Boscastle Revisited

Boscastle, after the flood

We're off on holiday tomorrow to sunny Cornwall, where we lived for some years round the turn of the millennium. My eldest daughter is staying behind to hold the fort (she has a good job at the moment and is saving towards university, so quite rightly didn't fancy the idea of two weeks in a crowded tent with her parents and assorted siblings). But the rest of us will be stretching out in the glorious rain ... I mean sun ... for the next couple of weeks.

Meanwhile, here's a Cornish poem from my forthcoming collection, Camper Van Blues. It's never been published before, even in a poetry magazine, so I thought Raw Light could have it before it becomes crystallised in book form.

This poem, 'Rain', is a sister poem to my shorter poem 'Flood at Boscastle', which appeared in Poetry Review a while back.

'Flood at Boscastle' came out of notes I made a few years ago whilst in the Bull Ring in central Birmingham (and reading Robin Robertson's book 'Swithering', interestingly enough). I expanded those initial notes over several months, remembering what it was like to live at Boscastle before the flood, the devastation it had caused compared to the memory of the neat little village that we had in our heads, then pared that material down to create 'Flood at Boscastle', which is available to read on my Salt Publishing page.

It was only in late 2007 that I returned to the discarded notes and began cutting away at them, moving sections, adding new pieces, experimenting with various different forms, and eventually ended up with this much longer poem, 'Rain', presented in couplets. Please note though, since I'm not greatly skilled at HTML and don't have time to fiddle with this, that in the book each second line is indented. Here they both sit snugly against the left-hand margin.

Meanwhile, I hope you all have a great summer, and for my own part, that it doesn't flood again while we're back in Cornwall!

Jx

*

RAIN

I

First, there was a rustle of frogs
unseen in bracken, parched

singing for rain
like all the frogs of the Amazon, for rain

like the beginning of things
over tired roofs and gutterings, for rain

deep and steady
over cliff paths and gorse

where workers once held land
strip upon strip

shining under the deluge, for rain
in the blown-out ford

slung black with, waist-deep in water
from these hills

hard-beat-against, untenable, for rain
falling through bruised light

grey-purple onto fishing nets
like giant spiders’ webs

draped in gleaming strands
across the wet stone quay

her cobbled streets back-lit
with a silver tattoo, with RAIN

the sheer thirst of it
the first of it

a rustle of frogs (unseen in bracken)
parched, singing for rain

like all the frogs of the Amazon.



II

I came there most days in search of sea,
blind with it,

that salt blue slap of the cliff’s edge,
shy gaggle of houses

curved like a woman’s hips
about a sleeping river, her upturned face

beautiful (though wrinkled in summer;
mud ruts in high grass)

and still the rustle of frogs
parched, unseen,

singing for rain
like all the frogs of the Amazon.

I came for the gravestones, stern
under the downpour at Forrabury

already furred black with,
bolted with water

swelling the river
at the hard mouth of the harbour

its wrung neck
and sling-shot exit a jostle

of water against rock, narrowing
and funnelling,

churning
and trammelling up RAIN.

Perched antediluvian,
that’s how I remember it,

grey stone and Cornish slate
from that prehistoric crater at Delabole,

wind turbines
white noise in the dusk

and the sharpish approach to the harbour,
its corniche turns

and wind-sheer drop, gorse bright,
from the cliff edge

where I would come most days
in search of sea

(rocking the child inside, imagining flight,
that first curious step).

Most days I came in search of sea,
the constant boom and suck

of water on rock
like the beginning of things,

like salt, like rain,
like frogs, unseen in bracken,

singing, deep and steady,
thalassa/sea

like all the frogs of the Amazon.



III

And where the stifled river met
the dirty tide

it threw up bones of things, oddments
and fish, and wood adrift,

torn branches still in bud,
salted wet-black spars

and plastic bottles, bags,
arrow-tips of glass

rubbed down to frost
and always the rain

freakish in summer,
the frogs singing

and surging the blind river
down to the sea, down to wild water,

to that filthy driven flood
breaking its banks

and punching through walls,
bouncing campers and cars

and houses aside,
that old dirty tide

alive with rubbish and blossom
white as cottages

and whole trees, blown green to the sea,
a stone bridge cracked

and tossed in the long surge forward
EXCEPT

No hands were lost –
no hands were lost, even as cars bobbed off

sea-drunk into brickwork, crumbling
as cars weaved

battered and jobbed
and the edge of a building broke first

then the rest shot free into the foam
swept loose

by the blank untenanted ark
of a mobile home

and love poured down like rain, unseen,
and the frogs sang on

like all the frogs of the Amazon.

Environmental Action Blog Day: Flood at Boscastle

Last week I signed up to the Blog Action Day campaign, where registered bloggers post something about the environment today, October 15th. Being busy as usual, I didn't feel able to work up some lengthy discussion about how I feel about the environment. But I am able to post up this poem, which came out of an environmental disaster that took place a few years ago, the devastating and wholly unexpected floods at Boscastle, Cornwall.

