What you wrote to know
was whether
the old ship canal
still paralleled the river
south
of Gloucester (England)…
What I never told
in my reply
was of the morning
on that same stretch
(it was a cold
January day in ’85)
when Isobel Durnell
saw the whale…
She was up at dawn
to get her man off on time
to the brickyard and
humping up over the banks
beyond Bunny Row
a slate-grey hill showed
that the night before
had not been there…
They both ran outside
and down to the shore:
the wind was blowing
as it always blows
so hard that the tide
comes creeping up under it
The great grey-blue thing
had an eye
that watched wearily
their miniature motions as they
debated its fate
for the tide
was already feeling beneath it
floating it away…
It was Moses White
master mariner
owner of the sloop Matilda
who said the thing to do
was to get chains and a traction engine
– they got two from Olveston –
and drag it ashore:
the thing was a gift:
before long it would be
drifting off to another part of the coast
and lost to them
if they didn’t move now…
And so the whale –
flukes, flesh, tail
trembling no longer
with a failing life –
was chained and hauled
installed above the tideline…
And the crowds came
to where it lay
upside down
displaying a
belly evenly-wrinkled
its eye lost to view
mouth skewed and opening into
an interior of tongue and giant sieves
that had once
filtered that diet of shrimp
had hunted out for it
by listening to submarine echoes
too slight
for electronic selection…
And Hector Knapp
wrote in his diary:
Thear was a Whal
cum ashore at Littleton Pill
and bid thear a fortnight
He was sixty eaight feet long
His mouth was twelve feet
The Queen claim it at last
and sould it for forty pound
Thear supposed to be
forty thousen pepeal to se it
from all parts of the cuntry…
The Methodist preacher
said that George Sindry
who was a very religious man
told himself when that whale came in
he’d heard so many arguments
about the tale of Jonah not being true
that he went to Littleton to
‘satisfy people’. He was a tall man
a six footer
‘but I got into that whale’s mouth’ he said
‘and I stood in it
upright…’
The carcass
had overstayed its welcome
so they sent up a sizeable boat
to tow it to Bristol
and put it on show there
before they cut the thing down stinking
to be sold
You can still see the sign
to Whale Wharf as they renamed it
and Wintle’s Brickworks became
the Whale Brick
Tile and Pottery Works…
Walking daily onto
the now-gone premises
through the ‘pasture land
with valuable deposits of clay thereunder’
when the machine- and drying sheds
the five kilns, the stores and stables
stood permanent in that place
of their disappearance
Enoch Durnell still
relished his part in all that history begun
when Bella shook
and woke him with a tale that the tide
had washed up a whole house
with blue slates on it into Littleton Pill
and that house was a whale…