The carts rolled out of the warehouses
And trawled each single street,
Each drawn by a giant Clydesdale with
Those massive hooves and feet,
They creaked along, and they struck a gong
That excited furtive looks,
While the men that day, who rode the dray
Called out, ‘Bring out your books.’

They watched the shimmer of curtains as
The people peeked outside,
For many were loth to show themselves,
All they had left was pride,
The law brought in by the ****** left
Trapped all but the pastrycooks,
For they could retain their recipes
At the cry, ‘Bring out your books.’

They said they were saving forests from
The pulp mill on the bay,
There wouldn’t need to be paper with
The pads we have today,
And too many things were incorrect
Had been printed on a tree,
Were sitting on people’s shelves, defunct
In ideology.

The people set up resistance, they
Had loved their tattered tomes,
And many a shelf was burdened in
The meanest of their homes,
‘The government’s trying to dumb us down,’
Was the universal cry,
‘Go out and save the forests, but
If they’re already printed, why?’

The spread of ideas is dangerous
They could rot you to the core,
And too many things on liberty
Have been printed, long before,
Perhaps it would have been better if
The people couldn’t read,
Taking away the books at last
Might take away the need.

The drays that rumbled along each street
They had stacked the books up high,
But there was the odd revisionist
Who complained, and grumbled, ‘Why?’
A squad broke into each suspect house
Where the owner locked the door,
And tore the books from his fevered grasp
While screaming, ‘It’s the law!’

But mine, I hid in the garden shed
And buried the others deep,
They wouldn’t be getting their hands on them
The ones that I wished to keep,
There’s so many fake and useless things
That they’re legislating for,
But to take our books and our liberty
Would be like declaring war.

David Lewis Paget

I was staying in the village
That was known as Banzhushan,
In the mountains, in the Province
That the Chinese call Hunan,
It was perched atop the mountain
You could reach, and touch the sky,
But there were no single women,
And the men up there were shy.

They were poor, could offer nothing
To entice a willing bride,
They earned little from their labours,
And their houses, poor inside,
So the girls would leave to travel
Down the mountain to the plain,
Where they’d find a richer husband
Than the farmer, sowing grain.

So the men would send out raiders
To the outskirts of the towns,
And they’d kidnap straying peasants,
All the women that they found,
And they’d target younger widows
Who would not put up a fight,
Then would carry them to Banzhushan
Protected by the night.

I had met a village elder
By the name of Zhang Fan Cheng,
He was ancient, a magician,
One the Chinese call yāorén,
He invited me to dinner,
It was simple, shoots and rice,
He was dignified and courteous,
But caught me by surprise.

In the further room, a mirror
Stood at length, both straight and tall,
The frame was wrought in silver
And it leant against the wall,
He showed it to me proudly
Then asked how much would I pay?
For just 5,000 R.M.B.
He’d sell it me, today!

I reached out to feel the silver,
Was it fake or was it real?
He sensed my hesitation
Then he motioned, ‘You be still!’
And plunged his hand into the glass
The mirror let him in,
His arm up to the elbow
Against science, against sin!

He reached his arm behind and pulled,
A girl came into sight,
She was standing in the mirror,
He was holding her so tight,
And she stared, while looking at me
And she said: ‘Qing bang bang wo!’
I could read it on her lips, and then
The wizard let her go.

She had said: ‘Would you please help me!’
But I’d stepped back in the room,
She was nowhere near behind me
Just reflected, in the gloom,
And I saw a tear forming at
The corner of her eye,
The wizard pulled his arm out, and
She waved to me, ‘Goodbye!’

I paid the man his money, and
I took the mirror down
On a wooden cart he lent me,
And I took it through Hunan,
Then I packed it on a train and went
Off speeding to Nanjing,
Where I kept a small apartment,
And I turned, and locked us in.

I stood the mirror over by
A meagre wooden shelf,
Then I stood quite still before it
Hoping she would show herself,
And I tried to put my arm inside
Like he had done before,
But the mirror was unyielding,
So I stood there, and I swore!

That night the girl appeared,
Standing right behind the glass,
And she pummelled on the surface
As if she’d be free at last,
But the mirror was ungiving,
And I couldn’t hear her voice,
So I took a ball pein hammer -
It had given me no choice!

She could see me through the mirror,
In alarm, she mouthed ‘Meiyou!’
But her beauty had beguiled me
Though I knew she’d shouted ‘No!’
I was fevered and impatient now
To set this beauty free,
So I swung the ball pein hammer
And it shattered, over me!

She fell out through the broken glass,
Lay trembling in my room,
Bleeding, sobbing in the silence,
Like the silence of the tomb,
And she said she’d been imprisoned
Since the days of Qin **** Huang,
Then she writhed upon the carpet
As her flesh turned into sand.

I had wanted to release her
To relieve those tender tears,
But her body, once released took on
The last two thousand years;
She took one last, despairing look
Then withered up to die,
And for years I’ve sought the answer
To the only question - ‘Why?’

David Lewis Paget

(Glossary -
R.M.B. - Ren-Min-bi - or yuan (Chinese currency.)
Yāorén - magician
Qing bang bang wo - (Ching bang bang wor) - Please help me!
Meiyou - (May yo) - No, nothing
Qin **** Huang - (Chin Sher Hwang)
1st Emperor of China - 246-210 BC)

The first time that I noticed them
I passed them on the stair,
She wore an amulet love-charm then
He was much too old for her.
I should have hurried and looked away
But I caught her smouldering eye,
And my heart had leapt within my breast
To this day, I wonder why?

Her hair, a tangle of lovers knots,
Her lips, a definite pout,
Her figure light and her legs were white
And I saw her look about.
She peeked behind as she passed me by
And I caught her knowing look,
The moment passed with the slightest sigh
I was firmly on her hook.

I didn’t go out of my way for her,
She seemed so firmly fixed,
The man beside her glowered at me
And gripped her by the wrist,
I saw him leading her often then
As our paths began to cross,
And smiled at her as she came my way
But her eyes looked vague, and lost.

The man came up and he gripped my arm,
‘You’d better leave her be.
Don’t think to fall for her fateful charm,
Giselle belongs to me!’
He pushed me then, and he walked away
And he gripped her arm so tight,
He stopped the blood where his fingers lay
And her hand went stark and white.

I asked a friend who had known her once,
He said, ‘Just keep away.
She labours under a curse, that one,
She only brings dismay.
You see the man who escorts her now
And you think he’s far too old,
A year ago he was twenty-two
But he aged once in her hold.’

I didn’t think it was possible
But he aged as time went on,
His hair and his beard went pale and grey
And his features, pale and wan,
Though she gained colour in both her cheeks
And her eyes would sparkle blue,
While he would stumble, but still cling on
Till she said, ‘I’m looking at you!’

As soon as she uttered those fateful words
His hand released its grip,
And she walked on, not looking back
As if on a different trip.
She came to face me and say the words
That had snared good men before,
But I turned into my passageway
Grey faced, and I locked the door.

David Lewis Paget

We hadn’t had TV news for days
And the nights were cold and still,
The radio sound was just a haze
Of hash, from over the hill,
There wasn’t a signal for the phone
And the Internet was dead,
‘Do you think it’s just the weather, Bill?’
‘Much more than that,’ I said.

The power went off on the seventh day
I began to feel alarm,
We’d never felt quite so isolated
On our outback farm.
I drove on out to the neighbour’s spread
But they seemed to have gone away,
I thought, ‘That’s funny, it’s not like Fred,
He’s usually baling hay.’

I came back via the Rogers place,
There was nobody around,
The doors to the house were open, but
They seemed to have gone to ground.
Their cars were there but the truck was gone
And the old Toyota Ute,
I called and listened, but not a sound,
I should have been more astute.

I should have packed, and driven away
If I’d known what I know now,
But the pigs and the chickens had to be fed,
And what to do with the cow?
I couldn’t think much outside the farm
The world could fend for itself,
We lived in a tiny world of our own
And thought about nothing else.

We lit the paraffin lamps at night,
‘It’s lucky we kept them, Bill.’
I said, ‘You’re right,’ and stood on the porch,
And watched the glow on the hill.
We’d had three days of never a breeze
Like the lull before a storm,
Though the clouds glowed red in the sky at night
In shapes that were ripped and torn.

A rumble began the thirteenth day
Like a thundering from afar,
And Jacqueline turned to me to say,
‘Stop leaving the door ajar!’
She then collapsed, and covered her ears
And bent down low in her chair,
I saw that her face was smeared with tears
And all I could do was stare.

‘You know that I love you, Jacqueline,
Whatever may come to pass,
I love you more than the day before,
I just want to tell you, lass.’
It started raining at just on dusk,
Came down, and started to pour,
It raised a mist, and started to hiss
In the barley stooks by the door.

The lightning started at four a.m.
We hadn’t been able to sleep,
The sky ablaze through a purple haze
I could hear my woman weep.
I wiped the dust off the .22
That I’d kept there, under the stairs,
Loaded a fresh new magazine
And silently said my prayers.

The cow was dead in the morning, lay
Quite burned, and covered in blood,
And all the chickens were strewn about
Quite dead, they lay in the mud,
‘What does it mean,’ said Jacqueline
As she stared through the window pane,
‘I don’t want to be too hasty, love,
But I think it was acid rain.’

‘There’s nobody left but us,’ she said,
Be honest and tell me true!’
‘I don’t want to jump to conclusions, but
There’s something we need to do.
Pack up our clothes, and all the food,
We’d better be heading West,
If Sydney’s gone, a hydrogen bomb,
Then Melbourne would have been next.’

We’re headed on out to who knows where
And leaving the rain behind,
I hope that the cloud won’t follow us there
Though we’ll be travelling blind.
The .22 is behind the seat
In case we have need of it,
I pray to God that we’ll have it beat,
But Jacqueline’s just been sick!

David Lewis Paget

‘I’ve never believed in ghosts,’ she said,
So I said, ‘I’ll prove there are.
I’ve seen them at night beside our bed,
I caught one sat in our car.
They wander along the street outside
I’ve seen them down at the beach,
You have to believe to see them, though,
They tend to be out of reach.’

‘You’ll have to produce one here for me
Before I’m going to believe,
It’s easy to say that they exist
If you just want to deceive.’
She effectively threw the gauntlet down
So I just had to respond,
And work on a way to bring one here
From out the back of beyond.

But where do you go to find a ghost?
It’s easier said than done,
I’ve seen so many of them, but most
Won’t answer to anyone.
I thought I’d try to Google one up
When turning my PC on,
Then took a sip from my coffee cup
While typing in ‘Ghost - just one.’

It threw up a series of single ghosts,
The one that walked in the rain,
And one that came with its head cut off,
A ghost in a railway train.
It even mentioned the woman in white
Who came halfway down the stair,
And stood by the bannister and groaned
With blood still thick in her hair.

I liked the thought of a railway train
With its own original ghost,
She didn’t seem to be in much pain
So she appealed to me most.
I sent a message for meeting me where
She could come and meet the wife,
And bring the train, to give her a scare
That would last the rest of her life.

That night we lay in our poster bed
And I heard the shriek of wheels,
The wife rolled over as in it sped
The room was filled with her squeals.
The train pulled up by the bedroom door
And the ghost approached our bed,
She wore a nightdress, down to the floor
With bullet holes in her head.

‘I’ve never believed in ghosts,’ she’d said,
She’d have to believe them now,
The ghost approached with a look of dread,
And it caused a terrible row.
‘Don’t ever bring ghosts in here again
Or you’ll be alone in the bed,’
As the train took off with a clicketty-clack
And the ghost just stood and bled.

I’m never allowed to Google up,
She said to stick to my verse,
They sit in the kitchen, while we sup
And even pass in the hearse,
She says that she never sees them now,
She doesn’t want to believe,
I know it would only cause a row
If I said they tug at her sleeve.

David Lewis Paget

They said that The Grange was a haunted house,
I said, ‘you’re having me on!’
But no, they said, ‘he’s back from the dead,’
I thought it a giant con.
‘Just spend one night in that house alone
With the power cut off, you’ll see,’
I said, ‘I’ll go, if Carolyn goes,
If Carolyn stays with me.’

Now she was more of a nervous type
But she said, ‘I’ll go with you,
Just promise you won’t make whooshing sounds,
There’s nothing a ghost can do.’
‘There isn’t a ghost,’ I told her then,
They’re all just having us on,
We’ll spend the night, if you feel uptight
I’ll prove that it’s just a con.’

We ventured in through the cobwebbed porch
As the hour was getting late,
The only light we had was a torch
And the fire we lit in the grate,
The Moon came presently shining in
Its ghostly beam through the gloom,
And Carolyn came and cuddled up
As we sat on the floor of the room.

‘Where did they say the ghost would be,’
She asked, as I patted her hair,
I couldn’t say, I was miles away,
Then we heard a creak on the stair.
I thought, ‘Oh no, it will spoil the show,’
I was hoping for just one kiss,
For this was the first time, she and I
Had ever been close, like this.

Then from above there were creaks and groans,
It came stumbling down the stair,
It looked like a bundle of rags and moans
And a skull, with eyes that glare,
Carolyn screamed as it reached for her
This thing from another world,
It bubbled and rasped in its throat, and said
One word that I think was ‘Girl’.

