PROLOGUE
They said there
was no such thing as society and made it come true. In
the guise of 'progress' they came like thieves in the
night. Shut down the mills and workshops, concretecapped
the pitheads and grassed over the stacks. Cleaned off the
grime and soot, ripped up the sidings, blew up the
cooling towers.Turned farmhouses into weekend cottages,
barns into commuter homes. A waymark on every stile and
stoop, Range Rovers and waxies - southern strangers
Thatcher-rich, hiking the price of housing. Closed the
post office, the branch bank and the corner shop,
purloined the paving, tarmacked the setts. Turned the 'Cosy'
fleapit into a supermarket, the Ebenezer Baptists into a
dole office for the natives. They have wrapped the ashes
of our vigour to sell to tourists, fossiled our
heritage , Tradition in a can, witchpiss with a widget,
half baked our passion in a Bronte Bun!
But if you turn from the hands on
holographic museum case and peer through the window of
recollection you will still sense blood and iron in the
silence of a spring morning, when the reservoirs are
glass and a faint breeze sighs through the scored rocks
and knotty ling. There is a spirit in the silent delf and
the dank, deserted level, a spirit unexcorcised in
the bare iron trees and the greasy boards of the deserted
mill. The rain knows, the wind hears and the rocking
stones remember. Blood and iron - unsilenced, peopling
the past and haunting the present, a muse of mossy
tombstones a shout of shattered stones and a babble of
belonging - splashed on a canvas of Brigantian Whispers.
JIM JARRATT 2001
Copyright Jim Jarratt 2001