Gentleman of the Road

                                                                                   The road less travelled
 

 

 Dear Reader,

 It was with enormous sadness that I learnt about the death of Prince Philip.  I suppose I, like many others, felt he was, if not a friend, someone one knew and liked.  And he was always there.  Having listened to the radio and watched television programmes about him in the last couple of days I realise what an enormous amount of good things he did, for the betterment of all.  He was special as Prince Charles told us.  But I have been thinking of the Queen and hoping she has lots of family and friends about her.  Even if you know someone is going to die it is a real shock when they do and the aches, longing and the grief this brings, start.  

Incidentally when Albert, Queen Victoria's husband died, she had photographs taken of his corpse and positioned them on the walls around her bedroom.  What a strange thing to do I would have thought but ... She then had forty-odd years as a widow and never took off her black clothes. She seems to have been a very strange woman who gave birth to nine children but didn't really like them.  She adored Albert, he was her life, and she never got over his death, never came to terms with it.

 

                                                                                    *

 

From Francis Kilvert, 1872, in Radnorshire, April 14th

'The blossoming fruit trees, the torch trees of Paradise, blazed with a transparent green and white lustre up the dingle in the setting sunlight.  The village is in a blaze of fruit blossom'.

 From Dorothy Wordsworth, 1802, Westmorland, April 17th

'I saw a robin chasing a scarlet butterfly this morning'.

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Gentleman of the Road

The old man shuffled into the cafe
head bent. shoulders hunched
with a weather-beaten face
and straggly beard
he looked sad and lonely.

In a deep rasping voice he said
he would like a ham sandwich.
I made him one,
and sat down beside him.

'I am a gentleman of the road, he told me,' he told me,
'been on it for fifty years or more.
I have walked the byways of England,
watched the sun come up
watched the sun go down.'

He told me his life story.
Often being cold and hungry,
frightened when sleeping
on a city street,

how he felt old and
out of sync with the times
how he hoped to die
in the countryside, under a willow tree.

When he left I hugged him
and tears came into his eyes
'I haven't been touched by another
human being for over thirty years', he said.

And tears came into my eyes.

                                                                                     *

With very best wishes, Patricia