1968 The Bard of Lacey Green

"Chairing the Bard" (Left to Right) Mosh Saunders, Dennis Claydon, Harry Church

"Chairing the Bard" (Left to Right) Mosh Saunders, Dennis Claydon, Harry Church.

(click Mosh & Trudy Saunders for more of Mosh and Harry Church for more of Harry.)

In 1968 a poetry challenge was made to write the best poem reflecting local life. The winner was Dennis Claydon with the following entry: -

WHO KNOWS

Did Anglo Saxon pass this way One long forgotten day?

Did he the course of Grimsditch walk on this barren upland chalk?

Did he watch the work progress as men toiled with strain and stress,

And did his children laugh and play, where now are fields of wheat and hay?

Who dwelt first in Lacey Green? None can tell, for none have seen.

Did they keep their Aylesbury ducks in this corner of leafy Bucks?

Were the first homes of long ago in Speen, Lacey Green and Loosely Row

Built of flint and Chiltern clay? For bricks were made here, so they say.

Did the first villagers (as we), look on the beauty of hill and tree,

Or glance at night across the Vale, bathed in moonlight ghostly pale?

Did courting couples walk to and fro in Highwood Bottom, long ago,

Or did they first stop and stand, and gaze across Promised Land?

Do we now tread where saints have trod? Did they not leave a house of God?

But who among us can tell, why we only have one bell?

Where is the Green, our friends may ask. A Green there was once, but alas,

Houses of different ages stand where sheep once grazed the common land.

Who were the men who built the mill, erected ancient timbers on this hill,

Where the golden grain to grind, while farmers stooped their corn to bind.

Men farm the good earth from morn till night, women make lace by candlelight.

The sound of the bodger's axe we hear in every season of the year.

Sights and sounds of an age now past, a village of which we have seen the last.

What of the future, who can tell? We may in a "city" one day dwell.

Questions we may ask for ever, such secrets should be yielded never.

Answers not found on history's pages. Answers lost in the mists of ages.