The Lady Mary took to her bed
On the last of the mad March days,
She’d strained her constitution, she said
At that upstart, Shakespeare’s plays,
The ruffians at the Globe were known
To be often rotten with fleas,
‘I must have been bitten,’ Milady said
With her skirt drawn up to her knees.

The footman fastened a painted sign
‘No Visitors’ up at the door,
While one of the maids got down on her knees
And scrubbed at the parquet floor,
Milady took to her poster bed
By a window out to the square,
‘You’d best get down to the Fleet,’ she said,
‘Lord Orton is working there.’

The doctor came with his physic
Carried a nosegay close to his face,
The cane that he prodded Milady with
Would leave her with little grace,
‘The swellings down in Milady’s groin
Will have to be truly bled,
A mixture of clay and violets then
Applied to the sores,’ he said.

The mist swept in and the night came down
As the fever grew apace,
And dark black pustules grew and swarmed
At the Lady Mary’s face,
A shadow fell on the window pane
Of a man stood out in the square,
‘Who is that nightly visitant,
And what is he doing there?’

She couldn’t make out his features for
His hat was broad of brim,
Shading his face and hawk-like nose
Though he kept on looking in,
‘I have a terrible feeling that
I’ve seen that man before,
He’s come from the coffin-maker, and
He waits outside my door.’

She slipped off into unconsciousness
So the footman let him in,
To measure her with a piece of twine
From her head to below her shin,
They waited then for an hour or two
While the doctor had her bled,
She cried aloud at a fancied shroud
And she shrank from it, in dread.

Late on the second day she woke
Lord Orton at her side,
Holding a faded nosegay to
Protect him from his bride,
She heard the clatter of wheels pull up
Outside in the darkened court,
And cried, ‘My Lord, will you leave me now
That my time is running short?’

She lapsed back into a coma, but
She could feel the tremors start,
And something strange had begun to change
In the beating of her heart,
A rattle deep in her throat began
And resounded through her head,
Just as a voice, it seemed to her,
Called out, ‘Bring out your dead!’

David Lewis Paget

The news came rustling through the trees
As I tethered the horse’s head,
It came with a gentle sigh on the breeze,
‘The Lady Mulcrave is dead!
She waits for you to attend her now,’
I shook in a craven fear,
‘Her arms are crossed in eternal rest
As she lies on her oak wood bier.’

I stared in horror about me then
For the voice I heard in the glade,
Though nothing moved in the gloom out there
But the shadows the fire made.
‘You lie,’ I cried, as I saddled the horse,
Buckled and fastened the bit,
Then spun around by the river’s course,
‘I’ll not hear a word of it!’

We galloped over the rickety bridge
And the hoofbeats rang in the air,
They seemed to echo the one refrain
That desperate word, ‘Despair!’
The moon hung over the distant hill
With the Motte and Bailey Hall,
Where I’d left Milady an hour before
At Sir John FitzAlan’s Ball.

She’d said, ‘Be certain to call for me
When it strikes the midnight hour,
I wouldn’t like to be left in there
Bereft, in FitzAlan’s power,
I’ve fended off the proposals that
He’s made, in the times before,
Be sure to wait at the Bailey’s gate
With my father’s coach and four.’

I’d left her there with a merry throng
In their masques and gowns and lace,
The gentlemen with their tricorn hats
And coats, cut high at the waist,
I’d ridden off to the distant wood
To sit out the time before
I’d ride alone to her father’s home
And collect the coach and four.

But now, I hurried on back in fear
That Milady was taken ill,
I prayed to God on my foam fleck’d ride
As we crested, over the hill.
The Motte and Bailey was dark outside,
Not a lantern at the door,
And not a guest to be seen out there
Where they’d thronged, an hour before.

I rode on into the courtyard where
The coaches had wedged in tight,
There wasn’t a single coach or horse
To be seen in the pale moonlight,
I called, ‘Is anyone left in there
I’ve come for Lady Mulcrave!’
There wasn’t a sound in the silence there,
A silence, deep as the grave.

I beat on the heavy oaken door
It echoed on through the hall,
I thought that I heard some breathing, breathing
Whispering through the wall,
‘Open the door and let me in,
I know you were here before,’
The hinges creaked and the door gave way,
Into an empty hall.

The air was rank and the walls were damp
And a moss grew on the floor,
There hadn’t been anyone living there
For fifty years or more,
And standing near the ancient hearth
Was a shape that brought a tear,
For stood in the gloom of that ancient room
The remains of an oak wood bier.

I sit in my cabin, deep in the woods
And avoid the world outside,
Something that happened late that night
Disturbed my time and tide,
The Lady Mulcrave died that day
In that Motte and Bailey Hall,
On the same day I was born, they say
As Sir John FitzAlan’s Ball.

David Lewis Paget

Marion Carrion, she was a tease,
She really knew how to flirt,
Would shake her hips and her moving bits
That were hidden under her skirt.
She’d beckon me out to the hockey field
And raise her skirt to the knees,
Said I could look at her secret nook
For only a simple ‘Please.’

She had all a woman’s mysteries
Although she was only a girl,
And knew the power of her nether bits
Would put my mind in a whirl.
So she showed her thighs with her flashing eyes
And then would have shown me more,
While I would share with a candid air
That I knew what she had in store.

Out there on the side of the hockey field
In the shade of the only bush,
We’d hide behind, so my hand could find
Whatever would make her flush.
I thought that I was the favoured one
While playing about with her toys,
But then I found on the soccer ground
She was sharing with all of the boys.

That moment of disillusionment
I thought would have broken my heart,
But I was tough and had seen enough,
There were other girls in the park.
So I thank Marion Carrion now
For her retrospect revelation,
She taught me well on the road to hell
And saw to my education.

David Lewis Paget

She lived in a strange old gabled house
But she rarely came outside,
I’d glimpse her up on the balcony
But she’d see me, and she’d hide.
She seemed a nervous, tremulous thing
But I thought she looked so sweet,
Her hair in a long blonde ponytail,
And a dimple in either cheek.

She lived alone with her grandmother
Who was old, and sharp of tongue,
A sort of witch with a constant itch
She had scratched since she was young.
She wouldn’t allow young callers, who
Attracted to Abigail,
Would try to court but were overwrought
By her, till their efforts failed.

The two who had breached her sanctuary
Who had forced their way inside,
Had only stayed but a single day
Then emerged, and had later died.
It seemed that a curse lay on that house
There was something in the air,
A sense of sin that had lain within
Caught up in the word, ‘despair’.

The more that I glimpsed of Abigail,
The more that my heart would leap,
I’d stand and stare on the corner there
And I’d sometimes hear her weep.
I’d hear the drone of that dry old crone
As she snapped and snarled at her,
‘A man is a fret that you’ll soon regret,
There’s a thousand more out there.’

I finally braved the woman’s wrath
And beat on their old front door,
I knew she wouldn’t invite me in
But hoped that her mood would thaw.
‘I’m coming to call on Abigail,’
I cried, and I pushed on past,
And racing across the hallway floor
I ran up the stairs, at last.

Abigail stood and smiled at me
With her grandmother aghast,
She took me out to the balcony,
I thought that the dye was cast.
I said that I’d seen her from afar
On the balcony above,
‘I want you to know I’m here to show
That I’ve fallen for you, in love.’

‘And I’ve watched you from above,’ she said,
‘I saw the love in your eyes,
I knew that you would finally come
So it’s not a great surprise.’
At this the crone had mounted the stairs,
I finally saw her smile,
She carried a platter for us to eat,
‘Some sweets, will you stay awhile?’

Abigail tied them up in a cloth
To take when I left that night,
Some cherry whirls, and peppermint twirls
And chunks of Turkish Delight,
She scribbled a note that she placed within
And she’d underlined it twice,
‘Whatever you do, I’m telling you,
Don’t eat the Coconut Ice.’

It seems that the sweets were all home made
In the kitchen under the stair,
‘My grandmother takes great pride in these,
But still, you’d better beware.’
At home I unwrapped them carefully
And I checked the Coconut Ice,
The smell was bitter like almonds so
I took Abigail’s advice.

The chemist confirmed that cyanide
Was part of the recipe,
The police arrested the grandmother
And now Abigail is free.
I wish I could say she stayed with me
But she went with Raymond Bryce,
So there was a lesson learned, you see,
I never touch Coconut Ice.

David Lewis Paget

Deep in the village of Darkling
Where the Squires and their Ladies rule,
No-one comes out in the eventime
Unless they’re a brazen fool,
The Hunt is rallied for after dark
And they wear the hood and the cowl,
Roam far and wide through the countryside
While the ravening hounds just howl.

They say that they’re hunting foxes,
But I know, that just isn’t true,
That blood they seek at the end of the week,
They may be looking for you,
They take their cues from the Magistrate
Who leads the Hunt through the grounds,
His word is law, and he sets the score,
They call him the Master of Hounds.

Sir Roland Bear has an awful stare
As he glares at you from the bench,
The lawyers do what they’re told to do
And offer little defence,
If you poach a hare from a Squire’s land
Or take a fish from his stream,
And you see him add your name to a list,
You know it’s your final scene!

For once outside in the courtyard there
The peasants will stare in dread,
They cross themselves as they pass you by
For nobody speaks to the dead!
You can’t go hide in your cottage,
If it still has a window or door,
Though you’re locked right in, the hounds of sin
Will come up through a hole in your floor.

The light of my life, Evangeline,
Was married to Percival Shroud,
He beat her once with a riding crop
To keep her bullied and cowed,
She worked all day in the Dairy,
In a barn on Percival’s Farm,
And I said one day that he’d have to pay,
I’d not see her come to harm.

She stared at me with her worried eyes
And she let me believe she cared,
We’d hide together beneath the hay
At the height of our love affair,
But one day soon, her burly groom
Had seen us going to ground,
And hauled us before the Magistrate
While our legs and our hands were bound.

‘There isn’t a place in Darkling here
For the likes of a pair like you!’
Sir Roland Bear, his pen in the air
Considered what he would do.
‘You’ve wandered outside the marriage bounds
Brought shame on the vows you swore,
While you have sullied her decency,
And turned a wife to a *****!’

He put his pen to the fabled list
And he wrote two names in there,
Then ****** us into the courtyard so
The folk could shame and stare.
They cut our bonds and we heard the hounds
As they howled and yapped for blood,
So we went trembling, hand in hand
To hide ourselves in the wood.

The Squires were grim and remorseless when
The Hunt pursued its fare,
Their Ladies thought it a festival
When they rubbed warm blood in their hair,
I’d said I’d not let her come to harm
But Evangeline had cried,
I broke a branch and I sharpened it
To defend my shattered pride.

They came at us like the hounds of hell
In their cloaks, and hoods and cowls,
Along with a pack of hunting dogs,
We could hear their approaching howls,
Evangeline was safe in a tree
While I stood guard below,
My fear was clear in my trembling hands
But I stood so it wouldn’t show.

A rider burst on out through the trees
And he roared, ‘Now pay for your crime!’
I waited until he rode up close
Then I ****** my stake in his eye,
He screamed just once, and fell from his horse
And his cowl, it floated wide,
I saw I’d killed the Master of Hounds
As the dogs tore at his hide.

The Squires looked down with little remorse
At the corpse that lay in the mud,
While the ladies leapt from their jittery mounts
To dip their hands in his blood,
We made our way unseen through the woods
Escaped from the killing grounds,
And Darkling now is free from the spell
Of the evil Master of Hounds!

