,
It rambled over a grassy ridge
And fell over a pleasant hill,
Next to a colourful flower bed,
And today, it lies there still.

Now children gather to play on it
This pile of rusted steel,
A train that had a tender heart
And for once could see and feel,
If all of its life were memories
Then the one it’s surely got,
Is riding unfettered across the green
To a bed of forget-me-nots.

David Lewis Paget

The tree was the lord of the neighbourhood
For it looked down over all,
Grown on a hill by a sparkling rill
It blossomed from Spring to Fall,
Its vibrant life flowed up from its roots
And broadcast through its leaves,
The warmth of a wise old autocrat
As it nestled into the eaves.

The tree had been there before the house
For a hundred years or so,
The builders wanted to cut it down
But the owner answered, ‘No!
There’s something magic about that tree
And I fear, if its timber falls,
The house you build will be cursed, you see,
I’ll be left with cold stone walls.’

The house changed hands as its owners died
But the tree grew on apace,
The other trees in the valley there
Were humbled by its grace,
Its topmost branch you could see for miles
It was marked on many a map,
They said, ‘Look out for the giant tree
On the hill by Calder’s Gap.’

The house was sold to a man called Binns,
A miserable kind of man,
They said he’d framed the dollar he’d earned
As a boy, while shifting sand,
But wealth had sharpened his temper, he
Was rude, to one and all,
The locals whispered behind their hands,
‘He’s headed for a fall.’

He looked from his bedroom window, and
He said, ‘I hate that tree!
It hides the view of the countryside,
The view that I paid to see.
You mark my words, it’s coming down,
It scrapes my window pane,
And wakes me up in the dead of night
It’ll go by the winter’s rain.’

The branches stroked on the window frame,
The frame was made of wood,
And passed to the tree its tale of shame
The tone of the owner’s mood,
The tree had shuddered, sent waves of pain
Abroad in the midnight air,
Like a cry of help, and its one refrain
Was, ‘Cut me, if you dare!’

The mile-a-minute responded first
Entwined and blocked the door,
Invaded the little garden shed
Where the axe lay on the floor,
It grew incredibly, overnight
As a shield around the tree,
To say, if a vine could really speak,
‘You’ll have to get through me!’

But Binns crawled out through a window,
Red of face and fighting mad,
‘What’s going on with this garden,
Where’s the gardener I had?
He went and got a machete, and
He slashed away at the vine,
Freed the door of its tendrils, and
The shed, in double time.

He found the axe on the earthen floor
And he took it to the tree,
‘You may have stood for a hundred years,
Now you’ll have to deal with me!’
He swung it once and the handle cracked
And splintered up his arm,
There wasn’t anything made of wood
That would do the old tree harm.

The splinter entered a major vein
And his blood dripped on the ground,
Apart from his scream and a sudden hush
There was just one other sound,
A violent cracking above his head
As a tree branch came away,
That hurtled down like a spear, and pinned
His heart to the ground that day.

The tree still towers above the rest
And sways in the slightest breeze,
It stands as a lord of the countryside
For it brought a man to his knees.
The house is ruined, a few stone walls
Still stand, and the curtains flap,
For nobody’s game to build again
Near the Tree by Calder’s Gap!

David Lewis Paget

I hated to pass the talking tree,
It made me feel all undone,
Raveling on in its revery
Like a racquet, coming unstrung,
What made it worse was the silken voice
Not matching a stringybark’s,
If I’d been offered a simple choice
I’d rather the voice was harsh.

It tried to attract my attention there
Each time I ventured to pass,
‘What are you going to do, just stare?’
It said, ‘Well, kiss my ***!’
It always tried to embarrass me
By being uncouth, and loose,
I said, ‘You’re surely the rudest tree,
We haven’t been introduced.’

It quoted Coleridge by the ream
Whenever I wore my hat,
‘A painted ship on a painted sea,
Now what do you think of that?’
‘I don’t know where you borrowed that line
I said, I have no notion, it’s
“As idle as a painted ship
Upon a painted ocean!”’

It used to sulk when it got it wrong
To wave its trunk with a clatter,
‘Who’d believe,’ it would say to me,
‘That getting it right would matter?’
‘I think He would, old S.T.C.
Would listen, hear, and note it,
Nor be impressed that a talking tree
Would get it wrong, and quote it.’

