Scours Lane, Reading…
Scours Lane, Tilehurst in Reading…
I drove along it on a dark November evening to locate a football ground, shared by Highmoor Ibis and Woodley United.
The tunnel was narrow and shouldered so many trains during the evening, lit up by fireworks, no doubt left over from the previous day, the 5th…
The car-park was rough ground and few spaces could be made out in the darkness and so I exited and found a dark spot near the riverside homes nearby.
There were fairground rides stored in the car-park, smothered by night’s veil, for the floodlights were not yet turned on inside the football stadium and the carousel horses looked as fearsome as the dodgem cars looked rat-like…
The two monstrosities looked like beached sea vessels, or perhaps stranded spaceships…
Weird.
A narrow tunnel hunched
Across a Tilehurst road
And led to riverside homes, worried
By the raucous rattle,
The sinuous screech
And the ebullient echo
Of the swift main-line passenger trains
And the curious, clinking of slow moving wagons of freight,
As they laboured north, or maybe south, heading
Towards Oxford, or maybe deeper into Reading…
Fairground rides bunched,
Darkened and spookily stowed,
Stark and forlorn, idle and unhurried
In the gathered gloom,
The caustic cold
And the damp dew:
Carousel horses, eyes wild, tearing at reins
And covered rides like giant rats fearing a dreadful fate
Lurked inside incongruous beached vessels, stranded,
Or spectral alien spacecraft, mistakenly landed…
Pete Ray
November 2017
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