CHANGING LANDSCAPES

I am fascinated by how writers are molded by landscape. I grew up in Swansea in South Wales; the same town [now a city] as Dylan Thomas. His poetry and stories are full of the middle-class Welsh landscape which shaped him.

I lived in contrasting landscapes; the working class slag-heaps of my Grandparent’s area and the middle-class seascape of mine. While I was fortunate to live in a lovely house over-looking the sea, my Grandmother lived most of her life in a tiny terraced house with my Grandfather and 8 children in a poor area of Swansea. 

Near her tiny house were the awful slag heaps of a past mining community. The area was haunted by a generation of men who toiled like moles in the Welsh mines and who lived in permanent darkness during the winter.  Reading about the harshness of miners' family lives made me appreciate how lucky I was.   

The changing landscape of industrialized South Wales led me to write a poem about a lost boy in the early 20th century who was forced into the mines by poverty. I hope you are moved by it.

 

The Black Mountain

Not a sound to be heard except Mam,

moving round our candled kitchen,     

cutting me door-steps of bread

as she had for my Da.

I put on his clothes:

his cloth-cap and worn jacket,

singlet, flannel shirt and moleskin

trousers to protect the knees.

They outgrew me by many years

but Mam didn’t laugh or even smile

as she passed me Da’s tin box silently.

My first night underground

it was to be and my heart was heavy

with leaving my Mam and my books.

I joined the stream of men as they hobnailed

up the street towards the black mountain,

13 – a late starter – terrified of the dark

and the avarice in the eyes of rats.

My Mam stood still in the candle-light.

My sisters slept... dreaming of dolls.

[Published in The New Writer. 1997] 

Think how differently Emily Bronte’s book “Wuthering Heights” would be is she had grown up in the softer landscape of S.E. England and not in Haworth, overlooking the wild Yorkshire moors. If she had, I don't think Heathcliff would have existed.

I wrote this poem after visiting Haworth and the wind-swept Moors. I imagined her walking there, drinking in the wild landscape around her.

Emily

She cannot think of anything more beautiful:

the Pennine Chain cutting clean through England,

and Haworth standing firm; an outlying spur:

wild and windy. Flanked by the River Worth.

That morning she crosses the bridge and climbs

the narrow cobbled streets lined with small houses;

needing to walk away from prayers and gravestones;

the sound of people; the prison of Parsonage walls.

Behind the Parsonage, through the fields - the Moors;

purple in summer sun and scoured by winds

which breathe a wilderness of furze and whinstone

into life, yet cannot move a browsing sheep.

Atlantic-driven clouds now sweep her clean

to hear the becks tumble words down rocks;

to touch their leaping thread; to feel the winds

inflect her lungs with mill-stone gritted breath. 

[The 'becks' are water.]