It must have remembered from days before
It had held a girl like this,
Death had never erased the thought,
Or the feeling that was bliss,
But now, the rags of the grave were foul
It gave off a graveyard stench,
And Carolyn, all she could do was howl,
This alive and lovely *****.

What seemed to me an apparition
A ghost in empty air,
Was rotting flesh and bones to Carolyn
Tangled in her hair,
It held her in a grip of steel
As it probed beneath her dress,
I couldn’t even fight it off
For to me, it was stagnant breath.

They came to us in the dawning light
With a key to let us out,
I lay as in a palsied dream
But I heard them scream and shout,
‘What have you done to Carolyn,’
But they were to late to save,
For she had gone where the ghost had gone,
To join him in the grave.

David Lewis Paget

They said that he’d come from the cemetery
And I thought he maybe could,
In his coat with tails, covered in snails
And a cape without a hood,
He looked like a typical gravedigger
There was soil on both his hands,
And on top of that, an old top hat
Held on with rubber bands.

His skin a peculiar shade of grey
Like an old and weathered wood,
His eyes set back, under his hat
Each shot with a ring of blood.
His cheeks were sunken under his eyes
His lips in a rictus grin,
Exposed his teeth in a grin beneath
With some of them fallen in.

His trousers had a military stripe
Were in holes about his knees,
Where he had knelt, with an old grey belt
That suffered from some disease.
His boots had once been a shiny black
But were covered in clumps of mud,
As he stomped in like a burst of sin
From a grave he’d recently dug.

His voice had a curious rasping sound
When he opened his mouth to speak,
With a sort of croak, back in his throat
Or a rusty hinge’s creak.
‘I’ve come to escort the Lady Anne
On her journey, over the Styx,
That river of hate, at Hades gate,
Where she keeps her box of tricks.’

‘I think there’s been a mistake,’ I said,
‘For the Lady Anne is well,
She’s sat in a chair, just over there,
And dreams of heaven, not hell.’
‘Then little you know of the lady’s heart,
Or the object of her dreams,
Her cheating heart would tear you apart,
She’s never been what she seems.’

I went inside to the Lady Anne
And I tried to rouse her there,
But she was pale, and the air was stale
Where she lay dead in her chair.
I turned again to the gravedigger
Who was standing near me still,
‘I’ll take her corpse to the woodland copse
Where her coffin lies over the hill.’

I often visit the grave he dug
Which is edged around with bricks,
And sit beside the babbling stream
That they call the River Styx.
Then I call in vain to the Lady Anne
To reveal what she had done,
And sit and cry as I feel denied
By the love I thought I’d won.

David Lewis Paget

I spend my time in the graveyard of
St. Martin’s in the Fields,
Cleaning the moss off the headstones
Just to read what damp reveals,
The local vicar has let them go
And the graveyard’s overgrown,
As creepers cover the finer points
Of the lives now dead and gone.

And some of the stones have fallen down,
Some of them on their face,
Showing their stories to the ground
That wouldn’t reveal a trace,
I heave and jemmy them back upright
Under the noonday sun,
Then read the inscriptions in the light,
Long hidden from every one.

The work is slow and exhausting but
It gives of its own reward,
They say that it stops the haunting by
The ones that are being ignored,
The graveyard dips down into a dell
And spreads through the willow trees,
With some of the graves so covered up
I get to them on my knees.

And some of them have been there so long
That the tops have fallen in,
Opening up the coffin lids
To the skull’s unholy grin,
I sometimes cover the aging bones,
Then I sometimes leave them be,
It all depends if they made amends
Once I know each history.

But one I found in that shaded dell
Made the hairs crawl up my back,
I raised the stone when I was alone
When I should have called for Jack,
For there on the new raised frontage
Was a scene from a dream of hell,
A demon, wearing a flowing cloak
And with sharpened claws as well.

She stared from the stone of granite
Her horns stood out on her head,
Someone had carved her figure there
To give us a sense of dread,
Her teeth were those of a vampire bat
Protruding out of the mud,
And only once I had wiped them off
Could I see the signs of blood.

And then I read the inscription:
‘Here lies the Lady Vamp,
She lured her victims into the woods
Disguised as a willing *****,
Then once inside she would tear their throats,
It looked like a beast of prey,
So no-one thought to look for her till
She’d given herself away.’

‘A soldier came on her sleeping
While she was covered in blood,
Her victim’s throat was in keeping
With a vampire loose in the wood,
He sharpened a stake from a sapling
And stood for a moment, apart,
Then turned in a burst of fury,
Thrusting the stake through her heart.’

The top of her coffin had fallen in
I saw, with the creeper aside,
And there lay the vampire, staring at me
As if from the day that she died,
The stake was ****** in through the ribcage there
She’d helplessly reached with a claw,
And tried to remove, to seek a reprieve
From what she was dying for.

I’m not superstitious, I should be, I know,
And in that there lies my mistake,
I reached through that rotten, coffin lid so
I’d get a good grip on the stake,
I pulled it out swiftly, and gave it a twist,
A foul wind blew in, like a breeze,
And I was aware of a woman who watched,
Stood silently there by the trees.

David Lewis Paget

We’d picked up the cottage for peanuts, as
It sat on the edge of a wood,
The air was damp and we used a lamp,
No power in that neighbourhood,
But the sun came filtering in through the leaves
On the pleasant summer days,
It was like we were living a hundred years
In the past, using former ways.

We carried our water in from a well
That sat just outside the door,
We had to lower a wooden pail
And it slopped all over the floor,
But Meredith laughed, and said it was fun,
She felt like a pioneer,
‘I’m getting to know how things were done
In the neck of the woods, round here.’

We fired the stove and the hearth with wood,
Gathered among the trees,
For branches fell, in the storms as well
When the wind was more than a breeze,
I chopped it up on a wooden block
And carted it all inside,
To see it stacked by the kitchen clock
Gave me a sense of pride.

Upstairs was a single bedroom with
An attic room beside,
The walls were covered with wallpaper
From a distant time and tide,
The bedroom was an ocean blue
And the attic was painted green,
I said to Meredith, ‘Shield your eyes,
It’s the brightest thing I’ve seen.’

The damp had got in the attic wall
And the paint had started to rot,
Up in one of the corners you
Could see a slight fungus spot,
But we didn’t need the room just then
So I said, ‘Just let it be.
I’ll find the time to attend to it
When the rest has set me free.’

But Meredith’s sister came to stay
So we had to use the room,
We turned it into a bedroom with
A flick of a whisking broom.
Rhiannon was a beauty, I’ll
Admit that she took my breath,
So young, and with her life unsung
And yet she was close to death.

She’d been and slept in the Green Room
For a week, or maybe more,
When she said, ‘I fell, and I feel unwell,’
Then she coughed up blood on the floor.
So Meredith was distraught, and thought
She’d sleep at her sister’s side,
But early the following morning she
Then told me her sister died.

She stayed with her sister’s body there,
She said it was like a tomb,
And soon my Meredith coughed up blood,
She said ‘It’s an evil room!’
A doctor came with the ambulance
And looked at the flaking mould,
Then said, ‘I think it’s the paint, my dear,
I’ve heard of this stuff of old.’

He scraped it then, and he tested it
And he came back round to see,
‘You know that paint’s full of arsenic,
There’s a well known history.’
And life was never the same for us
When we sat in the cottage gloom,
I could always hear Rhiannon’s cough
Up in that attic room.

While Meredith put the blame on me
Packed up her things and left,
She said that I should have scraped it off,
Then left me, feeling bereft,
She’d lost her sister, and I lost her
So I sit alone in the gloom,
My heart has stopped like a ticking clock,
And the cottage, now, is a tomb.

David Lewis Paget

The brook at the end of the garden
Would gurgle and gush through the weeds,
Would ripple and plash in the morning sun
Like a spirit with spiritual needs,
I’d play as a child with my paper boats
As they twisted and twirled on the stream,
Not knowing the danger my sister faced
As she paddled barefoot in a dream.

For under the water and in the weeds
Was the face of a Grindylow,
He’d stare long up at my sister’s legs
From his weedbed, down below,
I should have known and I should have warned
If I’d known he lay down there,
Ruling the brook from his silver throne
But I didn’t, I declare.

I didn’t then, till I saw one day
His face in the willow shade,
Reflected up on the water course
Like a shadow God had made,
He wore a sinister smile that turned
The edge of his mouth to scorn,
And eyes that pierced as Deirdre passed
Her legs quite bare at the dawn.

I said, ‘You walked by the river god
And he stared right up your skirt,’
But Deirdre frowned, stared at the ground
I thought that she must feel hurt.
She kept on paddling in the brook
Walked out by the willow tree,
And two long arms then pulled her down
Rose out of the brook, by me.

I hadn’t the time to scream or cry
Her hair went into the brook,
Quick as a wink, she made no sound
I dashed to the tree to look,
And though the water was inches deep
Its depth had taken the girl,
Down through the weeds where the Dryads weep
With the water starting to whirl.

The brook still bubbles and gurgles there
Will ripple and plash in the weeds,
But I won’t go where I know below
My sister lies in the reeds,
She must have married the Grindylow
For she never came back to see,
If I was there in the morning air,
If anything happened to me?

David Lewis Paget

We had come across this grotto in
The cliff near Cater’s Pride,
And were swimming in the shallows
When we took a look inside,
There was just a tiny entrance that
Had broadened to a hall,
And the strange effect of lighting seemed
Reflected off each wall.

There were seashells, there were gemstones
Shining, in the rocky face,
And a narrow path around a pool
With depths we could not trace,
But the water was so clear and blue,
And warm, it must be said,
That Cathy cried, ‘Can this be true?’
While I just shook my head.

We sat back on the ledge and dangled
Feet down in the blue,
We didn’t know that danger loomed
And nor, I think, would you,
But then some minor turbulence
Disturbed the perfect pool,
And suddenly three heads appeared
To laugh, and play the fool.

Three nymphs with sparkling eyes and teeth
Who splashed, their laughter pealed
And echoed round the grotto, as
Their presence was revealed,
They saw us and they beckoned us
As if to swim and play,
If only caution reckoned in
The thoughts I had that day!

But Cathy laughed and waved at them
From just beyond my reach,
And two of them came swimming and
They seized an ankle each,
They pulled her off the ledge and laughing
In that pool so blue,
Then swam around her teasing so
I knew not what to do.

Now Cathy was a swimmer, she
Could more than hold her own,
But when they swam around her
What I saw would make me groan,
For as they broke the surface I
Could see her face was pale,
And each of these fair maidens, well,
They had a fish’s tail.

They whirled around and tumbled her
And pulled her by the hair,
And soon I saw her fighting them
As if in need of air,
I dived in then to free her but
They saw me coming down,
And took her to the depths with them
Until poor Cathy drowned.

I totally lost sight of them
And had to clamber out,
Sat weeping by the pool until
Just like a waterspout
Her body shot up from the depths
And then the mermaids three,
Swam clinging to each other, looked
Apologetically.

They didn’t know we had to breathe
They had no need of air,
They made me signs of penance but
My Cathy simply stared,
And in her eyes a look of awe
As if in death she’d seen
A world that was worth dying for,
A dream within a dream.

David Lewis Paget

The storm outside was abating, or
He thought that it was, at first,
He’d only gone to the pub with Joe
To slake a raging thirst.
They’d both been out on the landfill
And it was humid through the day,
So Joe said, ‘Bet I can race you there
And put two pints away!’

But the storm had built as they drank in there
And the rain came down in sheets,
Then hailstones peppered the windows and
Joe said, ‘It’s turned to sleet!
I think we’re not going anywhere
‘Til the storm has passed and gone,
We might as well have another..
And it’s your shout,’ he said to John.

They’d known each other forever, and
Had married two sisters, late,
They’d both been into their thirties,
Sister Jean and sister Kate.
While one of them was a loving match,
The other one was mean,
And Joe said, ‘would you consider a swap,
My Kate for her sister, Jean?’

So John had laughed, but he looked away
For he knew that Joe was sore,
For Kate was never the bargain that
His mate was looking for,
Her tongue was sharp, though he knew her bark
Was worse that her fabled bite,
For John was meeting Kate in the dark
When they both were alone at night.

He’d kick himself, for he knew that Jean
Was the love match of the pair,
But she tended to work at night so much
That she often wasn’t there,
And Joe would stay at the pub so late
That they had to throw him out,
He didn’t have cause to go back home
So he stayed until last shout.

The storm continued to rage outside
So they both got worse for drink,
And the talk died down as they sat and frowned,
They both had time to think.
‘We’re always going to be mates,’ said John,
‘I hope that you think so too.’
‘We’re side by side where we both belong
No matter what we might do.’

But the ***** brought on a maudlin state
And it seemed to get to John,
‘It may be time to confess,’ he thought,
‘This deception can’t go on.’
‘I’ve something I have to tell you, Joe,
It’s time I was coming clean.’
But Joe stayed him, and he said, ‘Me first!
Old mate, I’ve been seeing Jean!’

David Lewis Paget

I used to think that thunder was
The sound of the Hammer, Thor,
He’d beat it up on the clouds above
Each time he was waging war,
He’d quell his foes with a lightning strike
Or drown them all in his rain,
Whenever he came along at night
His purpose was always pain.