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

I’d thought that they were extinct until
I found one in the coop,
A genuine Jersey Giant, strutting
Up on the henhouse roof,
Twice the size of the other hens
As I said to my sister, Faye,
‘Where did it come from?’ She replied,
‘Not there yesterday!’

‘I go to collect the eggs each day,
Do you think that could be missed?
That bird is a giant,’ she declared,
‘So don’t blame me, desist!’
I calmed her down, for she used to flare
At the slightest hint of crit.,
‘Whatever it is, it’s here to stay,
Perhaps we can breed from it?’

There wasn’t a cockerel near the size
Of this random Jersey Black,
‘It must have come visiting overnight,
I joked, ‘from a neighbour’s shack.’
She wandered into the henhouse and
From behind an empty keg,
She said, ‘You’d better come look at this,’
And showed me a giant egg.

An egg so big that you wouldn’t think
That a chicken could let it pass,
Tall and brown with a pointed crown
And a shell as thick as glass,
‘Are we going to let it hatch it out,’
Said Faye, ‘or crack it yet?
I wonder how many that would feed
As a giant omelette?’

‘We’ll leave her be, and we’ll wait and see
If a monster’s there inside,
We might as well, if a cockerel
It can be the henhouse pride.’
So we let her sit on the giant egg
For a week, or maybe more,
Then Faye came running inside one day,
‘You’ve not seen this before!’

The egg emitted a humming noise
And rocked a bit on its base,
While through the shell there were coloured lights
That would fade then grow apace,
And as we stood it began to crack
Then pieces would fall away,
It almost gave me a heart attack
For what I saw that day.

For spinning inside the egg we saw
A tiny universe,
With a sun-like star at the centre and
Our planets, in reverse,
And as we watched it began to grow
To float out the henhouse door,
Swelling constantly as it rose
To the skies, with a mighty roar.

I don’t know what it has done to us,
The sky doesn’t look the same,
There are three moons now in the evening sky
Since the Jersey rooster came,
I lopped the chicken that laid the egg
And I wait for the slightest sight,
With an axe for the Jersey cockerel
That Faye prays to at night.

David Lewis Paget

He pondered over the note he wrote,
Sat hunched and cold in his chair,
He nodded once as he read it then
And signed the bottom with flair,
The house was not even stirring then
As he rose, looked out at the sea,
It said, ‘By the time you see this, Jen,
I’ll be hanging from some old tree.’

Then he slipped on out to the breaking day
As the dawn was beginning to spread,
He should have been further along than this,
By now, he should have been dead.
He’d heard them stir in the attic room
When he’d come in late from the bay,
His wife and a lifelong friend of his
Who’d thought he was still away.

He’d heard the sound of them making love
As he crept to the attic door,
His face turned white in the passage light
As he sank to the passage floor.
The tears had welled at his eyes at last
As he crept back down the stairs,
He’d lost a friend and his woman, Jen,
And the love that he thought was theirs.

He wandered over the grassland there
To the woods at the edge of the cliff,
But not forgetting to take the coil
Of rope, he held at his hip.
He wondered how many times they’d met
While he was away at sea,
And laughed, the minute his back was turned
To leave him no dignity.

Then pictures rose in his troubled mind
That he shouldn’t have had to think,
He cursed himself, for he must be blind
When his friend had tipped her a wink,
The pain was really too much to bear
For he’d lost not one, but two,
He’d loved them both, she’d broken her oath
And his friend had betrayed him too.

He found a tree, hung over the cliff
That was old and gnarled and bent,
With a sturdy branch that would do the trick,
It was too late to relent.
He flung the rope and he made it fast
Then fashioned the hangman’s knot,
It would swing him out and over the sea
And send him where time forgot.

He tugged on the rope to test the branch
To see if it took his weight,
Dropped the loop down over his head
When a voice cried out, ‘Just wait!’
He turned to see his Jen on the path
That ran alongside the cliff,
‘What are you doing, my love, my love,
Is my love worth less than this?’

She said she’d gone for a walk that night,
Hadn’t been able to sleep,
‘Your friend is up in the attic room
With a woman from Warley Heath.
He only met her a week ago,’
She said, ‘and borrowed the bed.
He said that you wouldn’t mind, but I
Wasn’t impressed,’ she said.

He pulled the rope from over his head
And he hugged his woman tight,
‘I’m such a fool, but I thought that you
And he… It was such a fright!’
The sun beamed down and it seemed to say
That a love so strong was rare,
While a gnarled old tree drooped over the sea
With its rope, still hanging there.

David Lewis Paget

In one of those fogs of London
I boarded the East End train,
The mist was a yellow, evil smog
And then it began to rain.
I found a compartment, only two
To bother my peaceful ride,
And placed my case at my feet, in place
With my gold-blocked name outside.

The smell of the fog was drifting in
And burning my eyes and throat,
I said to the man, ‘Let fresh air in…’
He sat and buttoned his coat.
‘The air out there is as bad as in,’
He said with a scowl and stare,
‘You might be happy to sit and choke,
The window stays up, I swear.’

I leant well back, and looked at the girl
Who sat there, opposite me,
She wore her skirt right up to the hip,
I stared at her stockinged knee,
Her eyes were bright, an emerald green
But tears I saw on her cheek,
‘This fog,’ she muttered, and wiped them dry,
‘I think it was worse last week.’

‘But London’s always suffered from fog,’
I ventured, ‘Back in the day,
The Ripper used it to hide his crimes,
He used it getting away.’
‘Overblown,’ he said, the man in the coat,
‘There’s many was worse than he,
The blood ran thick in the gutters here
At times in our history.’

‘But he’s the one who never got caught,
You must at least give him that.’
The man slunk down in his corner seat,
Then sat, and played with his hat.
The girl just smiled, and said in a while,
I think you’re right, he’s the one,
I wouldn’t like, on a foggy night
To meet him, minus a gun.’

The man reached into his overcoat
And seized the girl with a sigh,
Holding a cut-throat razor to
Her throat, with a smile so sly.
‘I said I’d never do this again
But I must admit, I lied,
I noticed the name on your carry case,
You’re Jekyll, I see – I’m Hyde!’

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

The North Wind doth blow,

And we shall have snow,

And what will poor Robin do then,
Poor thing…



The house that poor young Robin bought,
You’d scarcely call it a house,
A single room on a farmer’s farm
You’d not swing even a mouse.
But he moved on in, and tidied it up
And asked Rosemary to stay,
She sat in silence, her knees clamped tight,
And her first response, ‘No way!’

‘There isn’t a cupboard to keep a broom,
The kitchen’s there by the wall,
We couldn’t live in this tiny room
To even think, I’m appalled.’
But Robin said, ‘It’s just for a start,
I’m going to build on a wing,
I’m making the bricks from mud and straw
It will all be done by the Spring.’

So Rosemary had unpacked her case,
And hung her clothes on a hook,
Then looked in vain for a tiny shelf,
There wasn’t even a book.
But Robin slaved, out in the yard,
Making his bricks from straw,
The walls went up and the roof went on,
And he laid the wood for the floor.

At first they slept on the floor inside,
And Rosemary kept it clean,
She said, ‘Don’t touch, till I am a bride,’
And pillows went in between.
He put his love all into his wing,
All carpeted now, and swish,
And set it up as a bedroom then,
‘Are you coming to bed?’ ‘You wish!’

She only ever kissed with a peck,
She never opened her lips,
He wanted more, but couldn’t be sure,
As he nibbled her fingertips.
Then one day, down came the winter rain
And the wind it was blowing cold,
Rosemary lay there shivering so
She allowed him just one hold.

His hand had strayed, down where it would
You’ll admit we’d do the same,
But he found down there, in that neighbourhood
Something that changed the game.
He leapt on up, and he washed his hands,
Said, ‘You’re not even a girl!’
‘Didn’t you guess,’ said Rosemary,
‘It’s not the end of the world.’

She chased him all around in that room,
‘I thought you wanted to play,’
While Robin stood, his back to the wall,
While holding her off, ‘No way!’
He fled into his favourite wing,
And hammered and bolted the door,
His bricks were melting out in the rain
And mud flowed over the floor.

She went on back to the troupe ‘Les Girls’,
While Robin stayed on the farm,
You’ll not see him venturing out these days
He lives in a state of alarm.
With just the sight of a petticoat
He’s a shuddering, gibbering wreck,
And ask him if he will leave his wing,
The answer comes back, ‘Like heck!’


He’ll flee to his farm,

To keep him from harm,

And hide his head under his wing,

Poor thing!

David Lewis Paget

The spirit of Christmas was here again
As they rocked on up to my door,
The aunts and uncles and cousins, all
I’d not even seen before,
They’d smelt the turkey, they’d seen the tree
With its lights, red yellow and green,
They’d even come with their knives and forks
In case that my own weren’t clean.

They came in a rush at twelve o’clock,
‘Now we’re not too late, we trust?
We got caught up at Aunt Mary’s, then
We missed the eleven-ten bus,
She says she’ll not be cooking this year
So we didn’t have time to lose,
She’ll hurry along with a minute to spare
As soon as she puts on her shoes.’

I said, ‘Oh good!’ as they filed on in
To wash their hands in the sink,
Then counted heads and I gulped and saw
The turkey begin to shrink,
A single bird for eleven heads
Or twelve if you counted me,
I might just get a wing and a prayer
When feeding this family.

They found the chest with the beer in ice
But there wasn’t enough for all,
So they corked and drank the fine Rosé
That I’d had displayed on the wall,
They ground the peanuts into the rug
And they spilled Chablis on the couch,
Then kept on stumbling over my feet
And all I could say was ‘Ouch!’

They sat around with an hour to wait
While the turkey started to brown,
And talked of family members that
They thought were coming on down,
But then the topic they all enjoyed
Was raising its ugly head,
‘You’d never believe,’ said Cousin Steve
But Auntie Caroline’s dead!’

‘I heard she fell from the Pepper Tree
With the pruning shears in her grasp,
Into a deadly swarm of bees!’
You could hear the others gasp.
‘And George, remember George, he was
Your Uncle’s cousin’s son,
He fell right under a train; they said
He had a blindfold on.’

Then Gustave from the German branch
And Heidi from the Swiss,
Had both expired in some dread fire,
I’d not heard any of this!
‘Delaney died in Ottawa
When he fell dead off his horse,
And Orson choked on a bottle of coke
That was really chilli sauce!’

I cleared my throat before I spoke
‘I would hate to interrupt,
But listening to your Death Watch List
Has made my mind right up.
I don’t know a single one of you,
You've not been here before,
But you’ll find who you are related to
If you’d like to try next door.’

David Lewis Paget

He wandered at night the streets that might
Be busy, during the day,
The empty squares and the thoroughfares
To search for a come-what-may,
He’d never appear in the light of day
And shrank at a distant shout,
His way was always a lonely way,
Watching the lights go out.

He’d always avoid the gaze of men
Who would stare at him, then die,
Nor would he seek a mirror then,
He was born with a single eye.
His mother took him away at birth
So his father wouldn’t see,
That she had lain with a cyclops once
And then paid the penalty.

She had kept him locked in a cellar, till
He had grown too strong and bold,
He’d strained and torn at his chains until
His jail had failed to hold.
He couldn’t leave in the daylight, for
He had only known the dark,
So left one night in the pale moonlight
And escaped across the park.