I turned up there with a saw one day
And the talking tree had cried,
‘I say, I’m not going to cut you down,’
I said, but it knew I lied.
For ‘April is the cruellest month,’
I said, and I wasn’t kidding,
I saw through its Eliot, silence its Pound
And cut off its Little Gidding.

David Lewis Paget

The house dated back to the Tudors,
Half timbered, in need of repair,
They offered it me for a peppercorn rent
If I’d do some work on it there.
Right next to it stood the Catholic Church,
All pillars and deep seated vaults,
I thought I could make it a comfortable lair
Despite its old timbers and faults.

But Kathy was not so enamoured,
She said that she’d rather a flat,
‘There’s dry rot and beetles,’ she stammered,
‘So what will you do about that?’
‘I’ll think about that in the morning,
For now you’ll just have to be brave,
You’ll love that old bed, and its awning,
And think of the money we’ll save.’

We got settled in and explored it,
The wainscoting seemed to be fine,
With three rooms upstairs, and an attic,
I seized on that, told her, ‘It’s mine!’
She wouldn’t come down to the cellar,
‘It’s too dark and creepy for me.’
I thought it would do for a storeroom,
It had its own hearth, and chimney.

One day I had leant on the mantle
When something had moved in the wall,
A bookshelf slid back near a candle,
Revealing an ancient priest hole,
But way beyond that was a tunnel
The led all the way to a crypt,
So this was their ancient escape route
For anything termed Catholic.

I thought I would wait to explore it
Till Kathy would like to come too,
But she had just shivered, ignored it,
And said, ‘you just do what you do.’
I couldn’t contain my excitement
As into that tunnel I went,
Imagining priests that had used it,
To burn at the stake, or repent.

Then halfway along in an alcove
I flashed the light, looking in there,
And there was a man in some red robes,
He sat, sprawling back in a chair,
And there on his skull was a mitre
That headdress for bishops of old,
And down by his side was a crozier,
All glittering, fashioned in gold.

But lying between his skeletal feet
Was a sight that I couldn’t absorb,
I felt at a loss, on top was a cross
On a gold and magnificent orb,
Caught short in his flight from the protestant’s might
He was stealing these treasures away,
In hopes that the realm of England returned
To the one true religion one day.

I picked up the crozier, picked up the orb
And I took them from where he had fled,
I didn’t tell Kathy, but thought it was best,
So I hid them both under our bed.
That night we heard chanting, a hymn in the dark
That had Kathy awake and in tears,
While I could see phantoms surrounding our bed
Giving form to a host of my fears.

There was an abomination of monks
That were filling the room from the stairs,
And chief among them was a bishop who stood
At the base of the bed, and just glared.
I leapt out of bed and recovered the orb,
And I handed the crozier to him,
He gave a faint smile, and then in a while
He was gone like a ghost cherubim.

I never went back to that tunnel again,
To tell you the truth, I was scared,
I knew that a fortune was hidden within
But to go back again, never dared.
I’m hoping that bishop has saved me a place
In a heaven for those who are saved,
So I can tell no-one where he lies in grace,
That knowledge I’ll take to my grave.

David Lewis Paget

There’d been stories about a tunnel
In the old, Victorian house,
We didn’t know where it led to,
But were keen on finding out,
It opened into a passageway
From a library wall of books,
Was dark, and damp and foreboding
If you merely went by looks.

To us it had spelt adventure,
To Jeremy Coates and me,
‘As long as we take a flashlight,’
I’d said to Jeremy,
We waited till after midnight
When the others were asleep,
We didn’t want to involve them all
Till we had taken a peep.

‘What do you think we’ll find there?’
He said as we opened the door,
Pushing aside a shelf of books
To stand on a flagstoned floor,
The passage led down a flight of steps
All green, and covered in moss,
We’d ventured in to this place of sin
On the date of Pentecost.

We should have known what we’d find there
If we’d taken note of the books,
The ones on the sliding bookshelf
And hidden in crannies and nooks,
There was more than a single Grimoire,
And the Oera Linda book,
That was known as Himmler’s Bible,
If we’d only taken a look.

There were copies of the Picatrix,
And the Munich Manual,
The first bore spells in Arabic,
The next strange animals,
There were books on demonology
Black magic spells as well,
And even a long chronology
Of the many circles of hell.

We ventured into that passageway
Not knowing any of this,
No doubt, if only we’d read them all
We wouldn’t be risking this,
But on we marched in the dead of night
To follow the flashlight beam,
Where the walls oozed iridescent streams
And the smell was quite obscene.

