Night school

Dad mended our shoes with bicycle tyres on a last, detail of Fresh Air and Poverty quilt

Dickens takes some reading, he does

Descriptive is Dickens

Went to night school

And asked for more.

Now take my life

Born in a poor family

In the village,

School were pretty basic.

Ordinary kids, expectations not great

Didn't mind them not being.

School, I played the wag

Down to the the stream.

Youths hanging around to find work

The long chains of iron

Or gold, of thorns, or flowers.

Accepted your situation. Played 

Kick can, football, or the Artful Dodger.

Miners didn't want their kids 

Down the pit

Wanted better for them.

Scrooge loves cash

Nicholas Nickleby meets the crook

On the moors and makes his

Escape. Me?

I left school at 14. Dad says,

"Want to better yourself?

Go to night school."

The world lay spread before me:

Dazzling before me, the world.

Hugh Bradbury

29 January 2015

From the arthur+martha project Stitching the Wars. A Two year collaboration with older people in Derbyshire, producing two embroidered quilts, a book, interviews and a series of poems. 

More poems found here. A short documentary film about the project found here.

Stitching the Wars

A Bomber's Moon, photographed at Lyme Park by Garry Lomas

I'm familiar with stitching

Decorative edges

Stitching the blackout

Grandad sewing

Lord Mountbatten's uniform

I'm familiar with stitching

A hosiery factory

The explosions amazing

When I think of sewing

Mother's doing buttonholes for dad

Playing the treadle

Sewing the machine

Dressmaking, I'm familiar with

Stitching

Aunties embroidering

Putting the colours in their order.

Hazel

Buxton

From the arthur+martha project Stitching the Wars. A Two year collaboration with older people in Derbyshire, producing two embroidered quilts, a book, interviews and a series of poems. 

More poems found here. A short documentary film about the project found here.

A luxury

'Fresh Air and Poverty' quilt at National Trust's Lyme Park. Photo Garry Lomas.

mum & dad, their luxury was each other

hardworking

quarry, breaking stone 17 years

me, spent 40 years farming, 20 driving trucks

that was my earthly career

my bed to lie in.

My mother made many beds

a woman before her time

"Living over the brush," the old ladies said.

Dad stood on a box in the hiring fair

slept above the hayloft for a year &

his sister died giving birth =

Haemorrhage

the doctor said, "You didn't pay

last time so I'm not coming."

Strife is a relationship

with others, in wartime

a luxury is to lie there & see a blaze.

Farming Life Centre

2015

From the arthur+martha project Stitching the Wars. A Two year collaboration with older people in Derbyshire, producing two embroidered quilts, a book, interviews and a series of poems. 

More poems found here. A short documentary film about the project found here.