He’d roam at night when the stars were bright
For the food and drink he’d need,
Padding the cobbled pavements there
In search of a missing creed.
What was the purpose of his life,
Could he exist alone?
Was there a female Cyclops somewhere
Willing to take him home?

One winter’s night when the time was right
And the streets were damp and drear,
He saw her walking a way ahead
And quaked in a sudden fear.
What if she turned and gazed on him
Drawn in by his single eye,
What if she died? He shook and sighed,
‘If she does, then so will I.’

She heard his footsteps behind her then
So he said, ‘you’re walking late!’
And her reply was a thankful sigh,
‘I can’t find my garden gate.’
He took her arm and they walked along
As she tried describing it,
His heart was full, he could do no wrong
As she tapped with a long white stick.

David Lewis Paget

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

David Lewis Paget

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

David Lewis Paget

I never can look when I’m riding past
The ruin of Falconridge,
I turn the head of my horse away
When I cross the Narrows Bridge,
And I concentrate on the countryside,
Try not to think of Clair,
Or the simple stone where she lies alone
Beneath its towers there.

But now and then I will think again
Of her and her sister Ruth,
Of the happy days when we used to play
In the dim days of our youth,
We would picnic out in the meadows
And I would chase them over the bridge,
For a kiss or two, though I came to rue
The House of Falconridge!

For Ruth was the elder of the two
And should have been first in line,
She grew to a haughty damosel
So I wouldn’t make her mine,
But Clair was bubbly, full of fun
And she showed she really cared,
So I knew that she was the only one
From the love that we had shared.

‘You will not marry my sister Clair,
I must be the first one wed,
I’ll not be seen as unwanted, left
To cry alone in my bed.’
So Ruth petitioned her father that
He halt our marriage plans,
But he had shrugged off his daughter,
‘This affair is out of my hands!’

The Banqueting Hall in Falconridge
Was decked with flags and flowers,
While Ruth went muttering her dismay
And hid in one of the towers,
She didn’t come out for the service
Though she did come out for the ball,
But sat and glowered at Clair, as we
Had danced our way round the hall.

Their father brought in the caterers
From the other side of the lake,
And they had wheeled in the greatest prize,
A huge five layered cake,
The tiny figures of bride and groom
Stood proudly on the top,
Then Ruth had suddenly come awake,
Leapt up and shouted, ‘Stop!’

The guests had stared, and a sudden hush
Befell the Banqueting Hall,
As Ruth seized both the bride and the groom
And dashed them against the wall,
She seized the knife from the wedding cake
And screamed in a long, high note:
‘I hate you all at this wedding ball!’
Then stabbed my Clair in the throat.

She ran right out of the Banqueting Hall,
I held poor Clair in my arms,
The blood poured over my wedding suit
As they called the Master-At-Arms,
She locked herself in the Northern Tower
And she lit a fire by the door,
Then ran right up to the topmost room,
Lay wailing, there on the floor.

The fire spread up through the Northern Tower
As Clair expired in my arms,
I couldn’t see through the veil of tears
How the guests had fled in alarm,
‘My love, my love,’ she had sighed at last
‘I forgive my sister Ruth,
We shouldn’t have taken her place away,
We wronged her, that is the truth!’

The fire raged, and burnt to a shell
The whole of Falconridge,
But Ruth they found, blackened and burned
As her flesh peeled off in strips,
She’s locked in one of the tower rooms
Will be locked in there for life,
With her claw-like hands and melted face
But it won’t bring back my wife!

I had a mirror placed by the door
She can see herself through the bars,
She has to suffer as I have done
By looking out on her scars,
And from the ruin of Falconridge
You may hear her cry, somehow,
When the Moon is over the Narrows Bridge:
‘Who will marry me now?’

David Lewis Paget

I’d rented out the basement  of
A house I used to own,
I hated renting places
I preferred to live alone,
I wasn’t good at choosing all
The tenants I would get,
And this guy was a doozy
The most eccentric of them yet.

But I must admit, the money
Paid the mortgage, right on time,
And I looked toward the future
When the house, it would be mine,
So I put up with his foibles
And his funny little ways,
He would sit down in his basement
And would disappear for days.

He had a little doctors bag
He wouldn’t be without,
With signs both astrological
And Druid runes, no doubt,
He always took it with him
When he wandered down the street,
Come skulking back, and talk about
The ******’s that he’d meet.

I knew something was going on,
I heard both screams and moans,
Seep up from out the basement
With the creak of drying bones,
At night they used to wake me up
And I’d lie there in dread,
And wonder what that movement was
Beneath my poster bed.

One night I crept on down and stood
Outside the basement door,
And heard strange voices muttering
Not one, but three or four,
I heard him raise his voice and say
In tones both harsh and grim,
‘I didn’t say you’d have your way,
But you can enter him!’

A peal of ghoulish laughter then
Rang out behind that door,
I bounded up those steps, ran like
I’d never run before,
Then lowered down the steel trapdoor
That sealed off that stair,
And laid the carpet over it,
You’d not know it was there.

I put up with a week of thumps
And cries of ‘let me out!’
But put my face close to the floor
And whispered, ‘Hey, don’t shout!
You keep those demons that you raised
Locked in your doctor’s bag,
Or maybe they will enter you,
And then, if so, that’s sad!’

I waited for those sounds to die
For upwards of a year,
Then poured a ton of concrete in
To seal that basement stair,
The house has sold, a Mr. Bould
Paid not enough, no doubt,
But said, ‘there’s not a basement there,
I’ll have to dig one out!’

David Lewis Paget

It looked all right through the windows of
Our cosy sitting room,
The day was light and the sun was bright
But the house was like a tomb,
The other rooms were as cold as hell
With their stalactites of ice,
That dripped from the bedroom ceiling down
To meet the stalagmites.

I’d settled Eve on the couch and spread
A blanket round her arms,
I didn’t think I should tell her, just
In case she became alarmed,
She’d spent a week in the sitting room
For she wasn’t feeling well,
How do you say, ‘We’ve fallen into
The Seventh Circle of Hell!’

They taught us the laws of physics were
Impossible to change,
Gravity, mass, and basic math
Had a certain, definite range,
But men of science had interfered
With the particle known as ‘God’,
They’d built the Hadron Collider and
The results, they said, were odd.

I could have told them how odd they were
When I went outside to see,
My car was covered in mushrooms
And a train sat up in the tree.
A whale was floating beneath the Moon
And a porpoise lay in the park,
The light was bright in the sitting room
But outside, it was dark.

Nothing remained the way it was
For all the colours had changed,
The lawn, the colour of strawberry jam
And the sky was rearranged,
The stars were falling like sequins in
A cluster of drops like rain,
And ice was forming up on the eaves
That tasted like champagne.

I went inside and I slammed the door,
I turned on the News at 6,
They said there’d been an apology
But it wouldn’t be hard to fix,
They’d run the Collider backwards to
The way that they’d done before,
And hopefully, the ‘particle God’
Would be as he’d been once more.

I sat with Eve as the sun went down
And I tried to keep her still,
Away from the hallway mirror so
She wouldn’t scream or squeal,
The lines were deepening on her face
As our lease on life had lapsed,
I hoped she wouldn’t go out today
With the world outside, collapsed.

The sun rose up in the morning as
It had for a million years,
And everything was familiar,
They’d run the thing in reverse.
The News went back to the good old things
We were used to, from before,
Stabbings, murders, infanticide
And that good old standby, war!

David Lewis Paget

The Church in its awesome majesty
Looked down, from over the hill,
From faith, to hope, to travesty
It stood, and is standing still,
So proud in its fine regalia
Its ritual, and never the least,
Its potent God who would wield his rod
Deter the jaws of the beast.

The Bishop of Saint Ignatius Church
Was a proud and holy man,
Who wouldn’t suffer the jibes of fools
From Rome to Afghanistan,
And certainly not those down the hill
In the new Masonic Lodge,
That beastly, secret doctrine that
He advised his flock to dodge.

He’d stand at the steps of his church and stare
Down at the barbarians,
He hated Lodges, he hated Mosques
And Rastafarians,
‘There shouldn’t be anyone else but me,
I hold the eternal God,
What gods they worship could never be,
For they’re all distinctly odd.’

While down at the Lodge of the Masons
They were cool with their golden rule,
They had to believe in a god as such,
But how, it was up to you.
For some would practice the Baptist faith,
And some Presbyterian,
While some enrolled in the Primitive state
Were a type of Wesleyan.

There was only a single Catholic
And he wore a glued on rug,
He wanted to still be young at heart,
Was known as the Grand HumBug,
The Antidiluvian Mason’s Guild
Was the name he’d chosen himself,
The others differed, but he was keen,
And he was the one with wealth.

Their God was known as the Architect,
They carried the masons tools,
The set square set them apart from all
The disbelievers and fools.
They worked on their secret rituals
And kept a goat at the back,
For leading a blindfold novice in
And guarding the Lodge from attack.

The Bishop heard that a Catholic
Was leading the Masons there,
He fumed, choked on his rhetoric, but
Was heard to firmly declare,
‘I will not shelter a wayward sheep
Who has taken to ways I hate,
The only fate for a traitor here
Is to excommunicate!’

He gathered a dozen priests to march
With candles, down to the Hall,
Surrounded the base heretic’s Lodge
And named HumBug in his call,
Sprinkled his holy water ‘til
It fizzed, and gave off a smell,
Doused his candle and closed his book,
Consigning the man to Hell!

But Humbug patted his glued on rug
Went out, untethered the goat,
He let it loose on the dozen Priests,
It butted the Bishop’s coat,
They ran in confusion up the street,
To the church, set up on the hill,
While the goat was hard at the Bishop’s heels
Like a demon released from Hell.

It butted the Bishop’s altar and
It charged, knocked over the font,
Scattered the pews for the devil’s dues
In a hellfire sacrament,
While HumBug muttered he might end up
In Hell, with his Mason’s sect,
But the Bishop’s God, had failed with his rod
In a clash with his Architect!

David Lewis Paget

I got a job at the Carnival,
All the fun of the fair,
With its Carousels and its Wishing Wells
And The Ferris wheel up there,
With a Gyro Tower and a Gravitron
You could hear the squeals of glee,
As they whirled about, and one fell out,
Nothing to do with me!

My only job was to strap them in
And I went from ride to ride,
They told me to familiarise
Myself with every side,
I loved the whirling Octopus
And the Swinging Pirate Ship,
But of them all, the Matterhorn
Was the one I found most hip.

I ended up on the Enterprise
At the closing of the night,
‘Just two more rides,’ the man announced,
‘For a journey into fright!’
I strapped them into each Gondola
As the twenty patrons paid,
And heard their screams as they soared aloft,
I could tell they were dismayed.

The ride came down with a grinding halt
And I went to let them out,
But no-one sat in the Gondola’s
Then I heard the Barker shout,
‘Last ride, last ride in the Enterprise,’
And the twenty folk got in,
I said, ‘What happened to all the rest?’
But he cried, ‘Don’t fuss now, Tim.’

The Enterprise had begun to spin
And carry them all aloft,
Then disengaged from its base and floated
Over a farmer’s croft,
The sky was an inky black that night
And dotted with glittering stars,
And I swear today, I heard him say:
‘They’re heading on up to Mars!’

David Lewis Paget

She kept him out in the garden shed
Where her sisters wouldn’t see,
He’d not been once in her upstairs bed
If they saw, she’d say, ‘Who me?’
He hadn’t come from her neighbourhood
So he wasn’t quite her class,
Whenever they met, he’d be upset
Like walking on broken glass.