For we lived down in the valley where
The tendency was to flood,
Whenever the river was swollen with
A squirt of his enemy’s blood,
We’d have to climb up to higher ground
And sit there, soaked to the skin,
With lightning flashing around our heads
We’d need to pay for our sins.

‘Pay for our sins,’ my father said
In a voice that rumbled and roared,
He’d pull a hood up over his head
And speak to the god called Thor,
Then Thor replied with a mighty blast
To drown out my father’s cries,
As if he answered him there at last,
‘All that you speak are lies!’

While mother sat in a silent weep
As often she’d done before,
‘Why did you have to build our house
Way down on the valley floor?
We would have been safer, further up
And still walk down to the stream,
To carry a bucket of water up,
But all that you do is dream!’

That was his sin, my mother said,
He didn’t know black from white,
He never looked far enough ahead
He didn’t know wrong from right,
Dreaming up schemes that failed, it seems
Like a prophet, living in dread,
That one black night at the river’s height
We’d all be drowned in our bed.

‘Not that his bed means much to him,’
My mother would often moan,
‘Not since that gypsy girl, that Kym
Stayed in the valley alone,
He spends his time in her caravan
Drinking her gypsy tea,
And letting her hold and read his hand,
He never did that with me!’

And so it was on a cold, black night
He’d gone to her caravan,
‘Just to check that she’ll be all right,’
He said, just playing the man,
The thunder crashed on the mountain top
While we prayed, and gave up thanks,
To the mighty Thor beating at our door
That the river not break its banks.

Lightning flashed though the vale of trees
Where she’d parked her gypsy van,
And then my mother was on her knees
As we heard a mighty bang,
For lightning struck at the heart of sin
And it set the van ablaze,
While both the sinners were trapped within
And paid for their sinful ways.

We buried him on the valley floor
For my mother said, ‘It’s right.
He doesn’t deserve a headstone
Nor a grave that’s watertight.’
Whenever the god of thunder calls
And the river overflows,
I think of my father down below
And I wonder if he knows.

David Lewis Paget

We lived on a tiny spit of land
That they called the Harkness Light,
It sat on a reef, a mile of sand
And it beamed out through the night,
There was just myself, and my darling wife
By the name of Jennifer,
But when I went up to tend the light,
He was below, with her.

I was supposed to be on my own
But he brought the cutter out,
Every time that they feared a storm
He’d come, and put her about,
Tie her up to the wooden dock
When the tide was on the rise,
And burst on in to our tiny room
With a wild look in his eyes.

‘I’ve come to be of assistance, Joe,
There’s a storm front coming in,’
‘I think we can manage it ourselves,’
I’d say, with a touch of vim,
I never could trust those smiling eyes
Or that set of perfect teeth,
He made me think of a circling shark
Like the ones beyond the reef.

But Jennifer always welcomed him
With one of her gracious smiles,
She hadn’t a frown for anyone
And her smile would beam for miles,
‘It’s lovely to have some company,’
She’d say, when a storm was nigh,
And cold, black angry thunderheads
Had filled the darkening sky.

He wasn’t of any assistance, he
Would sit and drink our tea,
While I would climb to the light alone
He wasn’t much use to me,
I began to suspect his visits there
Were more to do with her,
I knew that he was attracted to
My darling Jennifer.

It came to a head one night when I
Came down to find them hushed,
With Jennifer disarranged, and when
I looked at her, she blushed,
I knew that I had to do something
But what? It chilled my blood,
That one of these days she’d slip away
And I’d lose my wife for good.

I said, ‘I need your assistance, Chris,
To change the carbon arc,
We’d better get up on top or else
All they will see is dark.
I followed him up the winding stair
But carried a bar of lead,
And when we arrived at the topmost stair
I hit him, over the head.

It doesn’t take much to truss a man
When he’s out, stone cold for the count,
I tied his back to the outer rail
And facing the light, its mount,
And then I plastered his eyelids wide
So he couldn’t take his sight
Away from that glaring carbon arc
That made up the Harkness Light.

‘What do you think you’re doing?’ Chris
Had screamed on his coming to,
I said, ‘I’m protecting Jennifer
From the leery eyes of you.
You shouldn’t come on to another’s wife
For you know, it’s just not right,
I’ll do whatever I have to do
If it makes you see the light.’

That light burnt into his very brain
As he cursed, and cried, and swore,
His eyes could never survive the pain
Of a million candle power,
I went below and I said to her
‘Go up and set him free,
You’ll have to gentle him down the stair,
I don’t think he can see.’

It seems that I bet on a loser
For she left me anyway,
‘How could you be so cruel,’ she said,
As she left, the following day,
I heard they’re living together now
But I’m comforted at night,
That when she strips off her clothes for him
All he sees is the Harkness Light.

David Lewis Paget

‘Just where do you think you’re going, girl
With those ribbons in your hair?’
‘I’m off to the world of Make Believe
To the Hart Midsummer Fair.
They say there’s a Magical Fairy Ring
Where the maids dance round a pole,
Where the step of a dainty pair of feet
Can win you a *** of gold.’

‘There’s Lords and Ladies and Dukes and Kings
Come down from the Castle Kragg,
Wearing their Crowns and jewels and rings
And they roast a new killed Stag,
There are clowns and jugglers, Gypsy bands
And the Phantom Fiddler’s there,
Playing an ancient Irish jig
At the Hart Midsummer Fair.’

‘The gentlemen from the town come down
All dressed in their best array,
Looking to win a country maid
To hang off their arm that day.
And those as willing, the auctioneer
Takes maids from the countryside,
Bangs his gavel and calls the odds
For the sale of a country bride.’

‘I’ll not have you at the County fair,
You can stay at the farm by me,
We’ve been affianced for over a year
And wed in a year, we’ll see!’
‘I’ve waited long for your promise to wed
But nothing has come about,
I’ll not be wed to an Ostler, when
A gentleman calls me out.’

He locked the maid in the pantry, so
She wouldn’t get out that day,
But she slipped the lock, and changed her dress
And managed to get away.
She went the way of the hidden lane
On the old grey dappled mare,
And rode on over the hills to find
The Hart Midsummer Fair.

She was late for the clowns and jugglers
She was late for the Fairy Ring,
She wasn’t too late for the auctioneer
Who told her to come right in.
She couldn’t see who was bidding for her
But she took it with a smile,
It must have been some fine gentleman
For the bidding was done in style.

‘Four pounds I’m bid, for this comely *****,
Four guineas to you out there,’
Another pound brought his gavel down
‘I believe that you’ve won her, sir!’
They tied a blindfold over her eyes
And her wrists were bound with cords,
She had to walk for a dozen miles
Tethered behind a horse.

The horse’s hooves had a hollow ring
As they hit the cobblestones,
The walls were damp and the air was filled
With a smell like drying bones.
Her ‘gentleman’ took the blindfold off
And her knees began to sag,
She’d sold herself to the Pantler of
The household, Castle Kragg.

The Pantler, so very old and grey
With a blind, white staring eye,
He said that she’d be the scullery maid
There were pots and pans to dry,
There wasn’t a single window in
The kitchen, down below,
She ****** the money he’d paid for her
And she begged him, let her go.

‘That’s not enough,’ said the wily serf,
‘To free you from these grounds,
If you want to purchase your liberty
It will cost you twenty pounds.
Your value is in the work you’ll do
Both here, and under the stairs,
If you pay your shilling a week to me
It will take you seven years!’

That night she slept on a pile of sacks
And she ****** the man away,
She said, ‘You’re not going to touch me
For as long as you make me pay!’
But late that night in the pale moonlight
A horse’s hooves were heard,
And a shadow crept to her bedside,
Whispered, ‘Don’t say a single word!’

He led her up to the courtyard where
There stood the dapple grey,
Hoisted her up behind him, spurred
The horse, ‘Now let’s away!’
She clung on tight to the Ostler she
Had spurned, without a care,
And laughed when they crested the hillside
As the breeze blew through her hair.

The banns went up the following day
They were married in the fall,
She said, ‘I finally got my way,’
And he answered, ‘Not at all!
‘You only married an Ostler, not
The Pantler under the stair.’
‘An Ostler’s all that I wanted since
The Hart Midsummer Fair!’

David Lewis Paget

They came by the Inn that morning,
A troop of Cavaliers,
With their swords and buckles shining,
And ringlets round their ears,
They called to the simple stable boy
To attend without delay,
To feed and water their horses,
The King would be there today.

They kicked the Inn door open
With boots that came to the knee,
Demanded an instant pottage
For the troop of twenty three,
‘So get your wife to the kitchen,
Your daughter up to the bar,
By serving us you will serve your King,’
They said to the Inn-Keeper.

They crowded into the tap room,
Where Molly was serving ale,
Made rude and haughty gestures
‘Til the girl had turned quite pale,
Their empty steins were flung at the hearth
And shattered, over the stair,
The Inn to them was beneath contempt
With its simple peasant fare.

The wife served up a ploughman’s lunch
Of wheaten bread and cheese,
They snatched and curled their lips at it
And not one mentioned ‘Please!’
They tore an edict of Parliament
That was hanging over the bar,
And held it over a candle ‘til
The ash was spread on the floor.

‘We have us an act of treason here,’
The Captain said to his men,
‘What shall we do with an Inn-Keeper
Who favours Parliament?’
They dragged him out to the stable yard
And hung him high on a tree,
Dragged the wife and the daughter out
As he died, so they could see.

‘God rot you each and every one,’
The wife screamed out in pain,
‘I curse your colours and curse a King
That could be so cruel - For shame!’
They held the daughter and dragged the wife
Out of sight, in alarm,
Despatched her with a rusty pike
And then set fire to the barn.

The soldiers started to fall about,
Were throwing up, and pale,
While Molly shrieked, ‘How did you like
My Belladonna Ale?’
They still were there when a troop rode up
Of Cromwell’s Ironsides,
Who slaughtered the King’s own troop that day
As the daughter sat, and cried.

David Lewis Paget

There was sadness in his towering form
As he walked the windswept beach,
The clouds were louring overhead
And the **** cast up was deep,
He had to walk where the tide came in
On a narrow strip of sand,
And darting surges caught at his feet
With their floating contraband.

The wreck of the ancient ‘Neptune Glyph’
Embedded in drift was there,
Huddled under a looming cliff
With a trace of its last despair,
But rust had eaten its plates away
To the sound of the wheelhouse bell,
Where a Master and his daughter lay
‘Til the ship became a shell.

But now he skirted the rusting ship
And he seemed to hear her voice,
The daughter, in her personal hell,
She’d been given little choice:
‘Why did you take me out to sea
To avoid my mother’s plan,
She’d said that we would be leaving you
For you’re such a brutal man!’

Then a rumble grew in the rusting hulk
As the wind caught at the stern,
Rattling through the throat of a man
With a sound like someone burned,
‘I had to keep your mother from you
For she’s such an evil witch,
But she sewed a spell for a rising swell
And added the final stitch.’

The man on the beach could hear the roar
That rose from the rusted shell,
Of a storm that raged in the world before
And hurried them both to hell.
‘Why did you have to take the life
Of the mother that might have been?’
He cried aloud at the rusting shroud,
‘I’m left adrift in a dream!’

A voice replied in a rising scream
Then died away to a croak,
‘I raised the storm, but I didn’t mean
For my daughter dear to choke…’
The man turned back on the way he came
And left with a parting tear,
As a woman up on the headland watched
Him fade, and disappear!

David Lewis Paget

‘Hush ye, hush ye, little pet ye,
Hush ye, hush ye, do not fret ye
The Black Douglas shall not get ye’
(Northern English lullaby)

The Scottish records call him ‘The Good’
The English call him ‘The Black’,
They never knew just where he was hid
Before he would launch his attack,

He stood alongside Robert the Bruce
And they learned from their defeats,
Hit hard and fast with a mobile force
And be swift in their retreats.

They captured Roxburgh Castle at last
To the ire of Edward’s spleen,
Disguised as cows so they wouldn’t arouse,
They scaled the walls unseen.

And so the English called him ‘The Black’
For his many heinous deeds,
But he saw them off at Bannockburn,
When his spearmen killed their steeds.

The Bruce was weary and short his breath
With his soul bowed down by sin,
He told of his need to atone the death
Of his rival, ‘The Red’ John Comyn.

They’d come together at Greyfriar’s Kirk
And had fought, they’d both be king,
And there in front of the altar, Bruce
Had murdered his rival, Comyn.

‘So take my heart from my Scottish shores
To the Holy Land, to atone,
My heart will help you defeat the Moors
And my soul may then come home.’

The Black Douglas took on the task
And he went to fight the Moors,
But Alfonzo held his army back
And the Douglas fell from his horse.

They took his flesh and they boiled his bones
But they first embalmed his heart,
Then sent them back to his Scottish home
Though they somehow came apart.

The heart was found in the Douglas vault
In the ancient Kirk St. Bride,
But when they opened the old stone vault
His bones were not inside.

Perhaps they wander the Holy Land
In a search for the heart of Bruce,
He’d flung it at the advancing Moors
Before he fell off his horse.

But Melrose Abbey has Bruce’s heart
So his wanderings are in vain,
Though his soul will search ‘til his bones are found
For the sake of the Douglas name.