We walked a mile through the tunnel
Where it ended in a crypt,
With panels through to the street level
That would keep it dimly lit,
But this was night and the only light
Beamed in through the pillar flutes,
From the gas lamps out on the cobbled street
By the church known as St. Lukes.

And all around there were catafalques
Where the coffins lay in state,
Down in this modern catacomb
Where the devil lay in wait,
For a goat’s head sat on the further wall
By an altar, scarred and scored,
With the shapes of naked women who
Were seen as the devil’s ******.

A cross was stood on the altar but
It was mounted upside down,
Ready to celebrate black mass
In this hidden underground,
Then just as we stood and took this in
A coffin had raised its lid,
And Jeremy screamed a terrible scream
While I ran round and hid.

A shape rose up in a long black cloak
That had eyes of instant fire,
Teeth that could rip a corpse to shreds
In a moment of desire,
For evil never had looked so dark
As the horns on that spectre’s head,
While Jeremy screamed just one last scream
And fell by the coffin, dead.

I don’t remember how I survived
My flight up that passageway,
I’d thrown all caution to the winds
When I heard the spectre say:
‘Who dares to sully my sanctum, and
Disturb my sated sleep,
I’ve roamed abroad for a thousand years
That the seeds I’ve sown will keep.’

I reached the end of that passageway
And I slid the shelves across,
All of those books were glowing now
With the innocence I’d lost,
And then I heard but a mile away
Was the tolling of a bell,
Up in the belfry of St. Lukes
That covered the path to hell.

David Lewis Paget

My brother was twelve years older so
I knew him not so well,
But heard of him in the taverns,
Getting drunk, and raising hell,
My mother said, ‘Keep away from him,’
And I did, for many years,
But blood is blood, and a brother should
Help out, though it ends in tears.

He’d done a spot of embezzling,
He’d picked the pockets of Earls,
You never left him to tend a horse
And he wasn’t safe with girls,
But he was my brother Toby,
And I was his brother Tim,
I’d often find him beneath my bed
When he said, ‘Don’t let them in!’

By ‘them’ he had meant the Runners
Who were active in the Bow,
And some of the old Thief-Takers
With their ruffians in tow,
They roamed the streets with their cudgels
And would lie, just out of sight,
Beyond the doors of the Taverns, when
They turned them adrift at night.

The streets were mean, and were far from clean
Where my brother used to roam,
Despite the pleas of our mother, who
Would beg him to come back home,
But father remained unbending, said
His eldest son was a swine,
‘His endless scrapes, a Jackanapes!
He is no son of mine!’

I heard he’d taken a horse and fled
From a stables in the Strand,
‘There’s little that anyone now can do,
When they catch him, he’ll be hanged!’
My mother, crying a flood of tears
As my father cursed and swore,
‘I’ll call the Runners, or I’ll be ******
If you let him through my door!’

So Toby galloped to Hounslow Heath
Along the Great West Road,
Teamed up with the brute Tom Wilmot,
Lay low in his abode,
They’d venture out on a moonlit night
To wait for the latest Stage,
But Tom was never the gentleman,
Or known to contain his rage.

They stopped the coach on a lonely night
‘Your money or your life!’
Dragged out a country gentleman,
His maid, and his homely wife,
He wanted the ring on the lady’s hand
But her finger held it tight,
So he sawed the finger off as well
With a sharp, serrated knife.

‘It was terrible,’ Toby told me
As they loaded him onto the cart,
‘The screams and the blood, unholy,’
As the horse was about to depart,
They hung him high on the Tyburn Tree
Next to the Wilmot pig,
Not undeserved, but I cried and cursed
As he danced the Tyburn jig.

David Lewis Paget

He went ashore with the duty crew
The moment they got their leave,
And headed home for his two by two
And his waiting Genevieve,
He wore his official navy rig
With the medals on his chest,
Had taken pains that his suit was clean
And his blue jean collar pressed.

He followed the crazy paving that
Led up to his cottage door,
Could only see a glimmer of light
A smidgen of light, no more,
A heavy footfall came to the door
And flung it out wide, apace,
While he stood grim, and staring at him
A man with a stranger’s face.

Then Genevieve came breathlessly out
Went breathlessly up to him,
I want you to meet a cousin of mine,
He’s staying with us, meet Jim.
The sailor took a step in the door
And shouldered the man away,
‘I see,’ he said, ‘not seen him before,
I’ll see if your Jim can stay.’