He wasn’t known to her wealthy friends
Her folks or her peers at all,
If they came by she would go all shy
And gaze at a cold brick wall,
While he made out that he wasn’t there
Would hum and look at the sky,
She made him stare like he didn’t care
Or was merely passing by.

But deep down things were beginning to hurt
As he felt each little slight,
Like when she came to the garden shed
For her love feast every night,
She’d bring her cushions and lay her down
As she offered up her breast,
Then pick the cushions up off the ground
To take, once she had dressed.

She didn’t want to be seen with him
She’d say, ‘It can’t be done,
My friends would freak and would think me weak
If they knew what’s going on,’
She said he’d have to be patient, that
It all would be all right,
‘The time will come when I’ll have to tell
But it just won’t be tonight.’

Her sister came to her room one day
With a new bow in her hair,
Her hands had shook with excitement
And that made her sister stare,
‘You’ll not believe what I found today
And I took into my bed,
The greatest love of my life, and he
Was sat in the garden shed.’

David Lewis Paget

The god from the past came stalking,
Came clambering over the hill,
He’d woken first thing in the morning
With a hangover, fit to chill,
Those Roman debauches with grapes and wine,
The reds and the whites of the Tuscan kind,
The fruit of an overburdened vine,
Were sapping his energy still.

He’d rubbed at his eyes in the dawning,
And wondered where everyone went,
For nothing remained of the Roman baths
Not even a soldier’s tent,
And where was the maiden he’d last embraced
The sweet  Lucina, so fair of face,
Whose long held virtue was laid to waste
When the force of his love was spent.

Invidia’s green and brooding eyes
Had watched as he laid her down,
Had mixed her potions to match his lies
As they struggled, there on the ground.
She thought, ‘No god should be so remiss
As to offer a rival a tainted kiss,
From now, I’ll act as his Nemesis,
He’ll sleep while the world turns round.

She poured him a draught of her potion then
The last of his thirst to slake,
Though Empires rose and fell again
She vowed that he’d never wake.
The buildings crumbled and turned to dust
As the god dreamt long of his love, and lust,
While Nemesis thought her scheme was just
And the field turned into a lake.

The ages tired and the gods retired
To their mansions, high on the mount,
But he continued to sleep and dream
More years than he could count,
The god slept through in a dream sublime
While generations were buried in lime,
Two thousand years was a blink in time
For the gods in their banishment.

He woke on a chilly Autumn day
And found himself in a lake,
Shivered once, and then strode away
For his heart had begun to ache,
He walked down into a valley plain
Green and fresh in the Autumn rain,
When out of a tunnel streamed a train
With a scream, and the squeal of brakes.

‘By Juvenal!’ cried the god in shock
As the carriages streamed on by,
Then up above, like a giant gnat
A vehicle flew in the sky.
‘The world has changed since I fell asleep
The gods have fled to the mountain keep,
And men have conjured a giant leap,
The world has passed us by!’

He ran headlong through the tunnel
Hoping to find Lucina again,
And that was the great explosion that
Nobody could explain.
The diesel engine was rendered flat
With carriages piled on top of that,
While Nemesis on the mountain sat
Her tears flowing like rain!

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

It was only a tiny village then
Away from the thoroughfare,
Had existed since I don’t know when
With a grassy village square,
There were only seven ancient cars
In the narrow village streets,
And none of them travelled very far
For the shop stocked milk, and treats.

It hadn’t seen much of progress since
The days of old King John,
Who’d lost his jewels in The Wash, by Mintz
Near the town of Oberon,
The villagers there were set in ways
That caused nobody harm,
But when Lars came from Oberon
There was cause to feel alarm.

For Lars was the local planner for
The town of Oberon,
He’d dragged it kicking and screaming
Into the century just gone,
He’d widened streets, and cancelled Meets
In the old stone Mason’s Hall,
By bulldozing their building, leaving
Folk with a low stone wall.

He’d passed it all with an ordinance
That had given him total power,
The council caved to his arrogance,
All that he did was glower,
He put street lights on the corners, and
He acted like a prince,
And when he was done with Oberon
He set his sights on Mintz.

He drove on down to their village square
And he said it wouldn’t do,
He’d turn the square to a thoroughfare
So the cars could drive right through,
He didn’t care when the people there
Said ‘Leave our square alone!’
He said, ‘I’m passing an ordinance,
So you might as well go home.’

The local hall was agog that night
There’d never been such a crowd,
The villagers all were up in arms,
‘This fool shouldn’t be allowed!’
‘This calls for a special meeting,’ said
The spokesman, Rupert Bragg,
‘We’ll have to call on the village witch,
The widow, Nancy Stag!’

They all poured out of the village hall
And they went to see the witch,
Who was busily mixing potions in
A cauldron and a dish,
‘You’ll not be needing my magic,’ said
Old Nancy, with a smile,
‘If you all agree with my plan, you’ll see,
That Lars will run a mile.’

She asked the women to stay behind
While the men went on their way,
‘I mean the ones over seventy,
The rest can go or stay,’
They huddled up with the village witch
And applauded Nancy’s plan,
‘We’ll send him scuttling off from Mintz,
You’ll see, he’s only a man!’

When Lars came down in his private car
They met him in the square,
Holding banners and placards, but
That’s not what made him stare,
‘You’d better get back to Oberon
Or we’ll march there, for our rights,’
He turned, and hurriedly left the square,
They all were dressed in tights!’

David Lewis Paget

‘Why do they call it Goblin Castle?’
I asked my friend, Carstairs,
We sat, gazed up at the battlements,
‘It’s a hell of a way up there!’
I knew that the Lord and Lady Crane
Had been living there, forever,
‘It used the be called the Castle Bleak,
But Goblin Castle... Never!’

He bit his lip and dismounted, and
We tethered the horses fast,
Went to sit by a hollow tree
And squatted, sat on the grass.
Carstairs had worked for the Cranes for years
So he knew the ins and outs,
Of every tittle and tattle there
In that massive, noble house.

‘It happened just when the Lady Crane
Was only a maid in there,
Before the Lord had taken a shine,
And offered his hand to her.
Her name was Jenny de Quincey
From some distant, noble blood,
But all she had was the noble name,
Her folks were as poor as mud.’

‘There were places there that she shouldn’t be,
There were places that were barred,
The servants said that its history
Was more than battle-scarred.
They whispered rumours of little folk
Who had roamed about in the past,
Had stolen goblets and golden plate
But they’d all died out, at last.’

‘She ventured down to the dungeons, where
They’d kept the local churls,
Back in the days of taxes, that
Were paid to the Lords and Earls.
She expected to find them empty, but
Then further along the hall,
She found a dwarf, just two foot four
Who’d long been chained to the wall.’

‘The dwarf had a sickly pallor that
Looked green in that eerie light,
A monstrous forehead and bulging eyes,
And he gave the maid a fright.
He said he’d been chained a hundred years,
That he came from a local tribe,
‘Of Goblins, Hobs, and Gnomes,’ he sobbed,
But the rest had not survived.’

‘Jenny was wearing a golden chain
That he came to the bars to see,
For goblins love the glitter of gold,
Are rabid for jewellery.
He snatched the chain and he backed away,
Clutched it against the wall,
‘You’ll have to bring the key to the cage,’
He said, and she was appalled.’

‘She brought the key the following day
And opened the rusted gate,
She didn’t know quite how strong he was
But she found out, all too late!
It wasn’t only the glitter of gold
That the goblin had in mind,
But to draw a veil on part of the tale,
I think would be more than kind.’

‘She luckily married the Lord that week
So it wasn’t a total mess,
She started to show, that womanly glow
And the Lord had thought him blessed.
But the truth came out when the heir was born
With a face that glowed pale green,
With bulging forehead and flapping ears,
And the biggest eyes I’ve seen.’

‘They keep him down in the dungeon, in
A cage, right next to his Pa,
While she’s locked up in the tower room,
Has never got out, so far.
It used to be called the Castle Bleak
And it lived right up to its name,
But now it’s called the Goblin Castle
Of Lord and Lady Crane.’

David Lewis Paget

Some once called him a Grand Old Man,
Others called him a slime,
You couldn’t get a consensus that
Was even, all the time,
For some kow-towed to his money, while
Others fell by his sword,
His life was overall sunny, while
His victims quailed at his word.

He lorded it over his children,
He ruled their kids with ease,
A sullen look from beneath his brow
Would bring them to their knees,
His will was forever changing
As solicitors came and went,
One day he’d offer a mansion,
And another day, a tent.

When he finally died he was stony broke
And they wondered where it went,
He’d always been abstemious
But the money had been spent.
He left all their lives in ruins with
Their expectations gone,
A couple of ramshackle houses were
The only things they won.

There wasn’t the money to bury him
So they left him where he sat,
Up at the head of the table in
His black, beribboned hat,
He glared at them as he’d glared in life
One hand on the table-top,
Where he used to tap with his finger
As if it would never stop.

Tap-tap-tap on the table-top,
Tap-tap-tap it went,
His eyes bored into the back of your head
As if to say - Repent!
And people scurried, this way and that
To divine what the tartar meant,
The grim old man in his black top hat
Who ruled to their detriment.

They left him sat and they locked the door
Didn’t go back for a year,
Til the eldest, saying ‘let’s know for sure,’
Returned with a tinge of fear.
‘He might have stocks in his waistband there
Or shares hid under his shirt,
Or cash stuffed in his beribboned hat -
He treated us all like dirt!’

He ventured into the dining room
Where the grim old man still sat,
His eyes a-glare in the year long gloom
From under the brim of his hat.
But as the eldest approached him there
The finger began to tap,
A steady rap with a note of doom
That would curdle blood to sap.

So Toby dived to the tinder box
And he leapt up with the axe,
His face as pale as a ghostly tale
But determined to attack.
He raised the axe and he let it fall
Severed the finger there,
It skittered across the table top
As the old man fell from his chair.

The stocks were stuffed in the old man’s hat
The shares were stuffed in his sleeve,
And so much cash in his waistband that
They said, you wouldn’t believe.
But still he’s locked in that grey old house
For they found it wouldn’t stop,
That severed finger that skittered there
Still taps on the table-top!

David Lewis Paget

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

David Lewis Paget

He knew what he wanted to say to her,
He knew what he wanted to do,
He’d step right up to her open door
And he’d quickly say, ‘We’re through!’
Her eyes would show she was startled then,
He thought that her jaw would drop,
But he would turn, walk swiftly away,
And leave with his head held up.

He’d seen her walking out in the park
And he thought he’d seen them kiss,
While he’d been walking there in the dark
With his Mathematics Miss.
She’d flagged him down, and said that his work
Was poor, that he had to choose,
Whether to chase that silly girl or
Square the hypotenuse.

All that she wanted to talk was sine
And something she said was tan,
She’d filled his head up with algebra
But seemed to depress the man.
She’d put her arm round his shoulders then
And said she would help him through,
‘All that you need is a little work
And you’ll be so pleased when you do!’

While Sally had seen her cousin there
Skipped up to him in the dark,
‘Fancy me seeing you way out here
At night, in the Bowling Park!
I thought you were still in Africa
But happen on you, like this!’
Then threw her arms up around his neck
And gave him a cousinly kiss.

