Times change don’t they?
“Are there no prisons?”
“Are there no workhouses?”
Asked Mr. Scrooge back in the decade
Known as ‘The Hungry Forties”,
When asked to assist with charity,
A charity that was mostly Christian rather than secular.
Times change don’t they?
‘’We plough the fields and scatter the good seed on the land
And it is fed and watered by God’s almighty hand’…
I grew up singing that as a schoolboy,
Not knowing then, that it was a hymnal retort
To Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species …
Times change don’t they?
And when I sang that as a schoolboy,
We collected and distributed the fruits of the harvest
To senior citizens in the area,
Many, I suspect, widowed in the Great War,
And our posh head-teacher would not allow
Anything as common as tinned food
To sully the cornucopia in the hall,
Times change don’t they?
Then we started thinking of ‘The Third World’,
As it was known then,
Charity no longer started at home,
In the boom-time 1960s,
But when beggars returned to the streets
In the 1980s,
Tins were needed at home,
Times change don’t they?
And now, in a new century,
In the last two weeks,
I have fed the homeless in the streets around Kings Cross,
Written lessons about Mr. Scrooge –
And his redemption –
Written lessons about the cruelty of Stroud’s workhouse,
And now I am searching for the tins again,
For families,
For Stroud’s Food Bank,
For charity, once more, begins at home.
Times change don’t they?
Do they?