They settled down in the kitchen, sat
Across the table and glared,
While Genevieve had served up a meal
A meal that had been prepared,
‘So who’s your cousin related to,
Your mother’s side, or your Da’s?’
She stopped for a moment then to think
‘It must have been Grandpa’s.’

But he’d grinned over the table then
At Genevieve, this Jim,
And that was the moment the sailor knew
That he’d been suckered in.
‘I don’t think this is your cousin, dear,
But there, I think you knew,
And hit the stranger fair in the face
With a plate of boiling stew.

I think that he scarred the guy for life
For his skin came off in strips,
While Genevieve took a paper towel
And tried to save his lips,
‘Take your mate to the Rose and Crown
And buy him a cooling beer,’
The sailor said, as he cuffed her head
‘For you’ll not be staying here.’

David Lewis Paget

Whenever the rain comes falling,
It rearranges our town,
Whatever before was dry and up
Is suddenly wet and down,
They say it’s the fault of Widow Krupp
Who saved her tears in a tub,
And splashes them out with a scream and shout
As rain fills the gutters up.

And the streets lie under the waterways
For the river will burst its banks,
Flooding the gardens, and pathways,
There’s nobody else to thank.
We lose all sense of the North and South
As the East and West drift by,
And watch as the town goes spinning round
By gazing up at the sky.

People go drifting out in boats
To look for the supermart,
But all they find are the floating goats
That litter the flooded park,
The wooden houses meander by
As they leave their place in the street,
And neighbours wake in a different place
To the one where they fell asleep.

No wonder they call it ‘Waterdown’
It could have been ‘Waterup’,
For Waterdown is a drifting town
Thanks to the Widow Krupp,
The townsfolk threaten to duck the witch
As soon as they find the pond,
That lies bewitched by a flooded ditch
Out there, the back of beyond.

The pub has been anchored down with ropes
To stop it drifting away,
They towed it down from the heart of town
To give them somewhere to play,
While Madame Loy is the local toy
Who hangs her shingle outside,
‘Come in and play, if you’re bored today,
Entrée, and come for a ride.’

They finally got to the Widow Krupp
And drowned the witch in her tears,
Ducked her well in her wooden tub
Now it hasn’t rained for years.
The ground is dry and they wonder why
The river is just a stream,
And for those few who are newly new,
The past was a fitful dream.

David Lewis Paget

The SatNav said, ‘Turn left ahead,
There’s going to be a crash,
A dozen cars are headed in
For one almighty smash!’
I slammed my foot down on the brake
And pulled off to the verge,
As other drivers honked and cursed
And flew past, in a surge.

I think my mouth fell open as
I stared down at the screen,
An LED was pulsing red
Ahead, at Winson Green,
‘Would you repeat the last command,’
I muttered, still in shock,
‘Sit here and wait, avoid your fate,
Five minutes on the clock!’

The papers said the lights had failed
When they came out next day,
A dozen cars had met head on,
Three died in that affray,
I didn’t dare say anything
In case they thought me mad,
An Oracle SatNav indeed,
I shook my head - How sad!

I lay awake in bed at dawn
I hadn’t been to sleep,
The automatic toaster by
The bed began to speak,
‘Get up, get up,’ and popped the toast,
Its usual discourse,
But then, ‘you’d better get downstairs
And check the neighbour’s horse.’

The horse was in the living room
Had come in from outside,
Had gifted us a steaming pile
Right there, on Maggie’s pride.
‘That rug will never be the same,’
I shouted at the horse:
‘I saw the door was open, so
I just came in, of course!’

A talking horse? It couldn’t be,
I went to see the quack,
‘I keep on hearing funny things,’
I said, he turned his back.
‘I think my ears are playing up,’
I motioned with my thumb,
He shook his head, I’d quite forgot
The Doc was deaf and dumb.

My life is quite impossible
I must admit defeat,
As phones and televisions all
Abuse me in the street,
But I never seem to hear the wife
Who tends to scream and shout,
So it seems there’s still an upside
When you’re going mad - No doubt!

David Lewis Paget

I woke to a knock at the door one day,
And stumbled, to put on my gown,
The place was a shambles, and last night’s tea
In cartons, was scattered around.
I hate people seeing the way I live,
They shouldn’t call round, it’s a *****,
But called out, ‘Who is it?’ and got the reply,
‘It’s me, it’s the upstairs witch.’