They parted then and she turned away
And she saw a sight in the dark,
It looked like Jim, it was surely him
With a woman, there in the park.
She had her arm round his shoulders, they
Looked cosy, walking away,
She bit her lip and her mind went flip
As her world turned bleak and grey.

She knew what she wanted to say to him,
She knew what she wanted to do,
She’d step right up to his open door
And she’d quickly say, ‘We’re through!’
His eyes would show he was startled then,
She thought that his jaw would drop,
But she would turn, walk swiftly away,
And leave with her head held up.

David Lewis Paget

There’s a silence out in the fields tonight
Where the barley sheaves are stooked,
Their shadows stand in a menacing line
While the wives at home are spooked,
They peer from windows, they peer from doors
And they lock their shutters tight,
There isn’t a man in the valley’s span
For they didn’t come home tonight.

They left their cottages there at dawn
As the sun was on the rise,
Wandered out with their ploughman’s lunch
And rubbed the sleep from their eyes,
They carried their sickles across their backs
Their ******* hooks and their flails,
And who could read took a crumpled book
To read with a half of ale.

They bent their backs to the task ahead
Of reaping the sheaves of grain,
The clouds were billowing overhead
And they said, ‘It looks like rain!’
The sun went in and the sun came out
As the shadows flitted across,
They stooked the sheaves at an angle so
The rain would drain from the crops.

The rain held off ‘til the afternoon
When the men were streaked with sweat,
They sheltered under the Sycamores,
Laid down their tools in the wet,
The wives were busily cleaning homes,
Preparing the worker’s tea,
They didn’t look out to the barley field
‘Til the sun dipped into the sea.

They didn’t look, it was almost dusk
When they noticed something wrong,
The men would usually come back home,
They’d hear them, singing a song,
A silence settled upon the land
And the wives came out to stare,
But nothing moved in the barley field,
The men were just not there.

Their faces white in the pale moonlight
The wives sat still, and stared,
The stooks were seeming to move about
And the women, they were scared,
The stooks lined up in the barley field
Like a pack of hooded ghouls,
And lying right in the midst of them
Was a heap of reaping tools.

There’s a silence out in the fields tonight
Where the barley sheaves are stooked,
Their shadows stand in a menacing line
While the wives at home are spooked,
They peer from windows, they peer from doors
And they lock their shutters tight,
There isn’t a man in the valley’s span
For they didn’t come home tonight.

David Lewis Paget

There isn’t much left of The Grange today,
There isn’t much left at all,
Only a charred left wing, I think,
And the odd, still standing wall,
The central Hall is a pile of ash
As it was, the day I left,
Sat on the back of the doc’s grey mare
As the Lady Mary wept.

It wasn’t supposed to end like this
On the day of the wedding ball,
Balloons and streamers hung from the roof
As the marriage carriage called,
Annette stepped out like a fairy queen
In her ****** white, and lace,
While Reece, the Groom, in the wedding room
Had a smile on his handsome face.

And I led the Lady Mary in
To the mother’s pride of place,
I only had eyes for her that day
As she walked with a widow’s grace,
It wasn’t a secret, I yearned for her
But this was her daughter’s day,
So I was content with the hand she lent
For she squeezed, along the way.

The priest stood up by a lectern as
The guests all prayed and knelt,
To bless their way on this wedding day
I’m sure it was truly felt,
But Mary’s brother-in-law was there
With an evil look in his eye,
He’d wanted to claim the Grange from her
Since the day her husband died.

‘The Grange belonged to my family,’
He’d say, ‘and I want it back,
You only married into the place
When you wed my brother, Jack.’
He made an offer, but she said no,
The Grange had become her home,
‘You sold your part to Jack at the start
Before you went off to roam.’

But Douglas, he had an evil mind
And his countenance was stern,
He said if he couldn’t have The Grange
Then he’d rather see it burn.
He’d brought three barrels of gunpowder
Unseen, but out in the yard,
He chose this day to make Mary pay,
We should have been on our guard.

The guests were all engaged at the front
When he wheeled the barrels in,
It takes a mind of evil intent
To imagine this kind of sin,
Annette had lifted her wedding veil
And raised her lips to the groom,
When all hell suddenly came to play
In the depths of that wedding room.

The hall was full of the screams and cries
Of those who lay on the floor,
While I picked the Lady Mary up
And carried her out to the door,
It was there we saw the bride, Annette
Who’d made it out to the porch,
The groom was dead, but the bride had fled
As her dress went up like a torch.

There isn’t much left of The Grange today,
There isn’t much left at all,
Only a charred left wing, I think,
And the odd, still standing wall.
But the Lady Mary married me
In the wake of all the strife,
Her daughter’s gone, but our love is strong,
And Douglas is serving life.

David Lewis Paget

He walked on up to the cottage from
The cliff, the long way round,
He didn’t want to be seen or heard,
His footsteps made no sound,
He was wearing the same old overcoat
That he’d worn, those years before,
When he’d sauntered out of the cottage,
To take a walk on the shore.

The weather then had been brisk and cold
In the first few days of Spring,
The clouds had been light and fluffy then
He remembered everything,
The gulls were nested along the cliff
And the tide was on the turn,
A single fisherman cast his line
On the far side of the burn.

The pathway down by the cliff had been
Rock strewn and fairly steep,
His steps back then had been tentative,
He had time enough to keep,
He’d told his wife he’d be back by one
From his walk along the shore,
And she had blown him a kiss for fun
As she swept him out the door.

But now he looked at the garden that
Had been so nicely mown,
The privet hedge, the wisteria
Were all now overgrown,
The cottage needed a coat of paint
And the chimney pots were cracked,
He stopped and mused at the garden gate
For the love the cottage lacked.

Then a face appeared at the window that
Was pale, and sad, and drawn,
And he wished the earth would swallow him
From the day that he was born,
The door flew open and out she flew
Like a shrew, with little grace,
A look of scorn as he stood there, torn
And she slapped him round the face.

‘What do you mean by coming here,
Did you hope to see my tears?
You walked away, not a word to say
And you don’t come back for years.’
She screamed and pounded his overcoat
As he took one pace, and stepped,
Folding his arms around her as
She clung to him, and wept.

‘I think I know how the others felt
But it’s all beyond recall,
I only talked to the fisherman,
And I was held in thrall,
He talked and talked of the things to come
It was most distinctly odd,
The world closed in around me till
I felt I was talking to God.’

‘He said so much, and it sounded wise
But I can’t recall a thing,
I wanted to get back home to you
For time was hastening,
But the sun went down and the Moon came up
Which was when he said it, then,
‘I’m not here looking for fish,’ he said,
‘For I’m a fisher of men.’

‘It’s been three years,’ said his tear-stained wife,
‘It has been three years or more,
Since ever you took your leave of me
To wander down on the shore.’
‘That was the time of his ministry,’
He said, ‘and I was to blame,
He  kept on calling me Judas, though
I said that wasn’t my name.’

‘He said that we needed forgiveness, like
I need forgiveness from you,
I honestly don’t know where I’ve been
But I know I’ve always been true.
He packed up his fishing tackle in
A bag he kept on the sand,
Took thirty pieces of silver
And placed them back in my hand.’

David Lewis Paget

He wandered along the decks by night,
Stood at the rails by day,
Kept to himself from what I saw
And didn’t have much to say,
He wore a yellow sou’wester when
The weather came in cold,
And a battered and worn old Navy cap
With the legend ‘Merchant Gold’.

He must have been once a ******
In a time quite long ago,
He still had his steady ******’s legs
On the ‘Michaelangelo’,
A crusty and time-worn cruise ship
That had seen much better days,
Pottering round the islands through
The softly lapping waves.

I doubt that it could withstand a storm
It was just a summer cruise,
For a raggedy band of tourists who
Had nothing much to lose,
The fares were cheap and the cabins bare
So I utilised the bar,
While the wife would wander off and say,
‘I’ll know just where you are!’

I got in some serious drinking
There was nothing else to do,
While Helen came back with every name
Of the stewards, and the crew,
For Helen’s a social butterfly
And she loves to gad about,
I’ve never been much of a talker
So I tend to shut her out.

One night I happened to wander out
She was over by the rail,
Listening to the sailor who
Was reading her some tale,
I turned back into the dining room
Until my wife was free,
Then asked her: ‘What was he reading?’
And she said, ‘Some poetry!’

‘A poem called ‘Sea Fever’ that had
Brought a tear to his eye,
It was all about a tall ship
And a star to steer her by,
If only you could have heard him, Ben
He had such a tale to tell,
I could have listened to him for hours,
His soul is like a well.’

‘His life was spent on the water and
He calls it God’s domain,
He said that having to leave it brought
His life’s most constant pain,
He pointed the constellations out
Named every little star,
He gave me a feeling of awe about
The ocean, where we are.’

I know I must have been jealous for
I never took the bait,
I didn’t talk to the sailor,
When I would, it was too late,
A storm blew up and the rising seas
Crashed over the decks and spars,
While he clung onto the outer rails
And gazed on up at the stars.

And then I must have been seeing things
For a man approached him there,
Holding onto a trident with
Coiled seaweed in his hair,
Touched him once with the trident and
The sailor turned his head,
Nodded once, with a gentle smile
Then draped on the rail, was dead.

They gathered the poor old sailor up
And bound him up in a sheet,
Waited until the sea calmed down
Called everyone to meet,
Then after a simple service they
Just slipped him into the sea,
A fitting end for a sailor who
Had left our company.

But Helen was broken hearted she
Was weeping all day long,
While I was irritated, and
I asked her, what was wrong?
She stopped and smiled, and she said, ‘Oh well,
He’s back in the sea he loved,
In a tall ship with a broad sail,
With the sky and the stars above!’

I think of him, and Neptune with
A trident, on his throne,
The sailor reading poetry
But this time, quite alone,
While coral reefs and gentle seas
Pay tribute to his life,
But I couldn’t share it now with him…
He shared it with my wife!


David Lewis Paget

(‘Sea Fever’ by John Masefield)

Annette, she was a Worthingham
And Karen, she was a Lee,
But both of them were adopted
In the war, in ’43.
They pulled them out of a rubbled house
But their folks, they couldn’t save,
And so they grew as the sisters two
With the common name, Palgrave.

As sisters, they were like chalk and cheese
Though the neighbours didn’t know,
They said that one was the milkman’s
And the other, Lord Mulrow’s.
For Annette, she was a saucy ****,
Was the wilder of the two,
While Karen, she had a stately mien
With a haughty, grand purview.

They fought like cats through their teenage years
Would curse and swear, conspire,
Annette destroyed Karen’s underwear
While Karen burned hers in the fire.
The mother was pale, and frail and ill
When she asked them both to go,
‘I don’t have to keep you anymore,
I adopted you both, you know!’

The news hit home like a thunderbolt,
They looked in each other’s eyes,
‘You mean, we’re not really sisters, Hell!’
It came as a great surprise.
Karen went to her room to brood
Annette was flooded with tears,
‘Why weren’t we told, it seems so cold,
We should have known that for years.’

So Annette got a cold water flat
While Karen lived on the Square,
Then Annette got herself pregnant, but
Nobody seemed to care.
The boyfriend didn’t appear one day
And she knew that he was gone,
She drifted into a deep despair
As time went travelling on.

She got so big that she couldn’t cope
And she thought to take her life,
And then there came a knock at the door
Just as she raised the knife.
She groaned and whispered to go away
As she lay flat out on the cot,
‘It’s Karen here, it’s your sister, dear,
I’m the only one you’ve got!’

