THE GOOD OVEN *Wattpad Featured* (aka 'Re Ply')

Roisin (poem)

your hair frizzy like mine

and your round eyes open

as you rest on the bench

head on arm gazing

twelve boys sleep upstairs

tops and tails across two mattresses

one isn't yours

you took him in

slag heap grabbed coal spits

fossil ferns blink and vanish

in spurts of green light

that dies down

what that cost that coal

who could whisper it

him screaming with half a face

brains bashed in

you screaming inside, bairns whimpering,

other women rigid, silent,

not yet, not him, not yet,

black, coal black, smoke black, slurry

half burned, half drowned,

fire raging beneath the sea

no child of mine he spits out

will go beneath that sea

twelve boys, eleven yours,

one forgot to go home

and a fishing rod

to whack them all equally to sleep

your home a shop now

the counter bench your bed

your girl with a cousin in the next street

safely out of it

you won't sleep

and you won't really notice

like you won't cry

because it won't help

beautiful linen waits for you

to iron it in the morning

was it for this you crossed the water

Roisin?

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * 

tops and tails - three heads and three pairs of feet at each end of the bed, sardines sleeping

slag heap coal- illegally gathered coal that fell from trucks or other rejected poor quality coal

people tell me they used to see marvellous fossils burning in the fire without understanding it

bairns - children

half drowned - the  suffocation from heat and noxious fumes can be like drowning, and sea water came into the pit as well

* * * * * * *

More about Roisin:

Roisin is an Irish name for Rose. She grew up on the shores of the Mountains of Mourne, and followed her man to coastal mines in England, to escape the hunger around about 1900,

They found a kind of slavery in the seams beneath the sea, and lived on potato peelings begged from big houses after the accident, taking in laundry and putting the children to work, through and after the first world war. He was so badly injured he was put away for the thirty years of hell he went on living. He was thought too terrifying to be seen by his grandson, even when the boy reached his teens.

The shop changed it for her. She rebuilt a life for them all in the one roomed terraced house, open all hours, everyone's pantry, always chaotic and always happy, warm and welcoming, for the rest of her life.

I remember her daughter, who lived two doors away from her oldest son, in a street very near where they were born. I sat with Roisin's daughter, and heard happier memories, of the later times. She thought I looked just like her mother. Was it a longing she felt at the end of life for a mother's comfort? Photographs found later proved it was true. Roisin and I were identical.

Some of the family had escaped the Irish potato famine by going to America instead of England. This film shows conditions in America at the time of this story. The film at the top of the page shows the place in the uk where Roisin lived, and one of the many later disasters.