David Lewis Paget

I well remember the Hermit who
Lived up in the public park,
He never ventured out of his cave
Til the sky and the fields were dark.
He was, ‘…the only Neanderthal
That survived the coming of Man!
Don’t get too near or you’ll rouse his fear
And he’ll chop off both your hands!’

The cave was deep and mysterious,
It hadn’t been there for long,
The entrance had been uncovered by
The blast of a German bomb,
As kids we’d run in the daylight sun
Right up to the entrance there,
And scream ‘Hello!’ in a long echo
When the other kids would ‘Dare.’

Then deep within came a rumbling
Like an Ogre, clearing its throat,
In seconds then we were tumbling
And I tore my best blue coat.
Just once we saw him out of the cave
With a beard, down to his waist,
Shaking his fist and grumbling
So we screamed, took off in haste.

The years went by and I asked my Dad,
‘Just who was that Hermit guy?
The one that you used to scare us with
In the public park, near Rye.’
He pursed his lips and his face was grim
‘Aye, that was a tale, my son,
Back in the war, a soldier there
And a ****** great Ack-ack gun!’

The Germans used to come every night
And the guns would open up,
With searchlights all criss-crossing the sky
We’d get no sleep or sup,
The guns would go, ‘Ack-ack, Ack-ack,’
Which is how they got their name,
The Home Guard took it in turns to shoot
Each time that the bombers came.’

‘Well Martin Shaw was an older man
And he shot a Heinkel down,
He stood and watched as it burst in flames
Then dived, and hit the ground.
But then a Dornier dropped a bomb
And it hit beside the gun,
It blew a hole in a cave below
Surprising everyone.’

‘The gun fell into the cave below
And so did Martin Shaw,
We said, ‘That’s it, poor Martin’s gone,
We won’t see him no more!’
But he survived in the cave below
And refused to come on out,
So when they were trying to rescue him
They were looking up the spout.’

‘The first one trying to come in here
Is going to lose his head!’
Martin screamed at the rescuers,
‘Come in, and you’ll be dead!’
He fired a couple of Ack-ack shells
To underline his case,
So they all backed off, and went to tea
And left the gun in place.’

‘The years went by and he stayed in there
Long after the war was done,
They knew that he didn’t have any more
Shells, for the Ack-ack gun,
So he’d only walk abroad at night
Catch rabbits and steal his veg,
They said he suffered from shell-shock
And was pretty near to the edge.’

My father had almost had me there
‘Til I saw his sneaky grin,
‘You’ve had me on again,’ I said,
‘You really suckered me in!’
He laughed, ‘I haven’t the faintest who
He was, but just a loon,
But there, that’s something to tell your kids
On a Sunday afternoon.’

David Lewis Paget

The Chief of the General Staff awoke
To the ring of the telephone,
He’d tried to ****** a couple of hours
At his Hunting Lodge, in Scone,
But the red phone was insistent, it
Would ring ‘til he picked it up,
‘For God’s sake Carter, what’s it now?’
The answer was abrupt.

‘The Early Warning’s gone to red,
They need you down at Staff!
Hang on, I’m going to patch you through
We’re not sure if it’s naff.
It didn’t go through to orange as
It usually does at first,
But we can’t afford to take a chance…’
The General’s lips were pursed.

‘Scramble the FA-18’s
Are the carriers out, d’you know?’
‘There’s two in the Med and one caught dead
In the dock at Scapa Flow!
The Seventh Army’s at Aldershot
And the Fifth’s in the Middle East.’
‘Well, whether the troops are out or not
It’s Martial Law, at least.’

The Action Room in the basement of
A secret place in Poole,
Had interrupted a war game with
The Army Training School.
The radar screens were alight with scenes
Beamed in from the new AWAC’s,
With missiles coming from everywhere
‘We need to be hitting back!’

The submarines were alerted to
Prepare their missile racks,
The silo’s over in Kansas armed
And ready to attack,
Then suddenly in the Action Room
The radar screens were clear,
There wasn’t a single sign or trace
Of a missile coming near.

And down in a London Nursing Home
They were leading him away,
A nice old fellow with Parkinson’s
With a half-full breakfast tray,
They snapped the lid of his laptop
Told him, ‘George, you’re going to be canned!’
He said, ‘I just got the hang of it,
That game called ‘The High Command!’’

David Lewis Paget

There wasn’t much left of the woods out there
By the time that they built the town,
Only a dozen square miles or so
For the rest had been cut down,
They’d fenced it off for a sanctuary
For animals large and small,
So nobody knew the hollow tree,
They hadn’t been there at all.

But I would go, and I’d climb the fence
When nobody was around,
And run right into the undergrowth
To feel my feet on the ground,
I’d disappear within the trees
Just yards from the boundary fence,
The leaves were thick on the path I’d pick
Where the trees were not so dense.

The woods were a magical fairyland
Where the sun speckled through the leaves,
It painted patterns of light and sound
When the treetops waved in the breeze,
And rabbits scurried across my path
As birds would twitter above,
Warning the deer of an ancient fear
That man never showed them love.

But I was sped on the wings of life
Away from the brooding eaves,
Away from the factories of strife
On a carpet of Autumn leaves,
I must have travelled a mile and a half
When I lifted my eyes to see,
The central bole of a Red Gum hole,
In the heart of an ancient tree.

It must have been twenty feet across
And more than a hundred round,
It ruled the place in a state of grace
Stood proudly on hallowed ground,
I caught my breath at its majesty
And approached the tree in awe,
Then slowly entered the hollow trunk
Through an archway, set like a door.

My eyes grew used to the gloom in there
When a voice said, ‘Don’t you knock?’
And there was a girl in the corner sat
In a plain and simple frock.
Her hair was fair and was tied right back
And her cheek was pale to see,
Her needle poised on a piece of quilt
With some strange embroidery.

I stood and stared in a state of shock,
Unable to breathe a word,
For standing guard on her shoulder was
A black and stately bird,
It cocked its head and it looked at me
With a bright, unblinking eye,
‘Are you the one who will set me free?’
She asked, in a drawn out sigh.

The bird had opened its beak just then
And let out an evil caw,
It sat there in a threatening stance
As I backed away to the door.
‘How do I set you free,’ I said
‘I didn’t know you were here!’
‘I’ve been enslaved in this awful cave
For the best part of a year.’

‘I have to finish the magic quilt
And there’s just one thread to go,
They sentenced me for my sense of guilt
And the sapphire ring I stole.
I threw the ring in the crystal stream
That babbles over the ground,
The bird is waiting the ring’s return
And won’t leave ‘til it’s found.’

The stream was merely a chain away
With a shallow, rocky bed.
I went there, skimming the surface where
It lay, the girl had said,
I saw a glitter among the stones
Reached down, and plucked the ring,
Then made my way to the hollow tree
Where I heard her, muttering.

The bird flew off from her shoulder, and
It snatched the ring from me,
Gripped it tight in its blue-black beak
And it flew from tree to tree.
I turned my eyes to the place she’d been
But the walls and the floor were bare,
There wasn’t a sign of the magic quilt
And the girl, she wasn’t there.

The woods are a magical fairyland
Where the sun speckles through the leaves,
And paints its patterns of light and sound
When the treetops wave in the breeze,
Where nature casts a spell on the mind
Of the one who dares, like me,
To scale the fence, and seek to find
The bole of the hollow tree.

David Lewis Paget

The horseman rode up over the hill
Astride of his coal black steed,
His blood had dried on its withers, till
He may have been dead, indeed,
His battered buckler hung at his side
And his chain mail coat was rust,
He’d left so many behind who died
Of his comrades, turned to dust.

The scars crept over his forehead where
The enemy slashed at his helm,
He’d beaten off so many before
Their numbers had overwhelmed,
He’d planted pikemen deep in the ditch
As they thought they’d pulled him down,
A final ****** in their mortal dust
Saw them set, deep set in the ground.

And now, but one chased him down the hill
His sword raised clear to the sky,
He seemed determined to cleft his pate
Though one might question, ‘Why?’
The battle done on the battlefield
There had just remained these two,
As up there twirled a funnel of smoke
From a single chimney flue.

And out there burst from the cottage door
A woman who’d lain in wait,
For two long years she had hoped and prayed
He’d return to his estate,
He didn’t know about Fontainebleau
Who had offered up his hand,
And swore that when he returned from war
She would take the better man.

But now she stood with her father’s bow
And an arrow from his quiver,
Determined only to greet her man
And the other horseman, never!
They galloped down from the mountainside
In line with her shaking bow,
With him so suddenly unaware
Why the arrow, why the bow?

The second rider had gained the ground
He needed for his charge,
And swung his sword above and around
To clatter his helm, at large,
The rider fell from his forward horse
As his woman raised her bow,
And saw the arrow fly fleet and fast
To the eye of Fontainebleau.

David Lewis Paget

He’d been away with the army then
For almost twenty years,
And walking back to his village he
Had expected smiles and tears,
He thought his wife would be waiting there
Though his son, he knew, was grown,
He’d been away and protecting them
Though the soldier, now, was home.

He saw the village had barely changed
Though the people stood and stared,
He thought that they were in awe of him
Could it be the village cared?
They took in his battered breastplate and
The dents that marked his greaves,
The helmet that had been battered and
The blood on his chain-mail sleeves.

He’d walked for several miles since when
His horse had collapsed and died,
It weathered many a battle but
Fell foul of the countryside,
But soon he’d take off his armour when
He would meet again his bride,
And she would make him a pottage, and
Rejoice that he hadn’t died.

He’d tramped in the lands of Burgundy
He’d fought in the land of Gaul,
He’d taken the Cross to Saladin
And wept at the Wailing Wall.
His face bore scars from the sword and lance
And a mace had raked his back,
From a knight behind who had been struck blind
In a frontal, forced attack.

He’d waded deep in a sea of blood,
He’d trampled a field of bones,
And helped to bury his comrades there
Marking the place with stones,
But now his body was tired and worn
It was leave the field, or die,
His horse had brought him wandering home
To the village of Burton Rye.

His wife came out from the cottage door
And she blanched, and shook in fear,
‘I don’t know where you are coming from
But you don’t belong in here!’
He glanced at the short and thickened form
That he didn’t recognise,
‘Are you the wife I’ve been fighting for,
If so, my memory lies!’

‘You went away in another life
Leaving none to warm my bed,
I took a shine to the blacksmith here,
Fell in love with him, instead.
It’s twenty years since you went away
Did you think you could return?
You’ve lived the life of a soldier, all
You do, is pillage and burn.’

‘I had to go to protect you here,
Out there, it’s a world at war,
I’ve fought the enemy everywhere
To keep the pain from your door.
I loved you when you were slim and young
And your eyes were bright with cheer,’
His shoulders slumped and he turned away,
‘I see I’m not wanted here!’

David Lewis Paget

He slipped on a set of headphones,
Adjusted a dial or two,
Then introduced his radio show
And the members of his crew,
‘The Horror Tales of the Greats’ he read
Each week to the folk in town,
Just as the Moon was coming up
With the sun then truly down.

And the folk had huddled round speakers
To hear, in a thousand homes,
The tales of Edgar Allan Poe
In the speaker’s crackling tones,
And an eerie mist fell over the town
If they chanced to look outside,
As the ghosts of horror stories past
Rose up from the place they died.

Each tone was sent with a shiver
From the night’s Plutonian shore,
Just as that stately bird of old
Had repeated, ‘Nevermore!’
While the cats had yowled in the alleyways
When he read a tale of sin,
Of walling up the corpse of his wife
When the Black Cat did him in.

The Fall of the House of Usher,
The Masque of the Red Death,
The tales built up in the atmosphere
And made them short of breath,
The Cask of Amontillado,
The Pendulum and the Pit,
Whatever the horror, and most intense
There was always more of it.

The stars that shone in the evening sky
Had gone, though the sky was clear
As the Moon had dropped down, over a hill
While the airwaves dripped with fear,
And the walls back there, in the studio
Were seeming to seep a flood,
As the speaker droned in the microphone
The studio filled with blood.

And suddenly then, a different voice
Was heard all over the town,
Rattling through their radio’s
And shouting the reader down.
‘Shutter your windows and lock your doors
Put children under the bed,
Hide yourselves right under the stairs
Or you may well end up dead!’

‘The very air that you breathe has been
Long saturated with dread,
Has filled your lungs with the ripe unclean
That came from somebody’s head.
The ghostly voice on your radio
That has whispered blood and gore,
Will drown tonight in the studio
So there won’t be any more.’

And right behind that terrible voice
There was choking sounds and screams,
Enough to curdle the very blood
And to give them nightmare dreams,
Then after a long, chilled silence of
The type that terror sates,
A voice said, ‘that was the final of
The Horror Tales of the Greats.’

David Lewis Paget

There’s not much of anything I can recall
From the time that we lived in the lane,
Only the puddles of rainwater eddying
With the wind’s gusting refrain.
Pamela knew, she was older than me
So absorbed all the essence of fear,
And many a time when she’d panic and whine
I would cry out ‘There’s nobody here!’

The trees were too tall and they ruled overall
By keeping the house in their shade,
The garden was cold and the rocks would grow mould
From the damp, in the part that I played.
The wind would come sniffing around from the trees
And shiver the hairs on my spine,
And then in a wheeze like a voice in the breeze,
‘You shouldn’t be here, this is mine!’

