Bones! Poem by David Lewis Paget

I well remember Sir Gordon Fitch
As much for his wealth as his plain language,
A spade was a 'bloody shovel' to him,
In truth, he was an arrogant man.

The Seventh Earl in a Stately Home,
But ruined then, half falling down
Though what remained was a grand old pile
It sat in the woods by Barkly Stile.

Three living rooms and a massive hall,
And fifteen rooms if I do recall,
The house had seventeen chimneys there
Soot-caked and brooding, beyond repair.

Three of the fires were boarded in,
The rooms so cold with the house snowed in,
We shivered and sat with our coats still on,
Scarves and gloves in the morning room.

When questioned, Gordon would shrug and say,
'Don't know, old man, it was just that way!
My Gramps did anything he saw fit,
A hundred years since that fire was lit.'

'My father told me to leave it there
The chimney smoked, and it choked the air,
There was no heat from the fire when lit -
You'll just have to make the best of it! '

My bedroom, too, like an old ice chest,
I couldn't sleep, I could get no rest,
I made my way to the library
Where a fire burned, and the books were free.

Old manuscripts ran along one wall,
Family papers, brittle and old,
Some volumes of ancient erotica
Under the name 'Biologica'.

Early prints of Victorian Dames
With not a stitch, and of course, no names,
I spent too long in there, I'll avow,
Comparing the women of then, with now.

I soon got restless and turned to walls
Of papers dealing with Barkly Hall,
Dry old screeds of entail and law
Way back to the old Crimean War.

One such cutting that caught my eye
Had told of the village of Barkly Stile,
A lad, just seven, had slipped away,
The villagers searched for him, night and day.

They searched the woods, they scoured the wold,
The ancient bell in the steeple tolled,
They set the hounds in the fields round there
But nothing was seen of Benjamin Clare.

Benjamin Clare had been and gone
Like a rainbow after a summer storm,
His mother did nothing at all but weep,
His father, he was the chimney sweep.

They left the village of Barkly Stile,
Came up in the world, so ran the tale,
They bought a house that was grand, complete,
A little bit rich for a chimney sweep.

I mulled on it, went back to my room,
Shivered and shook in the marble tomb,
Took the poker and found release
By prising the boards from the mantelpiece.

They fell away, piled up on the floor,
I walked to the passage and locked the door
Then peered on up through the chimney space
But all was dark in that soot-caked place.

I found in a cupboard a curtain rod
Which I poked up there, and began to prod,
When down with a rattle and caked with soot
There clattered the bones of a tiny foot.

And then some movement began up there
As weight was shifted, a tuft of hair,
Some ragged pants and a dirty shirt
And bones crashed down in the dust and dirt.

The skull fell out on the parquetry,
And lay there, looking on up at me,
My breath came out like a mist in there,
I'd solved the puzzle of Benjamin Clare!

He seemed to be grinning all over his face
Finally free from that dreadful place,
He'd long been stuck in that foetid air
Since the day that his father sent him there.

They'd paid him off, that I could see,
A house for his silence - Infamy!
Lord Gordon wasn't amused at all,
'The peasants will love it in Barkly Stile! '

'Why did you have to interfere?
You should have just left the blighter there,
He couldn't get out when it mattered most
And you can't light a fire, under a ghost! '

Two more bodies were found, at least
In the downstairs fireplace chimney-piece,
Another was buried just under the stair,
Suffocated, like Benjamin Clare.

I'm never invited to Stately Homes
Since the word passed round that I'd found old bones,
Their secrets are safe in the family plots
If I'm kept from their soot-caked chimneypots.

16 January 2009