As a former resident of Boscastle - we moved the summer before the flood - whose teenage daughters both worked in the Spinning Wheel Restaurant, which was absolutely gutted and destroyed by the flood-waters, I was naturally keen to put something down on paper about the disaster. The poem below, 'Flood at Boscastle', is what emerged, and was published last year in the Poetry Society magazine, Poetry Review.

The small town of Boscastle is awash - if you'll pardon the expression - with shops connected to New Age spirituality, divination and witchcraft, possibly because of a long-standing connection between the village and the occult, and not least because of the presence of the world-famous Museum of Witchcraft, situated in the town along the river bank itself. So it seems a little ironic, in the light of these factors, that nobody saw this disaster coming!

My poem does not knock New Age spirituality per se, but it does, I feel, point out that some matters can still be adequately dealt with by using what some might refer to as 'natural magic', also known as common or folk lore, rather than all the expensive and overly-sophisticated paraphernalia associated with the modern craft.


FLOOD AT BOSCASTLE


Ten steps down, through Sargasso weeds
green as the felt walls
of a fish tank, is a door
through which only haruspices may pass, bearded
and with credit cards,
to buy sacred books
and strange instruments for scrying
so they might peer inside
the living heart
and say which house survives,
which doesn’t.

Portal invulnerable, they cry,
to the left-hand of the rising river,
thy charmed walls shall not be blowholes
for the unclenched well of the waters,
no spiraculum mirabile
breathing mud into the underworld.

Later, stripped to the waist, men dig
blackened books
from the whale ribs of a cottage,
then stamp up through mud
to the Cobweb
for a finger or two of whisky,
predicting more rain
on the print of a wetted thumb.


First published in Poetry Review

Floods at Boscastle Again

You may know by now that Boscastle has flooded again. Not as dreadfully as before, but enough to scare the residents, I'm sure, and put the emergency services back on alert. You can find some on-the-spot photographs taken by residents here.

The devastation of August 16th 2004 was something I remember well, though I was on the other side of the country at the time, holidaying in Norfolk. Steve and I had checked into a small old-fashioned coaching inn in Swaffham, a few miles from the recreated 'Iceni Village' at Cockley Cley which we were planning to visit the next day, and had rung home to make sure the kids were okay before heading out for dinner. To our horror we heard from one of my daughters that our beloved Boscastle had been struck by an enormous wall of water, with many of the riverside buildings gutted by the flood, one washed away entirely. Dinner forgotten, we immediately switched on the small television set in our hotel room and spent the next few hours following the intensive news coverage instead.

We had only recently moved away from Boscastle, where we had lived for nearly a year, up near the ancient church on Forrabury Hill, and in nearby Camelford for three years before that. So we were not casual viewers, but were watching familiar streets and buildings engulfed in a torrent of mud, branches, cars and other debris being swept down the river - now occupying the main street - towards the tiny bottleneck harbour. Not only that, but we knew most of the people who were interviewed in the immediate aftermath, many of them utterly shocked and no more able to believe what had happened than we could, hundreds of miles away.

With thousands of others, we saw the television footage of that free-floating camper van as it struck the white-washed wall of the Harbour Lights shop; an instant later, the historic building had vanished into the water. And the world-famous Boscastle Museum of Witchcraft - a fascinating place we had often visited - had not managed to escape either, even though it was set back from the river bank. The whole thing was surreal, because we simply couldn't link what we were seeing with the village where we had lived and which we knew to be such a quiet, uneventful little place.

Friends, too, had been severely affected. The distraught owner of the Spinning Wheel Café, one of the businesses worst hit by the flood, had employed both my teenage daughters as waitresses for several years. If we had not moved away, they would undoubtedly have been working there that afternoon.

As we sat watching the television, I remember feeling sick as it was revealed how the large front window of the Spinning Wheel Café had been blown out by the sheer force of the water, sweeping through the building from the river which ran just behind and below the premises. The staff managed to climb onto the roof and had to be winched to safety by helicopters. As the water receded, we could see the building itself in ruins, awash with mud, unrecognisable. Just one of many livelihoods destroyed in a few hours that day. And the only consolation was that no lives had been lost.

Last year, recalling the devastation at Boscastle, I began work on what I hoped would be a long poem or perhaps a short sequence of poems about the flood. It's still 'in progress' but one of the pieces that emerged from that attempt has just been published in the summer issue of 'Poetry Review', which came out this Wednesday. It features real places in the village, including the famous old Cobweb Inn, just high enough above the river to escape the worst of the flood, and one of the many occult shops in the area, a tiny but beautiful place tucked away down a flight of steps just shy of the main bridge into the village, named after one of the cornerstones of Druidic belief, the realm of the 'Otherworld'.

I dithered over the title for ages, but in the end decided on something very obvious and prosaic: 'Flood at Boscastle'. I'm hoping that at some point in the future I'll feel able to publish the rest of the work I've done on the same subject. Whether the title of that particular poem will then have to change, I'm not sure.

So within forty-eight hours of that poem being published, Boscastle is under water yet again. Let's hope it remains a minor incident this time. Otherwise people may begin to suspect that I had something to do with it ...