‘Cata, pick up the children, then
We’ll all away to the woods,
They say there’s a mighty army come
To steal our homes and goods,
They’re capturing slaves along the way
So we need to be aware,
These men of steel with their breastplates on
Take children with fair hair.’
Sca had looked at his wife, she had
The hair of ripened corn,
And so had both of their children from
The day that they were born,
But he was dark, from the Iceni
And his face was painted blue,
He’d come from the beach they’d landed on
Where the blood was mixed with dew.
‘I’ve never seen quite so many ships
They’re standing off in the bay,
And way on out, the horizon seems
To be filled with ships today,
They’re crushing all that’s before them,
Our chiefs are down on their knees,
They know we can’t over-awe them
With our spears and charioteers.’
‘This army’s bringing its mighty gods
And they have this one called Mars,
He rules, they say, each clashing of arms
From way up there in the stars,
Their shields are linked in a solid wall
That we can’t get through to fight,
They’ll rule us now as they rule the Gaul
So we must be gone tonight.’
They made their way to a hermit’s cave
And they found some shelter there,
But the Legion came and they took his wife
For the sake of her golden hair,
His children too, were taken away
From the land of their loving home,
And the people gasped in the marketplace
When the two were sold, in Rome.
While he fled back to the Iceni
And he waged guerrilla war,
Served in the army of Boadicea
Once she had come to the fore.
She stood, six foot and her tumbling hair
Was red, right down to her waist,
‘A terrible sight,’ the Romans said
As she laid their cities waste.
They’d stolen all of her lands and laid
The lash across her back,
They’d ***** both of her daughters,
They were fond of doing that,
They didn’t know that the Iceni
As a tribe were more than bold,
Or of the terrible price they’d pay
When they cast her out in the cold.
She wiped out Camulodunum,
And slaughtered the Romans there,
Went on to sack Londinium,
This woman with flame red hair,
She burnt the city down to the ground
While the population fled,
The only people that stayed in town
Were lying in heaps, the dead!
They slew the Hispana Legion
That had marched down from the north,
Went on to Verulamium
And carried a flaming torch,
The Romans there were slaughtered,
The city razed to the ground,
But not before the warrior Sca
Had saved the wife he found.
She’d been enslaved in a Roman house
Had disappeared for years,
And when he pulled her out of the flames
She couldn’t see him for tears,
So they fled to the northern borders where
The Romans held no sway,
And their blond haired, blue-eyed offspring,
They still live there today.
David Lewis Paget