Our parents were never around it would seem,
Our time was spent mostly alone,
It’s true that I grew to be sensitive, too,
To the visions and sounds of my own.
But Pamela, she became crazy with fear
At every strange creak in that house,
So then when she’d scream, I’d say, ‘It’s a dream,’
And place a cloth over her mouth.

The house was three storeys, we never went up
To check out the topmost floor,
They said it was storage, and not ours to forage
So kept a stout lock on the door,
But Pamela said she heard noises above,
Like somebody padding around,
It couldn’t have been, or they would have been seen
Between the third floor and the ground.

But out from the garden I’d often look up
To stare at the sole window pane,
The one that was muddy, or could it be ******,
The colour was almost the same.
It was strange they insisted the stairway was locked
Could there be a grim secret to hide,
The darkest of murders, hidden away
And the storeroom above? Well, they lied!

Then Pamela said that she saw someone,
A shadow that fell on the pane,
Strange that the mud had continued in place
In spite of the seasonal rain.
Muddy or ******, it wouldn’t wash off
Though I stared and I stared, and I smiled,
The indistinct face that I saw staring back
Was the face of an evil child.

They say that the rest was over to me
Though I’ll never recall if it’s true,
It’s funny the things that you do in life
That you never thought you could do.
Pamela said I was quite the brat
But then Pamela’s such a liar,
All I recall is the face of a child
As the flames in the window grew higher.

David Lewis Paget

The house had an evil aspect as
It hung out over the street,
Casting a permanent shadow there
Where the market stalls would meet,
The first floor was half-timbered, with
The ground floor made of stone,
The windows were made of pebble glass
And the window frames of bone.

No one had lived in the house for years
Til the Robinson’s moved in,
A couple, straight from the wedding church
Where they’d cleansed themselves from sin,
They’d listened to all of the rumours that
The house had its share of ghosts,
But the cheapness of the peppercorn rent
Had influenced them most.

The house was built where a charnel house
Had stood in the days of plague,
Where later a debtors’ prison stood
Though its history was vague,
They said there had been a gallows there
With a trapdoor through the floor,
And the arm of the ancient gallows now
Was the lintel of a door.

But the Robinson’s had sailed right in
With a mop and a whisking broom,
‘In no time, it’ll be **** and span,’
Said Sally, within the gloom,
While Brad had opened the shutters then
To let all the light stream in,
‘We’ll flush the ghosts from their waiting posts
With a broom and a pound of Vim!’

They dusted down the old furniture
Left sitting since George the Fourth,
And turned the old oak table round
So the end was facing north,
‘But still there’s a dampness in the air,
And a tension that feels grim,’
Sally said, as they lay in bed,
And she clung, so close to him.

‘Are you sure that they can’t get in,’ she said
‘Now we’ve flushed them out in the street?’
But Brad was trying to understand
Why the bed was cold at his feet.
‘Why are the sheets so damp,’ he said,
‘And they’re cold, as cold as sin,’
Sally was shivering, fit to burst
Though the sun came streaming in.

They sat at the old oak table with
Their bowls of soup, home-made,
And Sally reached out to hold his hand
But he started back, dismayed,
The soup was thick in the serving bowl
It was still three-quarters full,
When a swirl in the murky liquid then
Revealed a grinning skull.

Sally shrieked, but she couldn’t speak
And Brad had held his breath,
‘We’ve got to get out of this house today,
We’re surrounded here by death.’
The shutters slammed on the windows and
The doors flew shut on their own,
And barring the pebble windows were
The frames that were made of bone.

The people out in the market heard
The screams at an early hour,
Looked knowingly at each other, said,
‘They have them in their power!’
And Brad was hung from the lintel when
They finally broke inside,
While Sally was dead by a grinning skull
In the dress of a new-wed bride.

David Lewis Paget

We lived in a house a cleric built
In fifteen sixty-three,
Deep in a copse of Roman Elms
A grand and mighty tree,
The place was Tudor, half timbered,
And it creaked in every storm,
The wind was rattling through the eaves
Before we both were born.

We saw it up in the window of
The Realtor, going cheap,
It needed some TLC because
Its look would make you weep,
It badly needed a paint job and
Some timbers plugged with tar,
The years of rot had disfigured it,
‘Are you interested?’ ‘We are!’

Dead leaves had cluttered the downstairs rooms
And damp had swelled the floor,
The leadlight windows were dark with gloom
There were rats down in the store,
We worked and slaved on it, Jill and I,
Till it soon became a home,
Nestling in a hollow that
The locals called a combe.

I’d lie awake in the poster bed
That had been since Cromwell’s day,
The beams and curtains were overhead
And the wind would make them sway,
While Jill slept soundly, I still could hear
The wind sough through the trees,
Come rattling up to the shutters and
Slip gently past the eaves.

But then some nights, I’d hear some muttering
Down there by the elms,
Like ghosts of soldiers, loud and stuttering
Underneath their helms,
And then I’d hear the sound of marching
To a Roman beat,
There wasn’t even a pavement but
It sounded like a street.

A street that clattered with cobblestones
To the sound of chariot wheels,
I’d stare on out from the window-sill
To see what night reveals,
But nothing moved in the shady wood
To make those strangest sounds,
I searched and searched in the daylight, through
Those ancient wooded grounds.

Then one day digging a garden patch
I came across a stone,
That held a funny inscription on
The face, that smacked of Rome,
I think it mentioned a Lucius
From Legion Twenty-Nine,
I pried it out of the ground and then
I knew what I would find.

He lay there still in his breastplate
With his helmet and his sword,
His sandals still on his feet and tied
On tight, with a rotted cord,
The skull stared up at me in dismay
As if to say, ‘Who’s there?
You’ve broken into my endless sleep,
Invaded my despair.’

I swiftly covered him over so
That Jill would never see,
A sight to give her the nightmares that
I knew would come to me,
But then I settled his stone upright
That he might rest in bliss,
And that was the end of the mutterings,
From that day until this.

David Lewis Paget

I’d read of the yacht that was lost at sea,
Among the Antarctic ice,
I never thought it would matter to me
Though its ending wasn’t so nice,
There were three on board, and two had died,
But one must have got away,
For I found the log of its final days
In a second-hand shop in the Bay.

It was badly damaged with damp and rot,
And some of the ink had run,
Some pages stuck so I couldn’t read
The writing on every one.
But the hairs rose up on the back of my neck
To read what there was to see,
For a tale of human failings were what
Became so apparent to me.

They’d gone in search of the southern whales,
John Stanley, Evan and Eve,
Though why they went at that time of year
I find it hard to conceive,
For the winter’s cruel in those Southern climes
And the sails ice up with the spray,
‘It’s hell when there’s no-one to keep you warm,’
John Stanley wrote on the day.

For Evan and Eve kept each other warm,
While John made do with a quilt,
He wrote that Eve kept looking his way,
Could that be a sign of his guilt?
He waited till Evan had gone topside
Then made his advance to Eve,
But she just pushed him away, and then,
He wrote, ‘I caught at her sleeve.’

‘She fell, and crashed to the galley floor,
And split her head on the sink,
The wound on her scalp was red and raw,
I needed a moment to think.
I lifted her into an easy chair
And wiped the blood from her brow,
Then Evan came tumbling down the stair,
‘What have you done to her now?’

The following entry was smeared with blood,
I couldn’t read what it said,
I only know when he wrote again
That Evan must have been dead.
‘I lifted him over the starboard rail
And slipped him into the sea,
His body had left a bloodied trail
But that had left Eve and me.’

‘She came around on the second day,
But only could sit and stare,
So I lifted her into the lower bunk,
I needed her warmth in there.
A look of horror had crossed her face
When I crawled under the quilt,
And held her tight on that second night,
I can’t explain how it felt.’

The next few pages were in a lump
I couldn’t tear them apart,
But then a page was written in rage,
‘I’d given the girl my heart.
But though she still couldn’t speak to me
She lay on the bunk and spat,
I told her that Evan had gone, so she
Had better get over that.’

The ink had run on the following page
In water that looked like tears,
So he must have felt her rejection while
She lay, gave way to her fears.
The entry he wrote on the seventh day,
‘I held her close, and she sighed,
I thought my love had begun to move her,
When I awoke, she’d died.’

‘I held her close on the seventh night
But she had become so cold,
I tried to give her my body heat
As the yacht in the ocean rolled,
I couldn’t slip her over the side
To do what I’d done before,
She needed a christian burial so
I’d take her back to the shore.’

The next few pages were merely rant
Bemoaning the love he’d lost,
But never a mention of Evan there,
Who’d paid the ultimate cost.
The sun came out on the fifteenth day
And the cabin became so warm,
Where Eve had lain in her rotting flesh
‘The worms came out in a swarm.’

‘I couldn’t believe the smell down there,
Her body was falling apart,
I should have buried her when I could,
I just didn’t have the heart.’
The yacht was locked in Antarctic ice
When the ice breaker came through,
And took both John and the Ice Log off,
So now I can read it to you.

But Eve lies still on the ice bound yacht
A skeleton now, but free,
Her soul in search of Evan, her love,
They’ll meet down deep in the sea.
While John still roams abroad on the earth
And carries his personal hell,
To mourn the love that he found and lost
Among the Antarctic swell.

David Lewis Paget

When Kelvin threatened to cut my throat
I thought him a little stressed,
We’d known each other for twenty years
The first ten were the best,
But I was married to Jill back then
Way back before the divorce,
Then Kelvin lunged, and married her when
Our marriage had run its course.

He seemed to think I was jealous then,
He thought he had hurt my pride,
I thought that our friendship might be saved
Despite his second-hand bride,
‘Why would I want her back,’ I said,
Hoping to reassure,
But he obsessed and was quite distressed
Each time I came to his door.

‘Keep well away from my wife,’ he said,
As if I’d not had enough,
‘What do you think a divorce is, Kel?
I’m finished with all that stuff.’
‘You had your time, you should keep away,
I know that you want her still…’
‘As much as I’d want a hole in the head,
You have to believe me, Kel.’

But he just circled the wagons round
Trying to keep her from me,
I’d been quite happy to put her down
Then live my life and be free,
He’d never heard the old saw that said
That to make her yours, let her go,
If she comes back home, then she’s yours my friend,
But if not, she wasn’t you know.

I saw Jill out in the supermart
And her face was lined and drawn,
I tried to hide by the Brussel Sprouts
But she caught me up by the lawn.
She seemed determined to seek me out,
To see if I looked like hell,
Was disappointed when I looked round
And said I was doing well.

‘I’m not,’ she said, and a tiny tear
Appeared, to roll down her cheek,
‘He never leaves me alone, I fear,
I’ve been locked in for a week.’
I waved my hand, tried to get away
‘Your life is not my concern,’
Then she clung onto my arm and cried,
‘I don’t know which way to turn!’

And that’s when Kelvin himself appeared
And threatened to cut my throat,
It looked as if I had interfered
‘And that,’ I said, ‘is a joke!’
But Jill still clung to my arm beside
The beans, and packets of stew,
‘I wish we hadn’t divorced,’ she said,
‘It was so much better with you.’

You’d think a friendship of twenty years
Could overcome such a jest,
But Kelvin suddenly burst in tears
And beat a riff on my chest.
I’ll soon get over the broken ribs
And the eye, with a lump of steak,
But Kel’s still married to Jill, thank god,
That’s the icing on the cake.

David Lewis Paget

I’ve been looking in the mirror
Every day since I was three,
Till a week ago I looked again
And saw it wasn’t me.
For this haggard face with wrinkles
And grey hair that should be black,
Took my place within the mirror,
And it stood there, staring back.

Sure, it registered surprise and seemed
To stare, and be in shock,
And behind me in the mirror stood
Our old grandfather clock,
It was ticking off the moments,
All that I had left of life,
So in case it was an omen, then
I thought I’d call the wife.

‘Can you see that ancient visage
In the glass, Penelope?
It’s supposed to be my image
But I think it isn’t me,’
And Penelope had stood and stared
Then shook her greying hair,
‘Yes, that scar was on your left cheek, dear,
But now it isn’t there.’

I was staring at the visage and
It gave me quite a fright,
For that scar upon my left cheek now
Showed firmly on the right.
And the parting in my hair was not
Just where it used to be,
For most everything was back to front,
So who the hell was he?

‘There’s a demon in the mirror,’
I exclaimed, ‘it has my mole,
And it’s come here from the devil just
To claim my mortal soul,’
So I seized a ball pein hammer and
Attacked the mirror glass,
Till it shattered into tiny shards,
That’s seven years, alas!

We’ve not allowed a mirror in
The house, from then to now,
We won’t invite a demon in,
We’ll keep him out, somehow.
We know we both are ageing, but
We’re not as bad as that,
Penelope will paint her face,
While I just wear a hat.

David Lewis Paget

The day the devil came down to earth
And lodged in Katrina’s heart,
It took me suddenly by surprise
When she shot his poisoned dart,
I’d known he was out to get me since
I’d got wised up to his tricks,
But I didn’t think that he’d use my girl
To blow my world to bits.

She’d always been such a loving girl
With her pure and slothful eyes,
I didn’t know that behind that smile
Was a cesspool full of lies,
He’d burrowed deep in her afterglow
And had twisted her inside,
I didn’t know it was him not her,
For her purity had died.