She’d brought a parcel of food with her
And a daffodil layette,
‘I couldn’t choose between pink or blue,
Not knowing it’s gender yet.’
They hugged each other and burst in tears
For a love they hadn’t shown,
While caught in an unknown falsehood, but
Their sisterhood had grown.

David Lewis Paget

The cottage stood at the outer edge
Of the village of Helsomewhere,
It held a slate on the garden gate
That scribbled a ‘Don’t Go There!’
It housed a cat and a resident bat
And something that moved within,
A thing unseen that was quite unclean
With various types of sin.

The folk that entered the garden gate
Had never gone back there twice,
When asked, they shuddered enough to state
‘It’s something that isn’t nice!’
The weeds were thick in the garden, and
Had grown right over the path,
And filled with sand by an old wash-stand
The remains of an iron bath.

Nobody walked the bullock track
That led by the old front door,
To go to town, they’d hurry around
A path that was there before,
The cottage stood like an ancient crone
That blighted the village scene,
A pointing finger, pared to the bone
Reminding them what had been.

At night the Moon rose over the ridge
And it cast an evil glow,
Down through the leaves of the eucalypts
To the cottage, far below,
The windows looked like a pair of eyes
As they stared out through the gloom,
While something was rushing around inside
Like a demon in a tomb.

‘Perhaps we ought to have burnt it,’
Said the senior councilman,
‘It stands alone as our conscience,’ said
The crusty old farmer, Stan,
‘We have to bleed for our own misdeeds,
Including a lack of care,
Each scream was seen as a nightmare dream
When Lloyd was living there.’

When Lloyd was hosting his dinners for
The girls from a nearby town,
Nobody seemed to question them
For Lloyd was always a clown,
But screams would happen at midnight
And would often be heard at dawn,
When Lloyd was digging his garden patch
By the light of the early morn.

And Lloyd would wave to his neighbours as
They hurried along his way,
Give them a cheery greeting, crack a joke
And say ‘Gidday!’
They didn’t suspect that evil lay
Inside in that old tin bath,
The one that is filled with sand, and now
Sits there, outside by the path.

One night the villagers crept on out,
And they took it each by turn,
To set a brand to the cottage, then
Stand back to watch it burn,
But something was rushing about inside
In a black and evil cloak,
While screams had seemed to come in a tide
With the dark and acrid smoke.

The embers were floating far and wide
In the haze of a Harvest Moon,
They set up fires in the eucalypts
That rained in the village gloom,
And every cottage went up in smoke
For the villagers’ part, they share
In the deaths of thirteen innocent girls
In the Hell of Helsomewhere!

David Lewis Paget

The Moon was rising, over the hill
Along with the evening star,
They lit the lane he was walking, ‘til
He could see the lights of a car,
They were headed up in the narrow lane
So he had to jump out wide,
Then it hurtled over the flowing rill,
Rolled, and lay on its side.

He stood in shock for a moment there
Then ran to do what he could,
But flames burst out of the tangled wreck
At the edge of McNalty’s Wood.
He heard a woman, screaming in pain
Who was trapped inside the car,
But the tank blew up, as he knew it would
So he watched it, from afar.

The door on top of the wreck flew up
As the air began to scorch,
The woman climbed from the burning wreck
But was lit like a flaming torch,
She stood engulfed for a moment there
As the flames devoured her hair,
And screamed, ‘I’m coming to get you, John,
In the dead of the night, beware!’

Then all he saw was a staring skull
As the flesh peeled off the bone,
The body shuddered, and then collapsed
As he turned, and ran for home.
His heart was pounding a steady beat
As he ran, and stumbled there,
The voice that rang in his ears was shrill,
‘In the dead of the night, beware!’

He knew the woman, he knew the car
And a terror entered his soul,
He’d left her stood at the altar, while
He hid in his coward’s hole,
He’d packed his bag, and travelling things
While her father stood at the door,
Loading a pair of cartridges
And sworn to even the score.

He’d left the town in the dead of night
Had driven a hundred miles,
Buried himself in the countryside
In a shack called ‘Seven Dials’.
There were seven clocks in the tiny shack
That would tick and tock in turn,
They each were named for a crying shame
And the seventh clock was ‘Burn.’

The first was named ‘Disloyalty’
And the second ‘Coward’s Toll’,
The third had hands but a vacant face
And its name was ‘Empty Soul.’
The fourth had written across its face
A single wording, ‘Scare!’
The fifth was draped in a veil of lace
With the only word, ‘Despair.’

He thought of stopping the ticking clocks
But they ticked on through the night,
He’d wake up drenched in a sweat, and when
He rose, his face was white,
The sixth clock hung in the kitchen, was
The only clock to chime,
But then would lock, the ticking stop
While the name said, ‘Out of time!’

He lay low after the burning car
Would not go out for a week,
He locked the doors and the windows,
Every night, but took a peek,
The world outside by the darkened wood
Was a place to chill and scare,
The wind would whisper among the trees,
‘In the dead of the night, beware!’

A month went by, they buried the corpse
That they found by the burnt out car,
He thought he’d beaten the woman’s curse
So he left the door ajar,
A gale blew up and it swung the door
Out wide in the dead of night,
And a shape appeared in the doorway
As he woke in a sudden fright.

She seemed to shimmer while standing there
In a charred silk wedding dress,
‘You didn’t think you’d escape me now
That you’ve left me such a mess,’
A breeze had lifted her veil by then
There was just a moment’s lull,
Then he stared at her and she stared right back
From a charred and blackened skull.

He screamed as only a man can scream
When the terror eats his soul,
A flame burst out of the wedding dress
And devoured the woman whole,
The shack went up and the ticking stopped
Of the first six dials in turn,
But above the crackle of flames he heard
That last clock ticking, ‘Burn!’

David Lewis Paget

When Alison left the bath to run
It ruined the parquet floor,
It spilled on out like a waterspout
And ran right under the door,
She’d gone back into the bedroom, so
The spill continued to run,
Across the landing and down the stair,
‘Now look what our daughter’s done!’

We couldn’t dry out the parquetry
It swelled, and loosened the glue,
Then bits would lift and would come adrift,
I didn’t know what to do.
Then Barbara said, ‘It’s coming up,
We shouldn’t have laid it down,
I’ll go and choose some ceramic tiles
At that tiling place in town.’

I said that I’d lay the tiles myself
But Barbara would insist,
‘We really need a professional
For a job as big as this.’
I shrugged, and let her get on with it
I never could win a trick,
So the tiler that she employed was one
Ahab Nathaniel Frick.

I’d seen this tiler about the town
All hunched, and wizened and old,
His wrinkled skin was like parchment in
Some leathery paperfold.
He wore a hat with a drooping brim
So the sun never touched his face,
A puff of wind would have blown him in
To leave not a hint, or trace.

‘Are you sure that he’s up to this,’ I said,
‘He isn’t the best of men,
He’ll probably get on his knees all right
But never get up again.’
But Barbara shushed me out of there
Was keeping me well at bay,
She wanted to prove what she could do
In laying the tiles her way.

I didn’t get in to see them then
‘Til the tiles were laid, with grout,
Nor see Nathaniel Frick again,
I supposed that he’d gone out.
I stood and stared at the new laid tiles,
Their pattern was in the floor,
And Barbara, waiting proudly said,
‘What are you staring for?’

‘There’s something a-swirl in those tiles,’ I said,
‘Some pattern you didn’t mean,
The way that he’s put them together, well
There’s a sense of something unclean!’
I said the tiles made an evil face
And showed her the curving jaw,
The squinting eyes that could hypnotise
And the cheeks, so sallow and raw.

She said that she couldn’t see it then,
That I must have twisted eyes,
I wasn’t wanting to hurt her so
I tried to sympathise,
But the monster’s face was set in space
And it wouldn’t go away,
I dreamt about that face by night
And I saw it, every day.

At night, the face seemed to snarl at me
When I passed it in the gloom,
And I worried that it was set right there
Outside our daughter’s room,
Then Barbara thought she heard a noise,
An intruder in the house,
And tipped me out of the bed to chase
The night intruder out.

The moans began in the early hours
And the groans came just at dawn,
Then Alison came into our room,
‘There’s a shadow on my wall!
A man with a broad-brimmed, floppy hat
And with squinting eyes that gleamed,’
I said, ‘That’s it,’ when she had a fit
And our darling daughter screamed!

I went on out to the lumber shed
And I brought a mattock in,
While Alison jumped in the double bed
As the tiles set up a din,
A wailing, groaning, squealing sound
That would raise the peaceful dead,
I raised the mattock and smashed the tiles
Just above the monster’s head.

The tiles rose up with a mighty roar
And shattered, scattered around,
As a shadow from underneath the floor
Rose up with a dreadful sound,
It hissed, and made for the stairway, leapt
And it almost made me sick,
For fleeing out of the open door
Was Ahab Nathaniel Frick!

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

He lay in bed and he watched the sun
Beam in through the double glaze,
The leafless treetops, withered and bent
In an unforgiving haze,
His wife lay sleeping, innocent
In a dream of former times,
As the clock downstairs in the hallway gave
The last of thirteen chimes.

He slipped on down to the basement, tried
To leave his wife in grace,
Took heart, looked over his shoulder just
To see her peaceful face,
Then carefully donned the gamma suit
That they’d issued with the hood,
And slipped on out through the airlock to
Assess the neighbourhood.

The visibility through the haze
Was down to fifty feet,
The yards were blackened and burned of
Every house along the street,
He checked each one with an open door
Where the occupants had fled,
But every now and again he’d find
They’d not be gone, but dead.

He’d make a note of the time of day
Of the house, its street address,
And note if any had decomposed
So the squad could clean the mess,
His friends peered out from their windows
Watched and mouthed their mute dismay,
While he would hold up a sign to them,
‘You can’t go out today!’

It took him an hour to check each block
That he’d got from Air Defence,
He’d watch the flickering LED
And would note the roentgens,
The cloud had covered the neighbourhood
But would move along, they said,
The dust-storm muted the morning sun
And at night, the sky was red.

The Homeland Squad would deliver food
To the ones without supplies,
Would drop their cases of powdered milk
To stem the babies cries,
While Gordon Hay would complete his day,
Rush back to his lady, Sky,
Wash off the hood and the gamma suit
And hang it on up to dry.

She’d dressed and put on her make-up
Added a touch of rouge to her cheeks,
And said, ‘I’m going to pop right out,
I haven’t been out for weeks.
I need to go to the supermart,
And visit the folks on the way,’
Then waited for Gordon to shake his head,
‘You can’t go out today!’

‘I’m sick of hearing you saying that,’
She stamped, and she burst in tears,
‘How long do you think you can keep me in,
This might go on for years!
You go out there in your funny suit
And there’s nothing wrong with you,
While I’m stuck here with our baby girl,
I want to go walking, too.’

She waited until he was fast asleep
And the baby fed and dried,
Then quietly opened the airlock, took
A breath, and she walked outside,
The dust was thick and the air was hot
And her skin began to burn,
She thought she’d better buy sunscreen
At the shop, on her return.

The supermarket was boarded up,
And so were the local shops,
She didn’t see anyone on the street
Not even the local cops,
Her folks refused to answer the door
Her friends had waved her away,
And Gordon’s words had hung in the air,
‘You can’t go out today!’

