NB: True story, my family, the Hatchetts, lived in this everyday village in the Leicestershire coalfield. My great great grandfather, William, died of typhoid in 1874, aged 35, as did his wife, Hannah. He was a bootmaker. One of his two sons, James was fostered to a bank manager and became a bank clerk. Banking must have entered the family's bloodstream - his son, my grandfather, James Leslie, was manager of the Lloyds bank in Droitwich, where my dad grew up in the 1920s and ’30s. After the war, James also became - peal of trumpets - the Mayor of Droitwich – a small, round man with glassses. He was an Independent. My dad told me that he was a Freemason. When I discovered Hugglescote, a village for the which the adjective “ordinary” could have been invented and its Baptist graveyard, with its uniform slate stones, I immediately felt a sense of community that my life has lacked and at home there. And it was a frisson to discover that my ancestors were Baptists. Where am I from?Junction 22 of the M1!
This countryside says sorry for itself
Its terraces, aligned from pub to pub
Its mountains, untidy mounds of slag
The pit heads and the winding gear are gone
Leaving, merely, an ambiguous urban fringe
Lead grey, on a Midlands afternoon
My ancestors walked along these streets
Drank in these pubs; they wore their Sunday best
Succumbed to typhoid, coalfield maladies
The Baptist church was their Jerusalem
They hoped for a life beyond the mundane
Lived and died, unremarked by history
Newton Burgoland is where we pull in
At a coaching inn - a fire, warm food
Lads in blue shell-suits slouch at the bar
They eye, suspiciously, our city clothes
The strangers – like ploughboys in an old print
“'What are you doing here?” says the barmaid
I am from here; this is where I am from
My great great grandfather's memorial
Is a slab in Hugglescote graveyard
A hundred years ago, I would have been
An insider, patching up boots and shoes
Joking with the barmaid – one of them
Tall grey stones slanted by a winter sun
“I won't let go,” I say, lifting you up
You slip from my fingers, and drop back
