Romsey sub Aqua
Feb. 22nd, 2014 09:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
steepholmThe River Test is a chalk-born, chalk-borne chalk bourn, that rises somewhere in the Ettinland north of Andover and hurries south as fast as it can, seeking a sanctuary for its clear waters in my home town of Romsey. There it makes a lattice of its many fingers, cracks its knuckles, and winds more leisurely through and under our streets, joining into one single stream only at the town boundary.
It's not a river that's prone to flooding, but even Romsey has been affected by recent events. Most of the houses in my mother's street have sandbags (hers is up a slight slope, luckily), and the Memorial Park where I played as a child is closed due to waterlogging from the streams that run either side of it. My phone isn't great at video, but this gives a sense of the speed of the water, even along one of the river's minor arteries:
Meanwhile, there's no way to walk up the footpath to the Salmon Leap and Green Hill - it's all over sandbags.
I've occasionally compared Romsey to Trumpton, and in that light the view of the bandstand is particularly affecting:
Indeed, the sight has woken in me a deep desire to write a Trumpton/Waste Land mashup...
The Trumpton brigade’s
Diurnal oompahpah
Is stilled.
Consider Captain Flack
Subdued to his element
Soused as a salmon
‘tache whiskers
Tenterhooked
On park railings, buttons
Popped like bindweed flowers
From the sheath.
Flack’s men from Pugh to Grub are gone,
Their sinews sinuous, weed-teased,
Piked and trouted – yet
They were elevated once, as
Tall and handsome as you.
It's not a river that's prone to flooding, but even Romsey has been affected by recent events. Most of the houses in my mother's street have sandbags (hers is up a slight slope, luckily), and the Memorial Park where I played as a child is closed due to waterlogging from the streams that run either side of it. My phone isn't great at video, but this gives a sense of the speed of the water, even along one of the river's minor arteries:
Meanwhile, there's no way to walk up the footpath to the Salmon Leap and Green Hill - it's all over sandbags.
I've occasionally compared Romsey to Trumpton, and in that light the view of the bandstand is particularly affecting:
Indeed, the sight has woken in me a deep desire to write a Trumpton/Waste Land mashup...
The Trumpton brigade’s
Diurnal oompahpah
Is stilled.
Consider Captain Flack
Subdued to his element
Soused as a salmon
‘tache whiskers
Tenterhooked
On park railings, buttons
Popped like bindweed flowers
From the sheath.
Flack’s men from Pugh to Grub are gone,
Their sinews sinuous, weed-teased,
Piked and trouted – yet
They were elevated once, as
Tall and handsome as you.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2014-02-23 01:39 am (UTC)February is the cruellest month, slugging
Sandbags over the slough land, drowning
Memory and desire, sucking
Gum boots with cold mud.
Winter kept us wet...
Nine
(no subject)
Date: 2014-02-23 05:04 pm (UTC)You ain't kidding, sister.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-02-23 04:14 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-02-23 05:04 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-02-23 12:06 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-02-23 05:04 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-02-23 12:26 pm (UTC)Poor Captain Flack. I hear the bells of the station telephone ringing beneath the waves...
(no subject)
Date: 2014-02-23 05:05 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-02-23 09:40 pm (UTC)But at my Flack from time to time I hear
The sound of whistles and motors which brings
Barney McGrew and Cuthbert to Mrs Porter in the spring...
(no subject)
Date: 2014-02-24 07:36 am (UTC)“You bought my carnations first a year ago;
They called me the carnation woman.
—Yet when you sent Mr Troop to move me on from the town square,
Where I was resting, gin sodden, I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Awake nor asleep, and I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.
Wo hat mein Leben gegangen"?
(no subject)
Date: 2014-02-24 07:59 am (UTC)