By Joan Clarke
In 1939 a small book appeared with this title. It contained the collected poems of G.Basil Sleigh who had died two year before. He was the son of the then vicar of Silverdale. The poems are mostly optimistic and dwell on pleasant things, but the story behind them is a sad one. In the introduction to the book, written by a friend, F. A. Woodward, there is a brief account of the poet’s life There may be those who remember Basil Sleigh and could fill out the story, but from this introduction we learn that Basil Sleigh was:-
Born in 1889, he was a scholar of Rossall and Queens’ College, Cambridge where he took a Second Class in the Classical Tripos He had embarked on a scholarly career, and had become a Captain in the O.T.C., when, in the full bloom of manhood, he responded without hesitation to his country’s call, and served as an officer, not without honour, in the King’s Own Royal Lancaster Regiment, throughout the war, in France and Flanders.
Wounded once, gassed, buried alive, the effects of his war experiences told on his fine physique, and were undoubtedly the cause of his enforced retirement from the scholastic work which was his real vocation, some ten years after the war, and also of his early death in 1937.
No name is put to the illness that killed him, but it is spoken of as ‘wasting’ and his father, in an explanatory note, speaks of ‘increasing weakness’ before his death. Some of the poems date back to the post-war period (his first book of poems appeared in 1929). Quite apart from any merit in the poems (and readers must judge for themselves) they are of some historical interest as the words of a poet who remembered the horrors, but in a more accepting and hopeful way than we are accustomed to from other war poets. Readers must judge for themselves whether his poems still speak to a later generation, but they do speak of courage in one so damaged by the war. His friend, in the introduction, speaks of the “.courage and unselfish patience with which he endured a long and wasting illness.”
The poems printed here are a very small selection from his large output and, since this is a local magazine, have mostly been selected from those that speak of Silverdale, his loved home.
Silverdale
Silverdale, Home of Saint and Peasant!
Fairies sing in every simple Tree!
Children's Laughter makes the Past the Present,
Gives my happiest Boyhood back to me!
Would that Words,
My weak Words,
Could express the love I owe to Thee
The Vicarage
Ivy green. Honeysuckle, Rose Red and White,
Big Bay Windows, and Jessamine bright,
Creeper sweet, little Porch, Periwinkle blue.
Flycatcher’s nest, and a Jenny Wren’s too.
The vicarage that Basil Sleigh is writing about is, of course, the Old Vicarage in Cove Road, and not the present vicarage close to the church.
Voices
I’ve seen the fields of Flanders,
The Somme’s grey chalk ravines,
The glow of burning Ypres,
The mines of red Messines;
I’ve heard the cannon thunder
And the sniper’s bullet wail;
But now it’s all a dream to me,
I’m home at Silverdale.
It’s fine to live in Peace time,
And most of all in Spring
When thrushes whistle love songs
And plover’s on the wing;
But still 1 hear the Voices
Of friends in brave ‘Fourteen”,
Remember us; we still live on
“The Spirits of ‘Fourteen’”.
Thoughts at Silverdale Garden Club’s Prize Giving.
“First Prize for Onions!” Simple Words!
Yet every eye lights up!
“What do they mean? - A voice replies
“They mean he wins the Cup!
But Friend Imagination speaks,
A Cup? - Just that? - No more?
To me they tell of years of thought,
Of sweat, of back-ache sore!
You see the smile of Triumph won;
I see a toiling man!
You see the Cup, so light to hold;
I see the watering can!
I see a Hear! that loves, a Mind
Pursuing truth through Strife,
An Artist of the Soil, a whole
Philosophy of Life.
I think of those who’ve not won yet,
And wish them good luck;
For many a man who wins no prize
Deserves First Prize for Pluck.
Published in Mourholme Magazine Issue 32 1998