We’d picked up the cottage for peanuts, as
It sat on the edge of a wood,
The air was damp and we used a lamp,
No power in that neighbourhood,
But the sun came filtering in through the leaves
On the pleasant summer days,
It was like we were living a hundred years
In the past, using former ways.
We carried our water in from a well
That sat just outside the door,
We had to lower a wooden pail
And it slopped all over the floor,
But Meredith laughed, and said it was fun,
She felt like a pioneer,
‘I’m getting to know how things were done
In the neck of the woods, round here.’
We fired the stove and the hearth with wood,
Gathered among the trees,
For branches fell, in the storms as well
When the wind was more than a breeze,
I chopped it up on a wooden block
And carted it all inside,
To see it stacked by the kitchen clock
Gave me a sense of pride.
Upstairs was a single bedroom with
An attic room beside,
The walls were covered with wallpaper
From a distant time and tide,
The bedroom was an ocean blue
And the attic was painted green,
I said to Meredith, ‘Shield your eyes,
It’s the brightest thing I’ve seen.’
The damp had got in the attic wall
And the paint had started to rot,
Up in one of the corners you
Could see a slight fungus spot,
But we didn’t need the room just then
So I said, ‘Just let it be.
I’ll find the time to attend to it
When the rest has set me free.’
But Meredith’s sister came to stay
So we had to use the room,
We turned it into a bedroom with
A flick of a whisking broom.
Rhiannon was a beauty, I’ll
Admit that she took my breath,
So young, and with her life unsung
And yet she was close to death.
She’d been and slept in the Green Room
For a week, or maybe more,
When she said, ‘I fell, and I feel unwell,’
Then she coughed up blood on the floor.
So Meredith was distraught, and thought
She’d sleep at her sister’s side,
But early the following morning she
Then told me her sister died.
She stayed with her sister’s body there,
She said it was like a tomb,
And soon my Meredith coughed up blood,
She said ‘It’s an evil room!’
A doctor came with the ambulance
And looked at the flaking mould,
Then said, ‘I think it’s the paint, my dear,
I’ve heard of this stuff of old.’
He scraped it then, and he tested it
And he came back round to see,
‘You know that paint’s full of arsenic,
There’s a well known history.’
And life was never the same for us
When we sat in the cottage gloom,
I could always hear Rhiannon’s cough
Up in that attic room.
While Meredith put the blame on me
Packed up her things and left,
She said that I should have scraped it off,
Then left me, feeling bereft,
She’d lost her sister, and I lost her
So I sit alone in the gloom,
My heart has stopped like a ticking clock,
And the cottage, now, is a tomb.
David Lewis Paget