I'm reconsidering 'eccentricities', John - and Jerome, thank you. If it's elvers yer after...(although not in the Citizen)
THE ELVER RUN
Laid off corn-portering at Gloucester dock,
with no more work in sight for anyone,
we got a boat at very-late-o’clock
and went to Longney for the elver run.
A grumpy water bailiff took our names,
bobbing around upon the Severn spate,
told us he’d sabotage our little games,
hauled us before Whitminster magistrate.
They’re country gentry on the Bench down there,
living at places like ‘The Lodge’, ‘The Court’, ‘The Hall’.
Landowners who make plain that they don’t care
for city hoi-polloi like us at all.
Elvering’s never been a sin before.
It’s always been a working person’s perks.
My gran, in service forty years or more,
never saw elvers eaten by rich jerks.
There’s not much money in it, heaven knows.
That’s why the upper classes have ignored
them all these years, until uprose
something called the Severn Fisheries Board.
They’ve dug up Acts which parliament passed
as long ago as Henry Tudor’s times.
So now the likes of us are being harassed
for what some fat aristocrat called crimes!
The Chairman said the notices were clear.
We claimed that we were all illiterate.
He ruled, with a most unbecoming sneer,
Our defence (and us) as illegitimate.
He fined us all, with costs. We couldn’t pay.
They marched us off in cuffs to Gloucester gaol,
for seven days hard labour anyway.
That treadmill fairly makes your muscles wail.
And then, of course, they had a second thought.
The Act got an amendment, so I’m told,
and things went back to being as they ought
to have been, if I may make so bold.
To top it all, the elvers got the hump,
though no one ever really figured why
they decided the Severn was a dump,
yet now you mostly find them up the Wye!
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