Daily Drawing: The Bayeux Tapestry

My father received this as a school prize when he thirteen for drawing I believe and then he was forced to leave school at 14 and work in the COOP then as a farm labourer on 27 September 1948 when 16 my grandmother kept a memo (see below)

He never drew again just detailed building plans…In drawing this I realised how detailed and fabulous the images are. I love the horse and plough below the title..

Cartoon or Comic Art at its finest circa 1066:-)

Daily Drawing: Football Medal

Daily Drawing: Football Badge – My father won the North Berks Cup at Reading’s ground in 1958 I think..here the winner’s medal complete with White Horse Uffington design..Our part of now Oxfordshire was then in Berkshire. In 1972 they rejigged the boundaries I am still a Berkshire kid…

Daily Drawing: My Father’s Watch

Actual watch

 

I keep hearing Grant McLennan.

 

‘His father’s watch he left it in the shower’ from Cattle and Cane

 

I recall a schoolboy coming home
through fields of cane
to a house of tin and timber
and in the sky
a rain of falling cinders
from time to time
the waste memory-wastes
I recall a boy in bigger pants
like everyone
just waiting for a chance
his father’s watch
he left it in the shower
from time to time
the waste memory-wastes
I recall a bigger brighter world
a world of books
and silent times in thought
and then the railroad
the railroad takes him home
through fields of cattle
through fields of cane
from time to time
the waste memory-wastes
the waste memory-wastes
further, longer, higher, older

Daily Drawing: Chalk Skull

 

Day of the Dead? No a fairground chalk skull I won on the 29th September 1971 at Wallingford Fair with my Dad. I know because I etched it on the bottom….today’s Daily Drawing and I already written a poem about it I will find it out and post here..

 

CHALK SKULLS

Three rings round a shiny target and it’s yours
amidst the clatter and pop of fairground stalls
burning like a new constellation fallen to earth
I clutched the small plaster skull in my fist.
A booth trinket. A choice between that
and a fading, chipped plaster angel fish.
We moved on. My father and I.
Past a mud splattered generator pumping
grey clouds across the dark wet grass.
First thing I’d ever won. 12 years old.
I found it last winter. Turned it up in an old box.
Then noticed the carved inscription on it.
I’d made all those years before.
Shaun Belcher. 11th September 1971.
Wallingford Fair.

I held it as my father, now in his seventies,
bent to the garden, his back to me
cuts away at the heavy clay soil.
The flint, chalk and clay, turning over again
as my own thoughts spiralled back over years
to the dusty stubble fields of late summer.
My step granddad and his collie
arcing in loops across the Oxfordshire fields
tracking imaginary pheasants and hares.
The dog that ground to a panting halt
saliva dripping under the kitchen table.
So we too shall come to our end.
All our skulls, man and beast
flaking and turning to powder in the black soil
like this skull, a plaster moon, thrown at the stars.

Available online in The Drifting Village

The Drifting Village – Poems 2001-2011

Daily Drawing: Eternity Ring

Daily Drawing: Eternity ring
Given to me by my mother when my father died I have to check story but I think the added bands inside ring were to stop falling off hand when working or later when ill with cancer as fingers lost weight…my sister Janice Newton will know…small object but found by chance in a writing box leather pouch tonight…small ring that has a big story behind it..