The day she opened her mouth I saw
That her tongue was hard and black,
The words she uttered were never hers
But a blatant, harsh attack,
I sat there stunned for a moment with
My face as white as a sheet,
‘Where on earth is that coming from,’
I said to her, ‘my sweet?’

She said that she’d never loved me and
That love was just a crock,
She felt that she was above me, well,
I stared at her in shock,
She said she’d lain with another man
On just the night before,
I’d thought that I was a lover, but
She said he was so much more.

She pressed all my tender buttons and
She made me feel quite sick,
She knew how to disarray me and
Her poison acted quick,
I asked her if I had done something
To spawn this stream of stuff,
She said that I didn’t need to,
Being me was quite enough.

I said that I’d better leave then, if
That’s all that I meant to her,
She called me a craven coward, and
A crawling, slinking cur,
Her tongue rolled back and it blocked her throat
She began to gasp and choke,
So I reached inside and I grabbed her tongue
As she screamed in a long, high note.

The tongue came out like an evil snake
It was long, and black as ink,
It came away in my hand and left
A small one, that was pink,
It wriggled over the floor and I
Then stamped it into a pulp,
While Katrina drew a massive breath,
All she could do was gulp.

She couldn’t remember a thing she’d said
So I said, it’s up to us,
Whatever it was, that blackened tongue
Was the devil’s incubus,
She cried and said that she loved me
It would be just as it was before,
But I look out for that incubus,
A seed from the devil’s spore.

David Lewis Paget

The wind blew out and the sea rolled in
By the cliffs and the curving beach,
A lonely stretch, they were kith and kin
And had never heard human speech,
A cottage grew by the shore one day
There were figures of surly men,
The sea had muttered, ‘They’re in my bay,’
And the wind replied, ‘Amen!’

The men had left but the cottage stayed
Like a wound to the ocean’s pride,
It split the wind at the valley floor
As it passed there, either side,
The sea said ‘blow it away my friend,
For it grieves my heart to see,
The works of man where I lap the sand,’
And the wind said, ‘Leave it to me!’

It soughed and soared at the eventime
And it scored with sand from the beach,
It struggled to topple the chimney pots
As it surged at one and each,
It lost its puff as the sun came up
When the tide was on the ebb,
‘I couldn’t move it a jot,’ it sighed,
‘And the roof, it felt like lead.’

‘We’ll wait for the winter tides,’ my friend,
‘I’ll surge and wash it away,
I’ll undermine its foundations, then
I’ll sweep it out in the bay.’
But then a flickering candle lit
From a window, facing the shore,
‘There’s something a-move, for a shadow flit
Last night through the cottage door!’

The sea had grumbled, ‘We’ll wait and see
What lingers there in the light,’
The wind peered in at the window pane
And sighed at the wondrous sight,
‘A creature there with its golden hair
And its eyes, a deep sea blue,
That set me quivering in their stare,
So what will they do to you?’

The morning saw at the cottage door
A woman all dressed in white,
She wandered along the empty shore
And the sea had gulped, ‘You’re right!’
He lapped his waters around her feet
As she waded in for a swim,
And said to the wind, ‘She’s warm and sweet,
And it’s sad, but you can’t come in!’

Back on the beach, a gentle breeze
Had whispered the woman dry,
Then flitted, scurrying out to sea,
‘You’ve changed your tune, but why?’
‘I think we needed that cottage there,
In reflection, let it stand.’
The wind just capered along the shore
As the door of the cottage slammed.

David Lewis Paget

‘Cata, pick up the children, then
We’ll all away to the woods,
They say there’s a mighty army come
To steal our homes and goods,
They’re capturing slaves along the way
So we need to be aware,
These men of steel with their breastplates on
Take children with fair hair.’

Sca had looked at his wife, she had
The hair of ripened corn,
And so had both of their children from
The day that they were born,
But he was dark, from the Iceni
And his face was painted blue,
He’d come from the beach they’d landed on
Where the blood was mixed with dew.

‘I’ve never seen quite so many ships
They’re standing off in the bay,
And way on out, the horizon seems
To be filled with ships today,
They’re crushing all that’s before them,
Our chiefs are down on their knees,
They know we can’t over-awe them
With our spears and charioteers.’

‘This army’s bringing its mighty gods
And they have this one called Mars,
He rules, they say, each clashing of arms
From way up there in the stars,
Their shields are linked in a solid wall
That we can’t get through to fight,
They’ll rule us now as they rule the Gaul
So we must be gone tonight.’

They made their way to a hermit’s cave
And they found some shelter there,
But the Legion came and they took his wife
For the sake of her golden hair,
His children too, were taken away
From the land of their loving home,
And the people gasped in the marketplace
When the two were sold, in Rome.

While he fled back to the Iceni
And he waged guerrilla war,
Served in the army of Boadicea
Once she had come to the fore.
She stood, six foot and her tumbling hair
Was red, right down to her waist,
‘A terrible sight,’ the Romans said
As she laid their cities waste.

They’d stolen all of her lands and laid
The lash across her back,
They’d ***** both of her daughters,
They were fond of doing that,
They didn’t know that the Iceni
As a tribe were more than bold,
Or of the terrible price they’d pay
When they cast her out in the cold.

She wiped out Camulodunum,
And slaughtered the Romans there,
Went on to sack Londinium,
This woman with flame red hair,
She burnt the city down to the ground
While the population fled,
The only people that stayed in town
Were lying in heaps, the dead!

They slew the Hispana Legion
That had marched down from the north,
Went on to Verulamium
And carried a flaming torch,
The Romans there were slaughtered,
The city razed to the ground,
But not before the warrior Sca
Had saved the wife he found.

She’d been enslaved in a Roman house
Had disappeared for years,
And when he pulled her out of the flames
She couldn’t see him for tears,
So they fled to the northern borders where
The Romans held no sway,
And their blond haired, blue-eyed offspring,
They still live there today.

David Lewis Paget

Caroline called from the balcony
To join her and check out the bay,
‘You wouldn’t believe, there’s a barquentine,
You never see them today.’
I looked and I scanned the horizon there
But all I could see was the pier,
There wasn’t a sign of a barquentine
And all the horizon was clear.

‘I can see nothing,’ I told her then,
‘The sea is as calm as a pond,’
‘I’ll give you a hint, just make your eyes squint,
Then look to the pier and beyond.’
And suddenly there was a shadow shape,
That looked like a barquentine,
But out where it lay, it was old and grey,
And something about it obscene.

‘It makes me uneasy,’ I said to her,
‘There’s something transparent and cold,’
‘I think it’s romantic,’ was her reply,
‘It must be two hundred years old.’
It gave me the shivers, I went inside,
As rain pelted in at our door,
Though Caroline wouldn’t come in, but sighed,
And stayed where she’d stood before.

That night I woke up in the early hours
To find she had gone from our bed,
I followed her footsteps down to the pier
And saw her just walking ahead.
But Caroline wasn’t alone out there
She walked with a man I could see,
And holding his hand, she kissed him, and,
Was as transparent as he.

Then back in the cottage I found her there,
All restless, and tumbled in bed,
She suddenly woke, and gasped as she spoke,
‘I’ve had a strange dream in my head.
I’d been making love in that barquentine
To someone that I never knew,
He said we should go, but I told him ‘No’,
And then I came looking for you.'

We got up at dawn as the sun came up,
Walked out to the balcony,
We squinted our eyes, but to our surprise,
All we could see was the sea.
There wasn’t a sign of that barquentine
But only an empty pier,
And Caroline sighed, stood at my side,
‘Some things are much more than queer.’

David Lewis Paget

They’d all set off for an island, that
Was fifty miles off the coast,
They were only going to stay a day
And a night, or two at most,
There were seven men and a woman there
On a twenty metre yacht,
The sea was calm and the breeze was light
And the day was rather hot.

‘What do you think we’ll find out there,’
Said the salesman, Alan Brown,
‘Whatever it is,’ the lawyer said,
‘It’s away from the **** of town.’
‘We’ll probably find ourselves again,’
Said the Judge, Lord  Allenby,
‘In a part of the world still pure, unspoiled
Like the way that we used to be.’

‘We may even find the Godhead,’ said
The Reverend Michael Shaw,
‘He hasn’t been seen around for years
And that’s what I’m looking for.’
‘I doubt if you’ll find him way out here,’
Said Franks, the Physicist,
‘Modern Science has followed his tracks
And proved, he doesn’t exist.’

‘Maybe we’ll find the remains of men,’
Said the archaeologist,
‘An ancient settlement, tumbled down
And pottery shards, to list!’
‘To me, you sound like a crazy lot,’
Said the butcher, Roger Dunn,
‘I just want to score a wild boar
So I brought along a gun.’

They’d sailed right into an island cove
When Mary Martin spoke,
Her eyes were dark and her hair was black
And she wore a scarlet cloak,
‘You’ll not find anything that you seek
But the runes of Druid lore,
For this is the ancient gods retreat
As you’ll find, when you explore.’

They rowed ashore in the dinghy
Pulled the boat high up on the sand,
Then each went off in his different way
To search for the inner man,
The Judge walked up to the highest cliff
To regret his judgement seat,
And as he fell to the rocks below
Knew all that he’d sown, he’d reaped.

The lawyer walked through the undergrowth
And fought his way through the vines,
The briars tore at his face and clothes
As he’d fought each case with lies,
He cried for help from the others as
The vines wrapped round his throat,
But couldn’t utter a plea for himself
As he fell to the ground, and choked.

The archaeologist had found
The ruins of ancient walls,
And thought of the riches taken back
He’d stolen from Mayan Halls,
He’d just unearthed a fabulous vase
Encrusted with amethysts,
When a wall collapsed, a future task
For some archaeologist.

A shot rang out, and it echoed then
The length of the island shore,
The Physicist dashed around the point
Expecting to see a boar.
But the butcher stood with his jaw agape
By the mouth of a cave, due south,
For the salesman bore lay dead on the floor
So he put the gun to his mouth.

Franks threw up as the butcher died
But walked right up to the cave,
He peered in as a rumble grew,
A voice dredged up from the grave,
‘You don’t believe in a god that’s real
You’re wrong, there’s more than a few,’
The ground then opened and swallowed him up,
‘Your science has done for you!’

The Reverend Michael Shaw was there
When the ground closed up again,
Crossed himself as he ran away
And he prayed and said, ‘Amen!
He pushed the dinghy down from the beach
And he rowed straight back to the yacht,
‘Preserve me Lord, from a fate like that,
If that’s God, I know him not!’

When Mary Martin got to the cave
It was late, was near on dusk,
She placed wild flowers there at the mouth
With a scent that smelled like musk,
‘I come in peace, I’m a nature’s child,
Though I’ve come from a world of sin.’
The voice then whispered, deep in the cave
‘For your grace, just come right in.’

David Lewis Paget

The passengers from the ‘Bold Dundee’
Were sick as they crawled ashore,
Tossed about in an angry sea
By the God that they knew as Thor.
He’d beat his hammer along their hull,
He’d roared as the thunder clapped,
And ripped the sails from the forward stays
As the sheets and the masts collapsed.

The tide had hidden the rocks from view,
A mist had obscured the shore,
The captain thought he was sailing free
As he’d always done before.
But the ocean swell in its mystery
Hid atolls of murk and myth,
That never appeared on a sailor’s chart
Where the Gods of old still lived.

The ship had shuddered and holed the bow,
Rode up, and sank at the stern,
The swell burst over the after deck
Drowning the crew in turn.
The passengers on the steerage deck
Were swept clean over the side,
Onto the rocks of a thousand wrecks,
But only a few survived.

By dawn that few had struggled ashore,
But the rest of them were dead,
Were floating out on the turn of tide
To rest on the deep seabed,
But Robert Young and his wife Jeanine
Were cast right up on the land,
And so was Emily Wintergreen
And the lad called Adam Shand.

They woke to an alien sunrise,
In a strange, pale purple mist,
And a sound came down from the mountainside
From a thousand years of myth.
A pale white horse bore a surly man
Who was ten feet tall to his head,
And roared, ‘Now bow before Woden, or
By Odin, you will be dead!’

Then striding noisily through the trees
That grew right down to the shore,
Came a giant man, a hammer in hand
Who roared, ‘You can call me Thor!
What brings you here to our hideaway,
To disturb our God’s redoubt?
We left you, hundreds of years away,
Yet now, you seek us out.’

Each one of them bowed, and touched the sand,
‘We don’t know why we’re here.
We didn’t plan it,’ said Adam Shand,
‘It wasn’t our idea.’
‘You turned away from us,’ Woden roared,
‘Sought other gods to please,
Once you were praying to us for help,
Would beg of us, on your knees.’

‘I swear we’ve never forgotten you,
You’re with us, all of our days,
For Woden, you are our Wednesday now,
And that is eternal praise.
While Thor is our every Thursday,
Every week that he comes around,
And Tiw, well he’s become Tuesday
So you’re lost, but you are found.’

The Gods stood back, and then conferred,
‘We’re going to let you go,
But only because you honour us
With your calendar, if that’s so.’
A longboat, free from the wreck came in
And the four of them climbed aboard,
Then waved goodbye to the Isle of Gods,
But at sea, they thanked the Lord!

David Lewis Paget

I woke in the early hours to find
My head between her thighs,
She hadn’t been there before, I swear
And I’m not a man who lies.
I’d seen her out in the Public Bar
Of the ‘Jacaranda Tree’,
Halfway along the Outback Track
On the way to Wendouree.

