Month: October 2023

THAMES VALLEY TEXAS

I just read some of this volume at the Open Book reading is Thames Valley Texas (updates at link above or direct here https://shaunbelcher.com/writing/?cat=106)

This is a kind of auto-biography of myself and my hometown of Didcot where I lived for a good part of 30 years. The title is a reference to the love of country music that my family had instilled in me from a young age and the experience of hearing Dolly Parton at full volume drifting across the estate from the working-men’s club on a saturday night.

If I cannot get a publisher to take this chapbook length collection on I will try and publish as a Horsehoe Press pamphlet.

Potentially in future I would like to publish the poems alongside a sequence of photographs I took in 2011-12 for a multimedia project called TRACK which almost but not quite became a PHD in 2018…


New Poems: Dead Centre

POW camp and housing

DEAD CENTRE

If England was a target and you were looking at cross hairs
In the centre of the cross hairs would probably be Didcot
The most normal town in England according to the pollsters
The 11th worst place to live according to crap towns

My home town, the town my family still live in, die in
A town that should not really be there, a ghost town
Only there because the residents of Abingdon and Oxford
refused the nasty dirty mess that they called a railway

So Brunel bent the line through a village called Didcot
They been taking other people’s shit there ever since
First it was provisions for the railway and a huge depot
Logistics was invented there to provide fodder for horses

Didcot has been a place to move stuff through and to ever since
From the army barracks, to the brand new Tesco mega storerooms
Where my family froze in huge freezers as warehouse operatives
Work for people with nowhere to go or reaching the end of the line

It’s the town people joke about, Didcot Parkway, gets its mentions
A place to glide through on the way to better destinations
Poets and novelists mention it in passing never stopped there
Never ventured off the trains to actually see it, a place holder

A place fit for commuters and immigrants, CHAVs and drug dealers
No place that anybody wants to live in for long, or stay forever
M parents grave is situated 500 yards from their council house
Now partitioned and resold built on a prisoner of war camp.

Thousands of lifetimes wiped away now and brushed into the past
Like the post-war immigrants who found a home there that could last
From Poland and Italy, Germany, Slovakia and the death camps
They preferred the dead centre of everything to anywhere else

They escaped the cross hairs and started again.
Built new lives and blessed every day that was normal

Thrived and felt safe.
Normal. Ignored. No longer a target. Dead centre. 


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