I had no idea she lived upstairs,
The apartments are all very small,
The slightest of noises will carry on through
The ceilings, and paper thin walls.
I opened the door in bemusement then
To see who was pulling my leg,
She wore every colour the rainbow sent,
Pushed past me, and said: ‘Call me Peg!’

I followed her into the wreck of my room,
And mumbled, ‘I know, it’s a mess.’
She shrugged, and she pointed my PC out,
‘I knew it was that, nothing less!
You sit and you type through the early hours
I hear all your whistles and bells,
Your tappity-tapping is driving me spare,
And worse, is confusing my spells.’

‘I have to compose when the mood is high,
And that is from midnight and on.’
‘And I only spell when the Moon is nigh,
I can’t til the sun has gone.’
We stared at each other with little grace,
Both grim, with a certain intent,
She wouldn’t be giving an inch to me,
I murmured I wouldn’t relent.

‘We’ll have to come up with a compromise,
I’ll help you, if that helps myself,
I’ll spell in your program a silence key,
And you’ll be at peace with yourself.’
‘But what am I getting from you in return,
This sounds like it’s going one way…’
‘I’ll bring all your stories to life,’ she said,
‘In colour, and one for each day.’

‘I’ve written so many, you’ll never keep up,
I’ll need to go back through my files.’
‘Just open the drawer of your cabinet,
And I’ll carry you there, for a while.
I’ve seen all your stuff on the Internet,
Your devils and demons and ghouls,
I haven’t a clue what you think you will do
In a garden, with so many fools.’

She sits in her garret and plays with her spells,
I type without making a sound,
I open the drawer and I walk on the shore
Or hear bells from the church in the town.
I follow each lady I’ve written in verse
And make love when I’m feeling the itch,
They all wear the colours of rainbows at first,
And they look like the upstairs witch!

David Lewis Paget

He gazed at me with his rheumy eyes,
‘You think that you’re getting old!
You’ll not go travel that lonely valley
Until your bones are cold.’
His voice was like the sound of a rasp
Bubbling up through his chest,
And his claw-like hands reached out for mine
As I backed away from his desk.

‘I see that you won’t come close to me
And I can’t blame you for that,
This body holds a corrupted soul
That’s caught, like a drowning rat.
I tasted sin ‘til I’d had my fill
When I once was young, like you,
I’m twice as old as you think I am
At a hundred and twenty two.’

I took a further step from his desk
And I let his words sink in,
I’d known that he was a billionaire
But not that he’d tasted sin.
‘They told me you had the answers, you
Could steer me to great success!’
‘I could, but given your chances, you
Should probably aim for less.’

‘I aimed as high as I thought I could
But life only gave me gruel,
I wanted to rise as high as the rest
But the lack of success was cruel,
They passed me by for promotion while
The idiots by me flew,
I watched them counting their bonuses
While the ones that I got were few.’

‘So envy lies at the heart of it,
You think it’s better with wealth,
You only can spend a part of it
What you really need is health,
Your cheeks are ruddy, your eyes are bright
You can walk in the winter rain,
While I sit crippled with untold wealth
In a body that’s racked with pain.’

‘But you’ve been able to buy the best
In a long and a fruitful life,
While I’ve been able to give much less
At home, to my loving wife.’
‘At least your woman has stayed by you,
She hasn’t been fired by greed,
She’s more content than the wives I knew
Who wanted more than they need.’

‘I don’t have even a single friend,’
He said, with a misty eye,
‘But plenty of greedy hangers-on
Who are waiting for me to die.
I wasn’t warned when I signed the form
In blood, that the heart grows cold,
That even the love of my children then
Could only be bought with gold.’

He shuffled the papers on his desk
And pushed one across to me,
‘Just sign on the bottom line in blood
And you’ll have everything you see.’
I looked at his ancient, withered form,
At the lines in his face of woe,
Thought of my wife and children, then:
‘I think I’d better just go!’

David Lewis Paget

I was born and bred in a valley,
It was all that I ever knew,
The cows grazed out in the pasture and
The cottages were few.
I grew surrounded by simple folk
Who toiled, and ate their fill,
They had one rule that they never broke,
‘We don’t go over the hill!’

They said, ‘Be happy with what you’ve got,
A pleasant country life,
One of the girls you play with here
Will grow to be your wife,
We have no use for the world out there
With its thrills, and shrill alarms,
We’re all content with the life we’ve spent
On our peaceful valley farms.’

The school was simply a single room,
We had no need for more,
At best, the students were twenty two,
At least, they numbered four,
They didn’t study so very hard
For the life they lived outside,
To the best of my recollection there,
Nobody ever died.