She turned, went back to her home, and found
The airlock had been barred,
She beat in vain on the window pane
But her husband’s words were hard,
He saw the blisters, over her face
And the pustules on her skin,
His tears were based on her lack of grace
As he said, ‘You can’t come in!’

‘I have to protect our baby girl
And I’ll do whatever it takes,
I love you Sky, but you’re going to die,
We pay for our own mistakes.
You always were too stubborn for me
And you had to have your way.’
She cried in dread at the words he’d said:
‘You can’t go out today!’

David Lewis Paget

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

David Lewis Paget

My life was pretty well empty,
I hadn’t a friend to call,
Trying to make a friend was like
Hitting your head on a wall,
Most other people bored me,
Others had nothing to say,
I didn’t know how much longer I
Could go on living this way.

My folks had died in the autumn,
In a wreck on Highway One,
I suddenly felt like an orphan
When nobody wanted one,
My brother had gone to the tropics
My sister had gone to the west,
So there I was on my lonesome,
Just me and an old tea chest.

I looked at the chest in the corner,
It hadn’t been opened yet,
I didn’t know if I was ready for
The surprises I might get.
My sister had packed and sealed it,
She said she felt like a thief,
‘Don’t even think of opening it
Until you’re over your grief!’

It was full of our family papers,
Documents, photo’s and rings,
All the stuff that our folks had left,
Some of their favourite things,
She knew that I’d cry when I opened it,
And went through the things she’d packed,
Our family had been torn apart,
There was now no putting it back.

It was late on a Saturday morning,
And I had nothing to do,
I prised the lid off the old tea chest,
And took a deep breath or two,
I shut my eyes and I dived right in
Tipped all the stuff on the floor,
A thousand pics of a thousand things
That the family did before.

I must admit that I almost cried
When I saw my mother’s face,
Just as she’d looked when I was young
In a bonnet of Irish lace,
My father was holding me close to him
In his army uniform,
He didn’t know it would end like this
In a crash, and a firestorm.

All the sepia tints were there
And the studio photographs,
Each one holding a simple pose
To wait for the camera flash.
There were faces there unknown to me
From the family, way back when,
Victoria sat on the English throne
And our ‘Grands’ were living then.

There was one old tattered photograph
Of our Great Grandfather Jim,
******* away on a gnarled old pipe
And our great Grandma, Eileen.
Then I heard a noise and I looked around
To the corner, in the gloom,
Where an old man sat in a trilby hat
Smiling across the room.

‘Don’t be alarmed, I mean no harm,’
He said, as I went to rise,
There was something vaguely familiar
About the grey in his eyes,
‘I see you’re checking the photographs
And I thought I’d just drop in,
I keep an eye on the family ties
And you, so how have you been?’

I looked again at the photograph,
At the man in the trilby hat,
‘I don’t know whether I’m going mad,
Are you Great Grandad, or what?’
‘I am, I am, you got it in one,
I’m part of your family tree,
Your folks just asked if I’d pop right in,
They’re out there now, with me.’

‘They worry about you doing well
You’re too much on your own,
I came to give you a tip or two
To brighten your life at home.
I met Eileen in a butcher’s shop
There’s one just down at Cleve,
She watches you when you walk on by
And wears her heart on her sleeve.’

I knew the shop, I knew the girl,
I wanted to ask him more,
But where he’d sat in the corner there
Was a piece of empty floor.
I went for a walk, to buy some meat
And she smiled in a sweet surprise,
When I said, ‘Don’t think that I’m forward, now,
But my, you’ve got lovely eyes!’

David Lewis Paget

The hearse set off through the mansion gates
Pulled by a pair of greys,
Stepping high, so they’d not be late
For the church’s hymns of praise,
Lord Gordon Knox on the catafalque
Awaiting his final ride,
Just down the hill where the graveyard spilled
And spread on the eastern side.

But staring out from behind the grass,
From between each tree and bush,
There gleamed the beam of a hundred eyes
In a sacred kind of hush,
The word was out it was Gordon Knox
Set to take his pride of place,
And from the woods had come every fox
To afford his lordship grace.

For Gordon had been the Master of
The Aldermaston Hunt,
Had chased them across the countryside
More than a man can count,
But somehow managed to lose the fox
As it turned, became covert,
And often seemed to confuse the hounds
As the fox returned to earth.

Three generations had come and gone
Since the young Amelia Knox,
Had left to walk in the countryside
And found a secluded copse,
The peasants say that she fell asleep
By a well protected earth,
And Reynard Fox had uncovered her
Before she had given birth.

So Raymond was the first of the breed
In a mix of fox and man,
A Knox by name but a fox by shame
When his mother’s guilt began,
And when he had a son of his own
He could see that the eyes were sly,
And every fox in the countryside
Could tell him the reason why.

Gordon carried the bloodline on
Though he rode to fox and hounds,
He ruled the hunt with an iron fist
They were hunting in his grounds,
And every time that the quarry went
He would make a lame excuse,
The scent was wrong, or the wind was strong
Or the hounds were far too loose.

And every time that the Master died
And the hearse had trundled by,
The foxes all came out to see,
In a way, they said goodbye,
But Gordon had left no son behind
Just a daughter, Elspeth Knox,
And I heard they’d given up on her
Till they found her in some copse.

David Lewis Paget

The freighter loomed from the darkness
Its shadow high on our port,
And Jenny screamed at the starkness
Of the fate the freighter brought,
Its bow wave flowed right over the prow
Of our tiny little yacht,
We knew that we couldn’t ride it out
So whether to swim, or not?

The sea was luckily clear and warm
It had been a perfect day,
As we had lazily sailed along
The length of Innotto Bay,
As night had fallen the breeze had too
And it left us quite becalmed,
So when the freighter came ploughing through
It had seen us both alarmed.

It rose above us, this rusty hulk
That had seen much better days,
The bridge was lit, could they see us sit
Where their bow cut through the waves?
The yacht was rocked by the turbulence
That its mighty hull displaced,
And suddenly we were swamped out there
As the sea rose to my waist.

The yacht had foundered, was going down
Crushed by the mighty bow,
And we fell into the sea where we
Clung on to each other, now.
It ****** us in as it glided past
And we heard the turgid roar,
As the giant props left a wake of froth
That would **** us in, for sure.

And Jenny panicked to stay afloat
As I clung on to her arm,
But down we went as our strength was spent
Where the props would do us harm,
We saw them thrash as we sank on down
And a dull throb filled our ears,
The blades would slice like a guillotine
Was the source of both our fears.

But the violent thrash of the water there
Sent currents beneath the stern,
And we were violently ****** on down
Where the props had ceased to churn,
And when we bobbed to the surface, we
Saw the freighter disappear,
Ploughing into the distance while
We lay in the bay, to cheer.

We were only a mile beyond the reef
And beyond that lay the land,
So struck out together in relief
And I held her by the hand,
We’ll never forget that rusty hulk
As it passed, I caught it’s name,
Riven with old corruption it
Was called, ‘The Devil’s Game!’

David Lewis Paget

They’d never got on before the dance
And they certainly wouldn’t now,
For Geoffrey Raise had showered praise
On the Fireman’s girl, somehow,
And she, Charlene, was impressed, it seems
With the Engine driver’s call,
And changed her date, though it seemed too late
To the Fireman, at the ball.

They stood on the plate of the Duke of Kent
With the fireman raising steam,
Shovelling coal to the firebox
In a movement swift and clean,
He scattered the coals on the glowing bed
With a practised twist of his wrist,
While the driver kept his eyes ahead
As the steam built up, and hissed.

‘Why did you jump on Charlene then,’
Said the Fireman, Henry Rice,
During a break, his back was bent
With sweat, but his eyes were ice,
‘I don’t have to answer to you,’ said Raise,
‘Charlene was anyone’s girl,
I liked the way that she held herself
And she sure knew how to twirl.’

The train pulled out of the station with
A puff and a cloud of steam,
And clattered along the track from Klifft
On its way to Essingdean,
Pulling a dozen coaches and
A Guards van at the rear,
And a hundred and twenty passengers
At the high time of the year.

‘What would you say if I did to you
What you did to me, back then,
Cutting in on your date that night,
What was her name, that Gwen?’
‘She wouldn’t have looked at you,’ said Raise,
As he pulled the chord to toot,
‘And as far as your feelings go, old chum,
I really don’t give a hoot.’

The train was rocketing down the line,
And flew past the water tower,
While Raise had opened the ***** right up
To give the Express more power,
The gauge was inching at sixty five
As they flew past Barton Dale,
While Rice was shovelling coal once more
Though his face was pinched and pale.

He took Raise down with the shovel as
They raced through Weston Town,
Who lay, half stunned on the footplate
Hanging off and looking down.
He kicked on out at the Fireman with
His size twelve steel-capped boots,
Who reached and hung on the chord that gave
The Duke of Kent its *****.

The train was racking up seventy five
As they kicked and punched and swore
Totally out of control it passed
The Halt at Elsinore,
They narrowly missed a rumbling freight
As the points took it aside,
While Raise had yelled, ‘You can go to hell,
But control your wounded pride.’

The Fireman opened the firebox
Spraying hot coals on the plate,
‘Now dance again as you danced Charlene,
If you think that you’re oh so great.’
‘Just let me get to my feet,’ said Raise
‘Or you’re going to wreck the train.’
‘It might be time,’ said the Fireman,
‘For your life to fill with pain.’

They hit the buffers at Essingdean
And the engine left the track,
It leapt up over the platform as
The roof ripped off the stack.
Raise was told when they went to court
That he’d never be re-hired,
And Rice, for want of the girl he sought,
The Fireman was fired.

David Lewis Paget

Down in the depths of Frosty Hollow
The Dell where nobody sleeps,
The eyes are watching one another
In case some human peeps,
It sits in a time of hither and slime
Each side of a distant flood,
Where nothing is really worth the bother,
The ancient Wizard stood.

He stood by the spell of them-and-us
That he spun in a past go round,
That sought the well of the what-they-were
When the skies were close to the ground,
And nobody sought to leave the Hollow
Except in a cowl or hood,
The ways of men were hard to swallow
Outside the enchanted wood.

The stars that sparkled up in the trees
Had promised a cold come in,
But the Wizard ruled the things that matter
And various types of sin,
He ruled the currents that gave them breath,
And told of the marsh outside,
Where those who left met an evil death
In the end, so nobody tried.

And slowly, he would increase the size
Of the Dell to the world outside,
The Dell would spread on the bones of the dead
He said, in his sin of pride,
But the eyes were fed with suspicions, and
They looked to each other first,
And the first in Hell were those in the Dell
Who looked at the Wizard and cursed.

Down in the depths of Frosty Hollow
The Dell where nobody sleeps,
The eyes are watching one another
In case some human peeps,
It sits in a time of hither and slime
Each side of a distant flood,
And there you’ll find an ancient Wizard
Who lies in a pool of blood.

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 house that I rented was falling down,
I picked up the place for a song,
There weren’t many rooms that were liveable,
The plumbing and wiring were wrong,
I lit up a paraffin lantern there
To lighten the dark and the gloom,
But while still exploring, I thought I heard
A voice in the upstairs room.

I hadn’t been up in the loft ‘til then,
I’d not even mounted the stairs,
The rooms were a midden of broken toys
Of lopsided tables and chairs,
I carted the worst of them out the back,
The fire that I set lit the gloom,
Again from a window above me there
Was the voice in the upstairs room.

