social

 

They’ve pulled down the village club;

all that’s left’s a stone and plaque to war they said was great.

Starter homes now stand between the one-time shop and pub;

the first grey tentacles perhaps, of yet another sink estate.

In the shadow of the quarry face the limekiln chimney’s long returned to dust

and railway veins to all the world are gone to rot and rust.

 

Here marriages were sealed, and torn,

children christened, birthdays blessed with friends,

friendships foundered, died and were reborn

and solemn wakes for those who’d reached their ends.

No favoured tankard waits behind a bar at six for lime-dry lips;

no ashtray overflows with Woodbine butts or lipsticked filter tips.

 

Once weekly wages balanced on the falling of a card,

dominoes clicked and cracked like old black bones,

a jukebox sang that love was soft and times were hard

and memories were soundtracked by Elvis or the Stones.

Cortina back seats in the car-park darkness kindled accidental lives

and instinct conquered innocence to turn schoolgirls into wives.

 

Here was release in pies and pints from drudgery and graft,

where comics on the sequin stage sold jokes in black and blue,

where rock hard men from rock hard lives drank and sang and laughed

and left their Monday mornings at the far end of the queue.

Where strippers writhed on Sundays while wives stayed home and cooked

and through mushy veg and dried-up meat they’d swear they never looked.

 

Always a do on Saturday night, always the Marks and Spencer shirt

and bingo (was she worth it?) with a hundred prayers for every call

and while a fat bloke sang just like Tom Jones they’d drink, they’d dance, they’d flirt;

a hundred lives, a hundred small reflections in the facets of a mirror ball.

Here the old went out to grass to take their turn upon the velvet bowling green,

beside the Co-op, pub and church, with the playground and the graveyard in-between.

 

It’s here he lies, beside old names returned to rock and earth

while time limps slowly by in heavy quarry boots.

The world’s a journey of those few short steps through life to death from birth;

and when we fell the trees we cannot save the roots.

The old men who remember him are fewer every day, sheltered in the quiet lych-gate seat,

but all that’s left’s the echo of a barmaid calling time, and a losing bingo ticket blowing up the empty street.