I’d seen her dance on the table tops
I’d seen her prance on the bar,
I’d said to Lance as I saw him glance
‘I don’t know where we are!’
He shrugged, to say that he didn’t care
As long as she danced that way,
Her stockings, down at her ankles and
Her skirt in disarray.

‘Now there is a ***** to turn your head,’
Said Lance, with a burst of pride,
He’d been out on the verandah, then
He’d turned to go back inside,
She’d joined him there for a moment,
Just brushed by for a quick connect,
But he hadn’t noticed her eyebrow raised
In a sign that said, ‘Reject!’

We both had our eighteen wheelers parked
Outside in the hotel grounds,
I was headed away up north
And he to the lights of town,
He offered to give her the sleeper cab
While he drove the star-filled night,
I looked away and I thought it sad,
But the trucks both looked alike.

I heard him leave at the midnight hour
And thought she was gone for good,
It wasn’t often I hauled this way
Or stayed in this neighbourhood.
But then I clambered into my bunk
Above, at the cabin’s rear,
And fell asleep like a hopeless drunk
Till the morning sun drew near.

I made an offer to buy that pub,
The ‘Jacaranda Tree’,
But only when she agreed to stay
And dance on the bar for me,
I asked if she’d meant to go with Lance
And she looked at me with scorn,
I sleep the sleep of a new romance
And the pillows keep me warm.

David Lewis Paget

She kept the jar on the mantelpiece,
Our Grandma, Eleanor Flood,
A plain ceramic with just one flaw
A cross that was scrawled in blood.
We didn’t know what she kept in there,
We’d ask, but she’d never tell,
She merely said if we opened it
Our souls would go straight to hell.

It sat forever above the hearth
And stared at us as we ate,
My sister said it was filled with earth
Scraped up from somebody’s grate.
I thought it might hold a pile of coins
Of Spanish Dollars and gold,
I’d read so much about gold doubloons
In pirate stories of old.

But Grandma Eleanor pursed her lips
Each time that we asked her why,
We couldn’t look and we couldn’t touch,
She’d sit, and stare at the sky.
‘You vex me, child,’ she would often say,
‘You’d tempt the devil to tire,
Your parents left me to care for you,
The day they died in the fire.’

She used that story to shut us up,
She knew to pile on the guilt,
She made us pay for each bite and sup
By shaming us to the hilt.
She made it seem like a deadly chore
To have to cater for us,
‘My life,’ she said, ‘should have been much more,
Not that I like to fuss.’

We’d often ask about Grandpa Joe,
Ask what had happened to him?
Her eyes would turn to a fiery glow,
‘He died in a state of sin.’
She wouldn’t tell us what he had done,
What got her into a state,
We looked for signs that she’d loved him once,
But all that we saw was hate.

The house was heated from down below
A furnace under the floor,
I’d have to feed it with coal and coke
I’d bring from the coal house store.
She’d make me empty the pale grey ash
And scatter it on the stones,
Out in the garden, by the trash,
And next to a heap of bones.

She said that Grandpa had kept a dog,
And fed it on butchers bones,
Then threw them out by the fallen log
And next to the pathway stones.
My sister said they were burned and black
And like they’d been in a fire,
We wouldn’t have dared to answer back
Or call our Grandma a liar.

One day, while dusting the mantelpiece
The jar had crashed, and it burst,
The sound of shattering porcelain
Drowned out our Grandmother’s curse.
For spilling out of the broken jar
Was a pile of ash in the light,
And sitting there was a skull as well,
Along with the ash, bleached white.

Then Grandma let out a weird wail
And fell, to kneel on the floor,
She stared, and the skull was staring back
To tear at her cold heart’s core.
‘Why have you come to haunt and stare,’
She cried, then toppled and fell,
Down on her face as her heart gave out,
Sending her soul to hell.

Two jars now sit on the mantelpiece
Of Joe and Eleanor Flood,
A matching pair, and each with a cross
I carefully smeared with blood.
I shovelled her through the furnace door
And later, raked out the ash,
While now there’s a growing pile of bones
In the garden, next to the trash.

David Lewis Paget

The Judge came into the village with
A troop of the finest horse,
The sunshine gleamed on their breastplates
And their guns and their swords, of course,
He wasn’t there to be friendly, but
To make the rebels aware,
And carried the King’s own warrant to
Set up his courthouse there.

The troop took over the Mason’s Hall
The Judge took over the church,
And set up a bench down in the nave
As the troops set out to search,
They looked for the signs of weaponry
In the homes of the poorest men,
Tearing apart the hovels in
The search for the rebels, then.

To root out the roughshod army that
Had marched to defy the king,
Who tore up the standard prayer book
That the king was offering,
They forced the priests to reverse the mass
To the way it was done before,
Laying a siege to Exeter
In the way of a civil war.

Now the troops rode into the villages
And they held the men in chains,
Sworn to see that they paid in blood
For their temper, and their pains,
The women were wailing in the streets
As their men were taken in,
To answer to a black-hooded Judge
For their crimes against the King.

There wasn’t a gallows large enough
For the men that he meant to hang,
But plenty of trees around the leas
That the cattle grazed upon,
And plenty of boughs and branches that
Would groan with the weight of men,
Whose only fault was this one revolt
When their faith was changed again.

They hung like fruit from the saplings,
They choked their lives from a limb,
They swung on ropes from the mighty oaks
In an **** of suffering,
The farms lay waste in the country,
The crops lay waste in the fields,
There wasn’t an army of labourers
Just troops, with their swords and shields.

The Judge climbed into his black teak coach
Rode out of the village grounds,
While children wailed and the women paled
In cutting their husbands down.
The horror lay in the children’s genes
For generations, it’s said,
Till years along they would right the wrong
By taking a bad king’s head.

David Lewis Paget

The beach swept away in the distance,
The tide as far out as could be,
A couple were laughing and playing there,
She’d cuffed him, in fun, to a tree,
‘Now that isn’t fair, Isabella,’
He’d laughed, as she danced in the sand,
‘You’re going to be mine, Richard Andrew Devine
Or forever be tied to the land.’

She taunted and teased and annoyed him,
He said, ‘I just want to be free!’
She spun on the sand and she held out her hand
And she laughed as she dangled the key.
‘You can stay ‘til I hear your proposal,
It’s like squeezing out blood from a stone,
If you fail to propose, this relationship’s closed
And I’ll leave you out here on your own.’

‘We’ve talked about this, Isabella,
And you know it can’t possibly be,
I’m already wed, when you came to my bed…
For God’s sake, just throw me the key!’
‘You know that you’ve never been happy,
With her, or with all of her friends,
It’s time you got rid of the lot of them,
It’s time you were making amends.’

‘I said at the start, Isabella,
That a fling was the most it could be,’
A shadow passed over his worried brow
As he looked at the incoming sea.
‘That might have been in the beginning,
But you know it’s gone further than that,
I’m having your child, did you know, in a while
And I’ll not have you leaving me flat.’

The sweat had burst out on his fevered brow
As the water encroached on the sand,
‘Did you know we’re beneath the high water mark,
In an hour or so, I’ll be drowned!’
‘The choice becomes yours, you must get a divorce
Or I’ll just walk away and be free.
There’s no going back, I’m determined in that,
I’ll be walking away with the key.’

The sea was beginning to lap at his feet,
And she to retreat as it came,
Then suddenly she was beginning to sink
While crying that he was to blame.
In seconds she’d sunk in the sand to her waist
In terror she cried, ‘Rescue me!’
But he was restrained by a half inch of chain,
‘For God’s sake, just throw me the key!’

‘How do I know that you won’t walk away
And just leave me to sink in the sand?’
‘I wouldn’t do that, just throw me the key
Or we’ll both become part of the land!’
She’d sunk to her shoulders at this point in time
And she struggled to pull out her arm,
Then raised it on high and she let the key fly
As they both held their breath, in alarm.

‘I’ve told her I want a divorce,’ he cried,
As the key fell just short of his reach,
‘And I lost the baby a week ago,’
She cried, to her neck in the beach.
They stared at each other as she sank from sight
Then the water rose over his head,
As a little gold key, was swept by the sea
To a hand that was already dead.

David Lewis Paget

‘Why would I even look at you?’
She said, when I made my bid,
She must have been all of thirty four,
While I was just a kid.
‘I only have eyes for you,’ I said,
‘That’s just the way that it is,
I lie awake in my bed at night
And dream of just one kiss.’

Her hands had fluttered, waved me away,
She was flattered, nevertheless,
I knew, because the way that she turned
Flared out the hem of her dress,
Her legs were fine, and smooth and strong
With shape to her calves and thighs,
I stared at them, though I knew it wrong,
They were candy for my eyes.

‘You’re far too young for the likes of me,’
She said, a gleam in her eye,
‘You’re half my age, you’re seventeen
So I’ll have to say goodbye.’
‘I never think about age,’ I said,
‘I think about looks and grace,
And you have plenty of both,’ I said,
‘You have a beautiful face.’

She laughed then, showing her gleaming teeth
And the dimple in each cheek,
Her lips were crimson, egging me on
I could have stared at her for a week.
‘You do go on,’ were the words she said
But her cheeks began to flush,
While I was thinking of her in bed,
And that brought a sudden hush.

‘I really think you are serious,’
She said, as if in surprise,
‘Never more sure and certain,’ then
I caught the look in her eyes.
‘Maybe if you were twenty-one,
I might just give it a whirl,’
‘I’m old enough and I’m full of love,
To me, you’re only a girl.’

I reached on out and I held her hand,
The palm of her hand was wet,
I sensed that here was the promised land
I might be successful yet.
And then in a moment’s madness she
Had raised her face to my lips,
And heaven opened before me as
She gave me just one kiss.

David Lewis Paget

The winter fogs roll in from the Thames
While frost forms up on the eaves,
The damp will settle in aching bones,
While the trees are bereft of leaves;
The streets were stark in the old East End
A footfall echoed and died,
And nights when the homes were shuttered in
They listened to wheels outside.

A Landau, black as the devil’s sin
And drawn by a single horse,
Rolled slowly up to The Black Dog Inn
By the side of the watercourse,
When out there came from the ***** house
In black from her head to tail,
A dollymop with a nosegay,
Wearing a bonnet, black, with a veil.

She’d climb up into the Landau while
The coachman, clad in a cloak,
Would give one flick with the reins,
And pull on the bit ‘til the horse had choked,
He’d take them off with a clatter
Wheels a-rattle on cobblestones,
His eyes agleam like a demon
While he whipped the horse to the bone.

The horse’s hooves on the cobbles
Warned ahead through the fog and mist,
As people cowered in doorways
Shouted a curse as the Landau passed,
They followed the glow of the gaslamps
Shedding their weak and feeble light,
And raced by the mighty river
Into the dark of the endless night.

They came to a halt at Wapping
Down where the river cast its spawn,
The bodies of dead and drowned who’d
Cursed their mothers for being born,
And hung on poles at the river’s edge
Was another terrible sight,
The bodies of sailor mutineers
That swung in their chains at night.

Hung on the Tyburn gallows
Then cut down and shackled again,
The bodies were coated with tallow
For a post mortem hanging in chain,
They’d bind them up with a winding cloth
Then coat them again in tar,
Hang them in chains at the riverside
‘Til their dust blew near and far.

The woman climbed out of the Landau
Took one look, and fell to her knees,
Her lover hung gently swaying,
Swaying in time to the river breeze,
His eyes stared out from the candle wax
And his mouth was shaped in an ‘Oh!’
He seemed to be saying, ‘Goodbye, my love;
What a terrible way to go!’

She wept like a woman demented,
Seized his legs, and pulled to her breast,
Clung to his swinging figure
Moaned like a creature, quite obsessed,
She tried transferring her warmth to him
But his cold was the cold of death,
And his eyes stared straight ahead of him
No thoughts, no love, no breath!

She climbed back into the Landau
As the coachman whipped it away,
And often at night they hear it go,
Those folks down Wapping way,
They say it spattered a stream of blood
On the road as it raced on by,
From the dollymop who’d slashed her throat
And lay in the coach to die.

And when there’s a mighty river fog
In the winter, down by the Thames,
They sit in the Inn they call Black Dog
And they drink to the health of friends,
They drink to the ones who’ve gone before
As they hear the wheels outside,
And hold their breath at the emptiness
As the door is opened wide!

David Lewis Paget

‘There are times and tides in every life,
There are things we never planned,’
The old man said to his grandson there
As he took him by the hand,
‘It may come soon, or it may come late,
It may be the final fall,
But when it does you may find you’re left
With your back against the wall.’

The lad stood still on the rocky ledge
He was more than petrified,
For half the cliff had given way
In a sudden, great landslide,
The path that they had travelled on
Had plummeted into the bay,
There was no forward, and no way back
Where they stood on the cliff that day.

‘Do you think they’ll come to rescue us,
Do they even know we’re here?’
The lad had cried in the first aside
Of his terror, and his fear,
The old man looked at the darkening light
And the clouds foretold a storm,
‘I think that we’ll be stranded here
All night, till the early morn.’

The old man looked where the cliff above
Had an overhanging ridge,
There was no way to clamber up
From their place on the narrow ledge,
And straight below, two hundred feet
Was the churn of an angry sea,
‘I think we’ll have to be more than brave
My boy, just you and me.’

