In This Salford Street

 Dear Reader,

                                                                                           Salford

                                                                                 A Witch Bottle

Dear Reader,

Healers in 17th century England used witch bottles as anti-witchcraft devices when someone was cursed as bewitchment. They would be filled with ingredients such as the victim's hair and urine, along with "protective" pins, nails or thorns.  Sealed within vessels, they would be placed around the hearth or buried under the floorboards.

A stoneware bottle stored for years in the cellar of a school in Rochester, Kent has been identified as a significant 17th century "witch bottle" containing a cure against witchcraft.  The bottle has lain under Rochester Independent College for more than 300 years.  Its importance went unnoticed when it was unearthed in 2004.

When I lived in a 17th century cottage in this town, where I now live elsewhere, there was a damp and dark cellar down from the ground floor.  When workmen came to clear it out and decorate it they found an old bottle full of strange things.   Perhaps it was a witch bottle, who knows?

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From Jane Austen, 1798, November 17th, in Hampshire

'What fine weather this is!  Not very becoming perhaps early in the morning, but very pleasant out of doors at noon, and very wholesome - at least everybody fancies, so, and imagination is everything.'

From John Everett Millais, 1851, November 19th, in Surrey

'Fearfully cold.  Landscape trees upon my window-panes.   After breakfast chopped wood, and after that painted ivy.....See symptoms of a speedy finish to my background. After lunch pelted down some remaining apples in the orchard.  Read Tennyson and Thirty-Nine Articles.'

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In This Salford Street

the houses have no eyes,
windows and doors, boarded up.
These houses were home
to someone,
people grew up here,
played life's games,
made love, made babies,
made friendships last to the end.

They are all demolished now,
other people saw to that,
damp bricks and mortar,
which had served their time,
dispensable.

Nothing is left.
No shops, no pubs, no parks,
no prettiness,
nothing but rubble, dust, sadness
everywhere,
and a river running with tears.

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With best wishes, Patricia