The cemetery hadn’t been in use
Since eighteen eighty-nine,
We had no use for a doctor there
For our health was always fine.
It always seemed like a mystery
But one that was never told,
Just why in our recent history
Did no-one ever grow old?

They told me when I was twenty-one
The story of Maggie Grey,
Her headstone stood in the cemetery,
The last one from her day,
She’d gone as a girl to the mountain top
Picked flowers for a bride,
But when she staggered on down again,
Something had changed, inside.

She said she’d eaten a purple fruit
From a bush that fateful day,
Whatever it was, we didn’t know
But it changed her DNA,
Of all the children she bore from then
They all were still alive,
Seven were born to her husband Ben,
And then another five.

They intermarried to keep their blood
As pure as it was fine,
And everyone in the valley now
Was descended from her line,
The rest of the folk had died and gone
As it was, before her day,
And the very last to be buried there
Was poor old Maggie Grey.

They said that we never could leave there
Just in case our blood would spill,
Or mix with the common herd out there
For the mix would make us ill,
They said we lived in a paradise
But could never make it known,
The moment the world had heard of us
They wouldn’t leave us alone.

My girlfriend, Catherine Mundy was
Rebellious from the start,
She said she wanted to travel, that
To stay would break her heart.
I followed her on a moonlit night
Where she went, to work her will,
And called out, ‘Catherine, please come back,
We don’t go over the hill!’

She stared at me from the mountain top,
Plunged down the other side,
I chased her then and I caught her, said:
‘Come back, and be my bride!’
‘I have to go or I’ll never know
All the things in the world out there,
But when I’m done, I’ll come on back
To find if you really care.’

She disappeared in the darkness, and
I wandered sadly home,
They sent a party to search for her
But then came back, alone.
‘She’s down in that village of miners,
We just hope that she holds her tongue,
If she tells them the story of Maggie Grey,
The valley will be undone!’

A year went by and the soldiers came
And they locked us in our farms,
They brought a team of physicians who
Set up in one of the barns,
They tested us and injected us,
Took blood on alternate days,
They wouldn’t say what they expected,
But they checked us with x-rays.

Catherine came back home as well,
She was cuffed to an army jeep,
I asked her what she had told them, it
Was then she began to weep.
A farmer died in the early Spring
And his wife went to her grave,
The first ones buried in paradise,
In a valley too late to save!

David Lewis Paget

I went for a walk in a farmer’s field
That once was a village street,
The cobbles were buried under the weeds
And scattering ears of wheat,
I wondered what had become of them,
Had they just faded away,
And left the buildings to tumble down
In disrepair and dismay?

Here the occasional chimney stood
Its flu still blackened with soot,
That once had shone with a rosy glow
Reflected by someone’s foot.
And there the remains of a hearth still lay
Where mother had cooked the food,
And once there had been a child at play
Outside, where a swing had stood.

I found the remains of an old stone slab
Worn down by the passage of feet,
The entranceway to the Inn they had
In the days when life was sweet,
But something had come to sweep it away
To level it all to the ground,
And I was struck by the silence there,
Marked by the absence of sound.

I finally came to the cemetery
That sat alongside a wood,
A pitiful forest of standing stones
Each marked with a name, but crude,
And in the middle a pitch black stone
That sat at odds with the rest,
‘Here lie the remains of the Witch of Crone,
May she burn in Hell, Bad Cess!’

It seemed then that the villagers had
Their taste of evil ways,
Before some force had hurried along
To see each building razed,
For then I stumbled across a stone
That lay, each shattered piece,
As if it was struck by lightning there
When he was just deceased.

I began to gather the pieces
Like a puzzle in that field,
And started to put it together,
See what secrets it would yield,
‘Here lies the Village Witch Finder,’ said
The sorry tale at last,
His name, ‘Nathaniel Binder’, carved
Before that final blast.

Then once that the tale was there to tell
I could hear a distant growl,
Deep in the wooded trees nearby
Like some grim and ancient howl,
And the black stone in that cemetery
Began to glow so bright,
As smoke poured off from its surface then,
Making me weak with fright.

I never went back to that farmer’s field,
Or that vast, unholy ground,
But I passed just once the village pond,
A hole, and not to be found,
The earth had opened, swallowed it up
In a time of great despair,
And there by the edge of that ancient pond
The remains of the ducking chair.

David Lewis Paget