The night came on with a swirl of wind
The first from an evening squall,
While they sat down on the narrow ledge
Their backs to the old cliff wall,
The lad was cold and his face was pale
So his grandpa held him tight,
‘Just think of what you can tell your friends
Once back from this dreadful night.’

The rain that came was torrential,
They both were soaked to the skin,
He wrapped his coat all around the boy
But he felt him shivering,
‘This brings back memories from the war
I was sat in an LCT,
Waiting for it to come and land
And to set the beaches free.’

The lad perked up, said, ‘tell me more,
Did you find yourself afraid?’
‘We knew the odds, we had gone to war
And the mines, they all were laid,
We hit the beach and they dropped the door
I was waist deep in the sea,
Trying to make it into shore
But I lived, and so can we!’

The boy was shivering constantly,
He’d die before the morn,
The old man struggled him to his feet,
‘We have to get you warm!
We’re both stood here in our LCT
And we’re brave, our hearts are pumped…’
He turned and smiled at the lad, and then,
Holding hands, they jumped!

David Lewis Paget

The earth had not been breathing
For an hour when I woke,
So the thought that I’d be leaving
Any time, became a joke,
There was not that faintest rustle
That we think to call a breeze,
When the leaves all rub together with
The swaying of the trees,
And the water lay in stagnant pools
Across the dying ground,
Where there once had flowed a river but
Its stream could not be found.

There was silence where there once had been
The babble of a creek,
If the earth turned on its axis now
That day took half a week,
And where the tide had used to turn,
Advance upon the land,
Its waves had ceased to function
All it left was drying sand,
If that was not enough, its dearth
Reflected in the sky,
In clouds dark brown like bracken
That would crackle up on high.

These clouds of louring thunder merely
Muttered in their pain,
And sent the flash of lightning down
But dry, and without rain,
And nothing that was living stirred
Within my line of view,
Not even what I should have heard
And so, I turned to you.
For there across the counterpane
Your lustrous hair was spread,
And all my world became insane
To know that you were dead.

David Lewis Paget

She’d lived alone since her husband left
Just after the fall of Rome,
Deep in the forest she’d kept herself
In the tangle of trees called home.
He’d left with one of the Legions, they
Recalled to defend the State,
Leaving Britain with Roman roads
And her people, left to their fate.

Aeronwy came from a Druid clan
From a mixture of kings and gods,
She’d never age in the forest glade
Where she lived with her hunting dogs.
She lived on berries and lived on fruits
And the **** that the dogs brought in,
But knew she never must see herself
Reflected in any spring.

‘For if you do,’ said a holy man
‘You will see that the years are fraught,
Your spells and philtres won’t help you then,
You’ll lose what the ancients taught.
The years will tumble over your breast
In a wave, and take your breath,
As long as you live in this vale of trees
You will be immune to death.’

She wept for the loss of her husband then
For he never came back home,
She didn’t know he’d been taken off
With his Legion, back to Rome.
They’d met when a hunting party came
To slaughter her Druid clan,
But she was spared, for her beauty there
Would entrance most any man.

He’d stayed with her in the forest glade
For a month of making love,
She prayed that he’d never leave her, in
A plea to the gods above,
She little knew of the world out there
Of the waning Roman’s might,
And so she wallowed in bitter tears
In her loneliness, each night.

Her time was not as the time for us,
Her minute was like our day,
The years would fly in her restless nights
As she dreamed her life away.
But she woke as fresh and as beautiful
As she’d been the night before,
While scores of agues and deadly plagues
Swept on, in a world at war.

The forest began to shrink as men
Fed wood to their kilns and fires,
What once had been a forest became
A wood, in the sight of spires,
She heard the clang of hammers on steel
At the factories rise and rise,
And soon her trees were surrounded by
New roads, and telephone wires.

Then men came into her forest glade
While cutting a new canal,
She hid in the corner, in the shade
As her trees began to fall.
One day she woke and the cut was there
With a little ****-backed bridge,
She mounted slowly, up to the top
And balanced over the edge.

She gazed down into the water that
Was still as a mirror’s sheen,
And saw the face that began to race
Through the thousand years she’d seen.
Her hair flew wide, and before she died
She muttered a weary moan,
‘I’d be content if it only meant
That my husband came back home!’

David Lewis Paget

He stood at the back, and looked around
The church, not even full,
There wasn’t a face he recognised
From his far off days at school,
He thought of Jim in the coffin there
Who had reached his end of days,
Then hid his head and the tears he shed
As they sang a hymn of praise.

The congregation had filed on out
To attend a hurried wake,
‘I hope she finished the Lamingtons,’
Said the grandson, Edward Drake.
‘We’re lucky to have a wake at all
For they’ve been divorced for years,
I couldn’t believe she’d put it on
But she even cried real tears!’

He didn’t follow the mourners down
But turned away on his own,
He hadn’t anything much to say
To the strangers Jim had known,
He’d said goodbye to his only friend
To the last one that he had,
The rest had gone on ahead of him
And the thought of that was sad.

What do you do in an empty world
When the last of those you knew
Is lying under a grassy knoll,
Covered in morning dew?
When your wife has gone to an early grave
And your son has gone, too soon,
While a daughter’s taken in childbirth
Early one Sunday afternoon.

He walked and walked til the sun went down,
To the sound of an inner voice,
‘Why have you stayed around so long?’
‘My fate gave me little choice!’
His mind filled up with the sounds of them
Who had laughed and joked in the past,
They said, ‘We knew it would come to this,
But someone had to be last!’

He wandered out in his garden then,
So dark that he couldn’t see,
But every one of his friends was there
Hiding behind each tree,
They called and chaffed in the darkness that
Their time had been way back when,
‘We’re quite content with the lives we led,
Why don’t you join us, Ben?’

But Ben sits still in his empty house
While a candle gutters there,
He thinks he’ll go when the flame goes out
Sat in his easy chair,
He doesn’t think of the future now
For his life was lived in the past,
And his mind is filled with memories
Til the Lord takes him, at last.

David Lewis Paget

‘I always wanted to see your face,’ she said,
She was teasing me,
I’d gone along to our twentieth wake
Since we’d been divorced, and free.
We got on better than ever we had
When chained together in time,
That piece of paper had choked us both
But being apart, sublime!

I looked across at the massive cake
They had wheeled across the floor,
‘Now that’s what I call a giant bake,’
I said. She said, ‘There’s more!’
There were twenty candles around the top
And seven around the lip,
The twenty since we had been divorced
And seven for when we flipped.

The seven year itch was what it was
When we ended up in court,
We really should have got over it
But we’d given it little thought,
For the plumber lasted a month or two
She confessed, in one of her gripes,
For she got bored with him on the floor
Checking her taps and pipes.

And I got sick of the Dolly Bird
Who had lisped, she would be mine,
Who liked to strip to the Beatles hits
When her head was full of wine,
It all fell flat when the passion died
And we stopped to get our breath,
There was nothing she had to say inside
So she bored me half to death.

We came together just once a year
As a mark of our mistake,
And every year with the slightest tear
We would share a Parting Cake.
I’d never seen one as big as this
It was white, and frilled with lace,
And that’s when Jennifer said to me,
‘I wanted to see your face!’

The lid flipped up and the stripper rose
As I dropped my jaw, and gaped,
She stood a moment and struck a pose,
‘That’s my present for you, Jake!
It’s a bit too late to apologise
For making that awful scene,
But I think we’re older now, and wise,
And you get to lick off the cream!’

The girl was covered in cream all right
On her thighs and hips and breast,
‘You get to lick what you want tonight
And I’ll scrape off the rest.’
She laughed, I laughed, and I saw her then
As the face of one I’d missed,
There was little thought of the stripper then
As we both leaned in, and kissed.

David Lewis Paget

Paulette had phoned in a frenzy, she
Was having a crying fit,
I said, ‘I can’t understand you girl,
Slow down, slow down a bit!’
And then she told me that John was dead
That she’d found him lying there,
That somebody must have broken in
And crushed his skull with a chair.

‘The place is a perfect shambles, Rob,
It looks like a bomb has hit,
There’s blood all over the hearth, the hob,
And outside, over the grit,
He must have left by the patio door
There are footprints over the tiles,
I’ve never seen so much blood before…’
And then she sobbed for a while.

I made the appropriate noises, just
To comfort her in her loss,
But really, I couldn’t care at all,
I just couldn’t give a toss,
For John had jumped in my woman’s bed
The moment my back was turned,
I had to hide that I felt so glad
That all of his boats were burned.

‘I need you Rob, will you come on down,
I can’t do this on my own,’
Her words, the nectar of ancient gods
I felt that my wings had grown.
‘I’ll be there, honey, I won’t be long,
We’ll tidy it up just pat,
I just have something I have to do,
I’ll pop by the Laundromat.’

I tied the washing bag by the neck
To drag it out to the car,
But only got to the hallway when
There came a knock at the door,
A neighbour wanted to borrow a tool
So I rummaged round in the shed,
And when he went, I had to be gone,
Drove straight to my girl’s instead.

The police were crawling all over the place
And said that, ‘You can’t come in!’
‘I came express at my friend’s request.’
‘Too bad, but where have you been?’
I said I’d give them a statement, then
I shrugged and said, ‘That’s that!
Just tell Paulette I’ll come to her when
I’ve been to the Laundromat.’

The police were there at the Laundromat
When I sauntered in with the bag,
The sergeant stared and he pursed his lips
As my shoulders began to sag.
‘What’s that on the bag?’ he questioned me,
And I said, ‘it looks like mud!’
‘Now isn’t that strange, it seems to be
That your bag is seeping blood!’

David Lewis Paget

She walked the cobblestone streets at night,
Everyone thought her a pro,
Her skirt was short and her blouse was tight
And her eyes moved to and fro,
She never answered a mocking call
For a price to rest her head,
And wouldn’t stop till the Moon went down
When at last she went to her bed.

She’d roamed the alleyways and the streets
For a year, or maybe two,
Whenever a stranger stayed her feet
She’d say, ‘Not looking for you!’
But still she’d roam till she turned for home
Each night, it went to a plan,
She’d check each face for a sign of grace,
Each night, she’d look for a man.

Sometimes she’d stop at a village Inn
And she’d sidle up to the bar,
The barman said, ‘No, you can’t come in,’
Then she’d say, ‘I’ve come so far.
I need to know if you’ve seen a man
With a head of bright red hair,
A lazy eye, with a look quite sly,
I’ve been searching here and there.’

But no-one knew of the lazy eye
Though they’d seen the carrot head,
‘He used to drink at ‘The King and I’
But I think that fellow’s dead.’
She wandered out to the cemetery
To look for the name they gave,
But the headstone said it was Henry,
When the name that she sought was Dave.’

She’d go back home and she’d cry at night
When the stranger came in her dream,
She’d only seen him the once before
But his face was burnt on her brain.
‘I’ll not be rid of him, nevermore,
And I’ll spend my life in pain,
I need to see him, if just once more,’
It drove her out in the rain.

One night she walked through an alleyway
In shadows, deep in the gloom,
Hiding a figure standing there
Who stared, like a figure of doom.
He faced her there in the only light,
The Moon, that beamed through the trees,
And she took note of the lazy eye
And the hair, like a red disease.

‘I think I’ve seen you before,’ he said,
I just can’t remember when.’
‘You did, while I was lying in bed,
You came through my window then.
I’ve searched for you for a year or more
And now is your time to pay,
You won’t be getting away this time,
So down on your knees, and pray.’

She pulled a pistol out of her bag
To point it at straight at his head,
The stranger’s knees had begun to sag,
‘I should have left you for dead!’
‘I’m glad that your hair is red, blood red,
For the sight won’t make me cry,’
Then fired a bullet, straight through his head
By way of his lazy eye.

David Lewis Paget

The little Toy Shop in the High Street,
With its pebble glass windows and doors,
Was a magical place, with its curtains of lace
And delight on its shelves and its floors.
It had always enticed and enthralled me,
With its skaters that whirled on a rink,
With tops that would hum, and soldiers with drum,
And dolls with bright eyes that would blink.

It had stood near the kerb in the High Street
In a small seaside village in Wales,
And we would go there for a part of the year
Near the Inn that was selling Welsh ales.
And I would stare in through the window
Though the glass would distort what I’d see,
When the women would pass, all the chattering class
I would think they were talking to me.

It would sound like they sang to each other,
Not a word in my English was said,
And their voices would meld with that Toy Shop,
Till I thought, ‘What goes on in their head?’
But I left that Welsh village behind me
As I grew, with much laughter and tears,
It was later, a trip would remind me,
What I’d left in the past, all those years.

Then I found myself standing outside it,
That little Toy Shop from the past,
Where nothing had changed, just the stock rearranged
When I stared through that window at last.
I opened the door with the pebble glass
And I made my way slowly within,
And there stood a girl in a bonnet and blouse
And a pinny tucked all the way in.

Her hair was the colour of seaside sand
And her eyes were the blue of the sea,
I noticed that there was no ring on her hand
And that she stared intently at me.
I think we both knew in an instant then
That within a short year we’d be wed,
But though she still sings in her Welsh with a friend
I don’t know what goes on in her head.

David Lewis Paget