An oubliette for Kitty
There’s a hole in this black city welcome,
there’s a beggar with a broken spine.
On Gallowgate, a heart is broken
and the ships have left the Tyne. So what becomes of this History of Pain?
What is there left to hear?
The kids pour down this Pudding Chare lane
and drown a folksong in beer. So here’s an oubliette for you, Kitty,
somewhere to hide your face.
The blood is streaming from fresh wounds in our city
and old scars are all over the place. There’s this dirt from a history of darkness
and they’ve decked it in neon and glitz.
There are traders in penthouse apartments
on the Quayside where sailors once pissed. So where are Hughie and Tommy, Kitty?,
the ghosts of Geordies past?
I don’t want to drown you in pity
but I saw someone fall from the past. So here’s an oubliette for you, Kitty,
somewhere to hide your face.
The blood is streaming from fresh wounds in our city
and old scars are all over the place. While they bomb the bridges of Belgrade,
they hand us a cluster of Culture
and tame Councillors flock in on a long cavalcade
to kiss open the next civic sculpture. And who can teach you a heritage?
Who can learn you a poem?
We’re lost in a difficult, frightening, age
and no one can find what was home. So here’s an oubliette for you, Kitty,
somewhere to hide your face.
The blood is streaming from fresh wounds in our city
and old scars are all over the place. So here’s an oubliette for you, Kitty,
somewhere to hide your face.
The blood is streaming from fresh wounds in our city
and old scars are all over the place.
Keith Armstrong
Orchard Terrace
The street where I grew up to the age of ten was a long road, lit by three streetlights, one at each end and one in the middle. It was very friendly and we all knew our neighbours, the children played halfway down and all the neighbours seemed to know what the others were doing.
At the bottom of the street was a railway line from the colliery at the Top End to past Newburn Dene. Two old ladies lived in a colliery cottage beside the railway line. One was stout, one had a wooden leg and they would come out and open the gates to let the colliery engine through, then close them again. We also had a gutter, running with water from the colliery, all the way down the road, which ran under the railway line and we used to walk through. It was wide and once when I was trying to span across I fell in - my legs were too short - and I was taken home screaming my head off.
I have little recollection of my pals as most have left the area. On washing days, those on one side had no long garden so had to hang their weekly washing across the street. If anyone selling fruit with a horse and cart came down, the line had to be taken in to allow them to pass.
Betty Urwin
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