A ballad for Amy Daniel (1856-1936). It is always complicated at the intersections. She was a Victorian merchant adventurer (think Peaky Blinders – series 1 – on sailing ships), playwright, producer, theatre impresaria, timber baroness. Not only did she write plays, she produced them. Not only did she produce shows, she built the theatres; not only did she build theatres she imported the timber with which they were built; and she sent shows of travelling players to the “Wild West”. She was first to produce Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic operas at her Opera Comique in Soho. This is for women responsible for bringing the timber home.
My mother sang me double entendres:
neck of the chicken, rumbleseat ride,
and How we all loved Frank Sinatra.
There’s a hole in the bucket Dear Thomas, Dear Thomas,
the Navy-wife life was hard,
in Nissen-hut yards on the western slope,
changing the baby in back of the car.
Ma should have been a Top Bond Girl,
enchanting Comandante Ché
with actors’ treasure: an Ensign’s cavalcade.
Her great grandma was raised on wagons.
Born in Philly in ‘56,
she fled the war to Mexico,
little girl in the firelight
putting on a show for sawyers
with nine fingers in the barrel.
Slow rolling foam blown off the top
of a schooner risking the Horn,
with a cargo of iron tools for Oregon
timber ports. Nothing more
than ships and theatre, let the showgirl
shine: glowing on the boards
behind the rovers driving cargo
and players who sustained them,
brewed the beer, distilled the whisky,
loved and entertained them,
where slippers trod on shoals of cod
and countless danced forgotten.
She arrived in London in ‘71,
travelled as much as anyone,
married a musician and went to work.
Her ships rode past Hispaniola
in the lee of Guantanamo Bay, making
for Veracruz on the Mexican Railway,
across the isthmus to Cortez.
Nowadays it’s jet-skis skipping
in the bay of Acapulco; crypto
fin-tech asset-stripping profit
off the top, while in the base mazut
lies curdled all that was ever wrought,
as the blades she shipped from England, to mills
in the Cascades, Douglas fir
and Oregon pine built her theatres,
music halls, symphony orchestras, too.
Great colonial redwood beams
holding the gods aloft. Sheds –
shore side of customs – counting
the board-feet off.
She trod it with trotters and hoofers,
high-kicking kittens, daughters in romeo roles,
who went round the hills of the new frontier
bringing the timber home.
rWorld2 