I couldn’t make out a word that it said
It grumbled and mumbled and moaned,
I stood and I listened and scratched my head
And to tell you the truth, I groaned.
I didn’t know what lay above me there
A squatter, a thief or a ghost,
A thief didn’t matter, a squatter I’d scatter
What worried me most was a ghost.

I went and I stood by the bottom stair
Looked up, with a feeling of doom,
The voice was whispering somewhere there,
‘You’d better be leaving here soon!’
‘The only one leaving this place is you,
Whatever, whoever you are!’
‘The only way you will be rid of me
Is by putting the lid on the jar.’

I plucked up the courage and took the stairs,
Was running, but two at a time,
The dust was heavy and thick up there,
Whipped up as I started to climb,
A haze was suffused in the room at the back
Where the window was beaming in light,
And there at a ghostly harpsichord
Was sitting a woman in white.

I stood stock still as she started to play
Bach’s Little Prelude in C,
The notes hung quivering, shivering in
The haze of the air by me,
I saw right through the woman, the dress
And the harpsichord to the wall,
There was no substance that I could see,
No substance to them at all.

The music stopped, she was looking at me
And she let out a long, loud sigh,
‘I’ve only played for two hundred years
To some visitors, passing by.
It’s never the same as it was at court
With the crinolines, bustles and lace,
And most have fled when the music played,
Without ever seeing my face.’

I looked at the jar on the mantelpiece,
A Funeral Urn with its store,
And ash was spilling, leaving a trace
With the lid that lay on the floor,
I bent to touch it and pick it up
But the woman had let out a cry,
‘I pray sir, never replace the lid,
For then I would surely die.’

I placed the lid on the Funeral Urn,
Turned back to look at her face,
The room was empty, the harpsichord
Had gone, not leaving a trace.
There was no sign of the woman in white
And the haze had faded away,
I turned and slowly descended the stairs
With a feeling of vague dismay.

For weeks I scrubbed and I tended that house,
Installed all my goods and wares,
But often found I was listening for
The sound of that voice upstairs.
So I crept in there on a winter’s eve
And I slipped the lid off the jar,
Went silently down the stairs again
Still listening, from afar.

The harpsichord struck a strident note
And it woke me up in my chair,
Then suddenly she began to sing
In a voice that was sweet and fair.
I only cover the Funeral Urn
If the vicar is passing by,
But sometimes sit at the head of the stairs
Just to hear the woman sigh.

David Lewis Paget

We’d travelled more than a hundred miles
From the nearest outback town,
The sun was roasting the plains out there
And the heat was getting us down,
We’d left all the eucalypts behind
And there wasn’t a patch of green,
Only a scrubby saltbush there
Where the natives used to dream.

We halted just as the sun went down
And Miranda let out a sigh,
‘Have ever you seen such stars as these?’
And pointed up at the sky,
The heavens shone with a mighty glow
From the stars that glittered, proud,
Each was lighting the earth below
From the inky black of its shroud.

But underneath us the ground was hot
And the track it lay, bone dry,
There’d not been even a single drop
Of rain, since the last July,
We huddled up in the four wheel drive
As the air began to chill,
I pulled a blanket across our knees
And we slept for a little while.

Miranda had some Arunta blood
From her great-grandmother’s side,
She’d learned of some of their culture, and
She had the Arunta pride,
We woke to a distant whirring sound
And Miranda sat up straight,
And murmured, ‘That’s a Tjurunga
Trying to open heaven’s gate.’

‘The white men call it a Bull Roarer,’
She said, with a hint of fear,
‘And I’m forbidden to hear it, for
It’s not for a woman’s ear.
They’ll **** me if they should find me here
For breaking their sacred law,’
She slid down over her seat, and sat
Her head down, close to the floor.

I climbed on out of the cab, and stood
Surveying the dark surround,
The whirring seemed to be closer now,
And the pitch went up and down,
An icy chill ran along my spine
As I saw a movement there,
Something slithering over the ground
Not far from where we were.

I froze in shock, and I held my breath
When I saw a pair of eyes,
Both the colour of rubies, and
Of quite enormous size,
And then I saw the head of the snake
As it ploughed a furrow, deep,
Its body the colours of rainbows, then
Miranda took a peep.

She said, ‘It’s the Rainbow Serpent,’
As the whirring sound went on,
Covered her ears and shut her eyes
And said, ‘It’ll soon be gone.’
I climbed back into the cab and locked
The door, and lay down flat,
Trembled in fear, I’d never seen
A snake as big as that.

The dawn was gradually breaking as
I took a look outside,
And there, where the ground had been quite flat
Was a creek, ten metres wide,
And water, straight from the Queensland rains
Was pouring over the land,
Sluicing along the new creek bed
Where before, there was only sand.

I’d never believed in the Dreamtime
Or the tales that the natives tell,
But somewhere the Rainbow Serpent roams
With eyes from heaven or hell,
We turned the nose of the jeep around,
Drove back to the town once more,
I’ll never return to the desert, where
You can hear the Bull Roarer’s roar!

David Lewis Paget

I’d walked back home by the clifftop path,
I’d only been gone an hour,
Rounding the point, it came into view
The sight of our Black Stone Tower.
Its ancient mystery suited me then
We’d picked it up for a song,
Nobody else had wanted it,
At the price, we couldn’t go wrong.

They said that a king had built it there
Far back in the mists of time,
And soldiers climbed by the old stone stair,
But now, thank god, it was mine.
A roof to shelter my Evelyn,
Though we supped by candlelight,
And drew our water deep from a well,
Made love when the stars were bright.

But now a breeze blew up from the cliff,
Was chill, and ruffled my hair,
And something about the Black Stone Tower
Was strange, a sense of despair.
For weeds had grown where the weeds were not
When I’d left, an hour before,
And someone had painted a bright red cross
On the Baltic Pine of the door.

It was only when I had got close up
That I saw that the red was blood,
And the door was half off its hinges,where
It was splintering, as I stood,
Then shapes began to appear to me,
Of soldiers, battering in
The Baltic Pine of this ancient door
To slay the soldiers within.

There wasn’t a single sound to hear,
There should have been clash and roar,
A mighty battle was raging in
The Black Stone Tower of war.
I called and I called for Evelyn
But there wasn’t a single trace
Of the love that I’d left alone in there,
That now, most terrible place.

I ran outside to the edge of the cliff
And stared down into the bay,
And there was the foulest, evil ship
Sails set, for sailing away.
And Evelyn strode down on the beach
While a soldier pulled at her hair,
Dragging her into a longboat as
She fought and struggled down there.

But this was a different Evelyn
To the one that I’d left at home,
The ******* the beach was dressed in peach,
My Evelyn dressed in bone,
And not in a full length courtly dress
Like you see from the days of yore,
As her ghostly shadow stepped in the boat
And sailed away from the shore.

I turned again to the Black Stone Tower
And the door was back in its frame,
There wasn’t a sign of the ****** cross
That had been there, just as I came.
And Evelyn staggered from out the door
As I cried out, ‘Where have you been?’
And she said sleepily, ‘Don’t be cross,
I’ve had an incredible dream!’

David Lewis Paget

The news spread over the countryside
As a clatter from iron rails,
The ominous sound of clacketty-clack
From their intersecting trails,
The plodding Goods of the 0-4-0
To the proud Express from Cheam,
It muttered as it was going past,
‘They’re going to get rid of Steam!’

The sudden shock brought an answering hoot
From the stack of the proud Express,
That whispered by on its 4-6-2
But shuddered to draw its breath.
‘And what will they pull their Pullmans with?’
As it passed through an April shower,
A 4-6-0 on another track:
‘They’re moving to diesel power!’

The steam from the Earl of Erin laid
A trail through the valley floor,
Its coals glowed red from the firebox grid
As the fireman shovelled more,
A Day Excursion that quietly sat
To wait for the train to pass,
Had whispered, ‘Sorry to see you go,
You’re King of the Master Class.’

The smoke that billowed from out the stack
Had turned from white to black,
The footplate shuddered, the furnace roared
As it raced along the track,
‘They say they’re moving to diesel power
And they’re getting rid of steam,’
The Earl of Erin had hurtled by
As a Tank Engine had screamed!

The driver, checking the frantic pace
Was trying to slow it down,
But nothing worked, not even the brakes,
‘We’re headed for Hampton Town!
We shouldn’t be doing sixty-five
We’re twenty over the top,
He slammed the door of the firebox shut
And the fireman’s shovel dropped.

The tender’s couplings opened up
And the Pullmans fell away,
The Earl of Erin had surged ahead
With a new found power that day,
It passed a struggling 0-4-0
As it headed toward the sea,
Gave one long blast on its whistle then
To say, ‘I’m finally free!’

The fireman jumped at the water tower,
The glass was going down,
The driver jumped when it hurtled through
The Halt at Hampton Town,
The Earl of Erin went racing on
When the sea came into view,
But locked the brakes at the water’s edge
Just as the boiler blew.

The Earl of Erin’s a rusted wreck
That still sits there on the line,
And children crawl on its footplate there
And dream of another time,
A time of dragons, a time of trains
A time they can only dream,
The age of romance, gone at last,
It died with the age of steam!

David Lewis Paget

I’d hidden away the mirrors
Packed them up and sent them off,
Taken the shine off the saucepan lids,
Sandpapered the coffee ***,
Everything that reflected I’d
Sand-blast, like the sliding doors,
Even got rid of the polisher
For shining the wooden floors.

It was very like narcolepsy when
She saw her face on a plate,
She’d go in a trance and sit for hours
In a crazy, dreamlike state,
I’d take away the reflection and
She’d sit and weep for hours,
‘You’ve taken away my beauty,’ she
Would say, and take cold showers.

It seemed like a terrible sickness that
She loved her looks so much,
She’d say, ‘If you won’t let me see myself,
I’ll just make do with touch,’
She’d run her fingers over her face
Explore each crease and mound,
And sigh to her satisfaction as
She felt her lips turn down.

I couldn’t get rid of the garden pool
That flowed on in from the brook,
Babbling over the standing stones
From the woods at Nether Hook,
I’d catch her kneeling beside the pool
And staring into its depths,
Smiling at each reflection that
Would ripple with every breath.

‘Beware of the evil Water Sprite,’
I told her more than once,
‘He takes advantage of lovely girls
For he hates to be outdone.
He’ll lure you into a shady pool
With guile, and his tender lies
And hold you down ‘til you surely drown,
You’ll avoid him, if you’re wise.’

She told me then of a vision that
She’d seen, that of a prince,
He’d smiled at her from the water but
She hadn’t seen him since.
‘That’s not a prince but the Water Sprite
And he’s trying to lure you down,
To put your face to the water, but
I’ve told you once, you’ll drown.’

The water was babbling gently on
A sunny day in Spring,
In shades of the weeping myrtles and
The sound of cuckooing,
Miranda was knelt beside the pool
And I saw her head go down,
When claws reached out of the water
Pulled her in, without a sound.

I raced across and I seized her hair
And I pulled her from the pool,
But claws had raked at her pretty face,
She said, ‘I feel a fool!
I should have listened to you, I know
But I thought that just one kiss…’
But he had turned to a monster and
Had bitten her rose red lips.

I put the mirrors all back in place
And I bought new shiny pans,
Polished the floor, you can see your face
But she hides behind her hands,
She never looks in a mirror now
Though her scars are healed and white,
But goes each day to poison the pool
To **** off the Water Sprite.

David Lewis Paget