THE BALLAD OF PEAKS HILL GOAL (guest post by Simon Binner)

THE BALLAD OF PEAKS HILL GAOL

(with thanks to Oscar Wilde's Ballad of Reading Gaol written 1897)

Thu 11 April 2013    exactly six weeks since Chloë Drury died on Thu 28 Feb 2013

Six weeks our guardsman walked the yard,

In a suit of shabby grey:

His cricket cap was on his head,

And his step seemed light and gay,

But I never saw a man who looked

So wistfully at the day.

Six weeks dear Chloë’s now been gone

Different meanings now for ‘gay’

Her leather jacket’s Hannah’s now

Her iPhone’s still in play

But the texts it gets are wistful

To a Chloë now gone away

Bedroom: untouched, unloved perhaps?

Mixed feelings – re-paint or leave?

That room was Chloë’s Reading Gaol

Neither Deb nor I believe

We’d want Chloë back inside that trap

So would re-paint help us grieve?

The Chloë that we’d beg return

No oxygen masks would need

She’d not be trapped inside that room

Nor deign us ‘rents’ to heed

She’d be fake-tanned up, and off to Shooshh

How we’d wish her now ‘God Speed!’

Her ‘cricket cap’ of short cropped hair

Cancer wigs be cast aside

Short-skirted, pre-loaded, laughing

Stalwart friends close at her side

What precious, oh so precious times!

Snatched but months before she died

In that six short weeks, baby Roman,

Knowing naught of Chloë’s depart

Eclipses grief with his baby antics

And his freshly learnt ‘walk on part’

If only Chloë’d seen Roman walking

That’d have gladdened every heart

Six weeks, my Chloë, you’ve been gone

What wouldn’t I gladly pay?

To have you back, in full attack

‘You Arschloch!” hear you say

So, yes, I remain ‘a man who looks’

Very ‘wistfully at the day’

The Ballad of Reading Gaol is a poem by Oscar Wilde, written in exile either in Berneval or in Dieppe, France, after his release from Reading Gaol on or about 19 May 1897. Wilde had been incarcerated in Reading, after being convicted of homosexual offences in 1895 and sentenced to two years' hard labour in prison.  During his imprisonment, on Saturday 7 July 1896, a hanging took place. Charles Thomas Wooldridge (ca. 1866 – 7 July 1896) had been a trooper in the Royal Horse Guards. He was convicted of cutting the throat of his wife, Laura Ellen, earlier that year at Clewer, near Windsor. He was aged only 30 when executed.  This had a profound effect on Wilde, inspiring the line "Yet each man kills the thing he loves."