So here I am in my front room in Rodborough, Stroud;
I looked out of my front room window,
To look for John Frost’s ghost climbing up Rodborough Hill,
3,000 gathered up there on the common,
Where I so often picture them,
John Frost on the horse drawn cart,
Addressing the crowds.
I took an evening walk to gaze at Sugar Loaf,
Far beyond the silver Severn,
Thinking of Stroud’s Five Valleys,
And the valleys of Newport,
The rush of rivers,
Topography, Industry,
The rush of history …
A few days later at the Chartist Convention:
There we were, like two old Chartists
Plotting in the churchyard at St. Woolas,
John, puffing on a roll up, like it was an old clay pipe,
Me, talking scripts, John Frost, cameras and our film,
Right by the Chartist memorial plaque,
When you, Pat, suddenly appeared, smiling,
With a gift, a volume of Thomas Cooper’s
The Purgatory of Suicides,
Written in prison after the Plug Riots:
Close to a thousand Spenserian stanzas
Of ‘Prison Rhyme’,
Expressing the radicalism
Of ‘The Hungry Forties’
(‘SLAVES, toil no more!’),
Ideas that made Disraeli stop and ponder,
And influenced Charles Kingsley’s Alton Locke,
Let alone thousands of Chartists by their firesides.
I was quite overwhelmed –The fading afternoon sun, The memorial, The autumnal leaves,
The setting, The generosity of the gift, The utter unexpectedness of such a gift, The sensitive symbolism of such a gift –Tears welled up in my eyes, And stayed with me though the afternoon twilight.
After I left the Chartist Convention,
I travelled by train under a Hunter’s Moon,
The Severn a floodtide of moonlight,
Wondering whose hands had first opened that book,
Whose fingers had first turned over those pages,
Whose eyes had first scanned the words by candle-light …
Reading aloud and sharing the words,
As I shall do to link space and time:
Newport and Stroud and Past and Present.