A Film, Poem And A Song.

We watched  Mrs Lowry and  Son on Netflix  the other night.  Have you seen it?

I found it very grim up north.  I was born and  lived in the Northwest of England and  I remember the mills.  Some of them still working belching out smoke from the tall chimneys and some ruins in the countryside being reclaimed by nature.

Lancashire is very much like DH Lawrence's industrial/rural landscape.  Even a city like Manchester, England's third biggest city, you're only several miles from the open countryside and the moors.

Timothy Spall plays LS Lowry.  He was also a great character playing Brummie character Barry in Auf Wiedersehen Pet.  He often reminisced about he use to play table tennis in the West Bromwich Methodist league.  The things I remember.

Vanessa Redgrave plays Lowry's bedridden mother and she aspires to be a concert pianist and live in a middle class area.  She's not keen on his paintings either.

I thought the acting was brilliant and the accents were authentic too. Here's a trailer:

One scene in the film showed him painting an industrial scene whilst standing in the countryside.

It jogged my memory of one of my old poems.  I use to write poems about old mills and canal barges....  Here's a poem I wrote over thirty years ago.  I was walking through a rural valley and saw a shell of an old cotton mill so I wrote the following poem:

Ode To A Ruin.

Skeletal, unworkable,
A mill in retirement,

Ghosts of yesterday, disarray,
Pitiful nature's sad lament,

Crumbling  mortar, times slaughter,
"King Cotton" is no more,

Boulders fall, abstract tall,
Rumbling debris cascades pour,

Relic, melancholic,
History passing through stones fingers,

No workers sweat, just silhouette,
Their memory still lingers.

Wish I  could paint like Lowry did.  'Going To The Match' is my favourite painting of his.  It's outside  Burnden Park.  A ground I have been on.  The painting is now in the National Football  Museum and worth over 1.9 million Pounds.

There's  a great video by Mike Harding called 'King Cotton' featuring some of Lowry's paintings: