At six o’clock we cleaned our cells,
At seven all was still,
But the sough and swing of a mighty wing
The prison seemed to fill,
For the Lord of Death with icy breaths
Had entered in to kill.
The Lord of Death roamed Reading Gaol when playwright and celebrity Oscar Wilde resided there, as punishment for loving a man poetically, physically and publicly. Rail travellers had spat on him as he stood on the platform before he began his journey to Reading, in the cast-iron manacles of a convict.
I travelled the same train, un-manacled, in the company of family members, all of whom I love publicly, one of them poetically, others with fatherly and grandfatherly tenderness.
We strolled the banks of the Kennet, beside Reading Gaol and I thought of Oscar.
I read aloud from his famous ballad.
I know not whether laws be right,
Or whether laws be wrong;
All that we know who lie in gaol
Is that the wall is strong:
And that each day is like a year,
A year whose days are long.
We know now that the law which convicted the playwright was wrong, so we, the humans who live in these regions, changed it.
But walls remain strong and days continue long, for many.
A lone swan cruised the Kennet, then glided under an office block and away. A grand-daughter pottered and tottered. A mother scampered to keep her safe.
I read verses to the woman seated askance upon a love-seat, set under the prison walls.
But though lean Hunger and green Thirst
Like asp with adder fight,
We have little care of prison fare,
For what chills and kills outright
Is that every stone one lifts by day
Becomes one’s heart by night.
Then we walked on, through the ruined Abbey, which monarchs built, then tumbled. The stones their subjects lifted remain, humanly shaped and elegant in their desolation. We walked into Forbury Park, inviting in the chilly Autumn sunlight. A grotesque cast-iron lion stood high upon a pedestal, on which were etched the names of local lads who had perished in the imperial war in Afghanistan in the 1800s.
Lads who were loved and who themselves loved, until tossed into the growling maw of war.
We walked on.
There is no glory or joy to be had in cast-iron manacles or war memorials.
Coffee, cake, conversation, the smile of a child.
Petty things, perhaps, might yet save us from further immolation.
For they starve the little frightened children
Till it weeps both night and day:
And they scourge the weak, and flog the fool,
And gibe the old and grey,
And some grow mad, and all grow bad,
And none a word may say.
It is a season of war refugees. Of children drowning, not smiling. Of screams and wailing, not conversation. Of cold briny suffocation, not coffee. Of death, not cakes.
It is always such a time. Boats collapse in short spans of water as great cargo and passenger crafts plough past. Follies of Empire repeat and persist.
The brackish water that we drink
Creeps with loathsome slime,
And the bitter bread they weigh in scales
Is full of chalk and lime,
And Sleep will not lie down, but walks
Wild-eyed, and cries to time.
Stephen Fry, with an excerpt from The Ballad of Reading Gaol
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QMQK0aWpAPY
Afghan war memorial in Forbury Gardens, Reading
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forbury_Gardens#/media/File:Forbury_Gardens,_Reading.jpg
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