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    Collected Voices
    Collected Voices
    Collected Voices
    Ebook71 pages54 minutes

    Collected Voices

    By Compiled by Richard Rooney

    ()

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    About this ebook

    This book is a collection of stories, poems and sketches produced by members of Garston Writers, a group of fiction-writing enthusiasts who meet most weeks in the Garston area of Liverpool, UK.

     

    People join the group for different reasons and it is as much a 'social group' as a 'hotbed' of writers. Members have had short plays staged at the Liverpool Fringe and regularly publish short stories / poems online, enter (and win) competitions, or read at open-mic evenings around town.

     

    Search for us on Facebook.

     

    Cover design and photograph of Garston Reading Room by Michael March.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherGarston Writers Group
    Release dateFeb 12, 2024
    ISBN9798224074969
    Collected Voices

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      Book preview

      Collected Voices - Compiled by Richard Rooney

      About Spam

      By John Collins

      ––––––––

      Spam was always second best

      Nowhere near as good as brisket

      Far inferior to steak pie

      Couldn’t match a chocolate biscuit.

      Fried with an egg for breakfast

      When bacon couldn’t be had

      Or made into fritters for supper

      It really wasn’t so bad.

      Compared with tripe and onions

      Or pilchards or bloater paste

      It was incomparably better

      Perhaps ’cause it hadn’t much taste.

      It came in tins that were oblong

      They were opened with a key

      And being so inexpensive

      It was often served for tea.

      Flavoured with piccalilli

      Or Branston or Pan Yan

      It could satisfy any hunger

      A feast fit for Desperate Dan.

      It was brought by GIs in the ’40’s

      To give hungry Brits some good cheer

      But the natives didn’t much like them

      Overpaid, over sexed, over here.

      A Different kind of Loving

      By Michaela Gutmann

      ––––––––

      Pippin, Poppet, Driver, Drifter, Desmond. All names that still illicit a strong and personal response. Trusted companions that saw us through our fantasies to adulthood. And likewise untrustworthy, capricious creatures who would for a chance of a summer nettle break the centuries old contract and throw a little girl headlong into despair and green sidings of stings. Jim Blundell’s Riding School in the village. His twelve horses meant the world to so many girls there for so many years. The Palominos, the Welsh Cobbs, the Appaloosa. The first club, the first love we could claim as our own. It was a safe and dangerous training ground for life and its lessons. With measure and prescription we would venture in a latency mist of fear, longing and trepidation. Before the lure of human bondage imposed its gravitational pull and a self-serving natural order took the reins.

      Some little girls grown older would still beat their path to the Stable-door. Guessing their story was something I needed to muse about mid-lesson between the clockwise perimeter walk and the rising trot. Why were they still here? In the circular paddock within their cyclical week they’d found a track less threatening if not more compelling. They’d lost their way and their hearts I suppose, to the thrill of nature to the very edges of domesticated. To a young life apprentice these notions were important. Possible warning beacons women show girls, without knowing so.

      They would dress-up every Saturday evening in breeches, gloves and hairnets. Polished conker brown boots, to the same level of sheen as the previous week. I believed it to be an erotic, safe game for them. A scenario with childish boundaries set so no chance of advancement, but an opportunity to play the game, all the same. A precursor to nothing. Jim the middle-aged proprietor was in command of all. His ponies, the riders the unrequited adoration of stable lovers whose bloom had now faded, dry like the bedding hay, the driest of all, the grass of last resort.

      While their contemporaries were pushing their prams homeward early Saturday evening. Unscrewing mascara coil brushes in preparation. Teasing up-do’s in a cloud of Elnett, in anticipation of a different kind of loving. Their Rubicon had been crossed; their decisions made.

      We waited for our name to be called from Jim’s Black Book. Matching maiden to beast, lover to stallion. One’s heart could be broken by a mismatch of expectation to reality. Like a boy’s hand longed for or a reciprocated lingering look, the mirrored register of ponies’ name to girls was vitally important.

      For Janet, Margaret and Pamela, Jim gave them what they wanted; their usual rides. No deviations, no dalliance with desires now, if in fact there ever had been.         

      Time moved slowly in our village just then. A dreamy time before the emergence of distraction and adolescence. A sweet, warm-spot epoque.

      One sunny Friday afternoon just after two, and after lunch, with the weekend close at hand something stopped. Twelve loud cracks shook the sky above our school yard.

      Jim Blundell had shot his horses. He couldn’t face separating them.

      He was dying of cancer with no more time left and he loved them too much.

      A Kestrel for a King

      By Michael March

      ––––––––

      It was an unscheduled stop. Haydon Bridge has always been the marker to indicate that the hard, monotonous part of the journey was over and I was on the home straight. Before the bypass was opened, I’d stop there regularly on my trips up north to visit family but the new bridge across the Tyne on

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