OVER the past year we’ve all reminisced about the good old times that we’ve missed but which are hopefully are on the brink of making a return.
We’ve also had chance to reflect on some of the not so good times – and for Mossley resident Joan Agnew, 98, this served as inspiration for her recent poems about the coronavirus pandemic and lockdown, as well as memories from further back during World War 2.
In her lockdown poem, Joan reflects on the time spent alone and the effects of the pandemic on society.
And in her poem ‘As I Remember’, she recalls the frightening reality of being a little girl who has just been told by her parents that Britain was going to war with Germany.
She said: “A few years ago I wrote a short story about the 50th anniversary of the war. I’ve always been interested in writing and compositions ever since I was at school.
“Being in lockdown got me thinking, as I’m sure it did a lot of people, and those experiences kept coming back to me in stages from one day to the next.
“I don’t know where the idea for the poem came from, I was just sitting in my chair and it just came to me and I felt that I needed to do something with it.”
Like many children in the war time years, Joan left school at 14 years old and by 16 she was working in the munitions factories doing gruelling night shifts.
Towards the end of the war, she worked in the radar stations and in the wake of the German surrender she took up a job at a local school before settling down with her husband as a full-time mum.
She continued: “I have two daughters, two grandchildren and three great-grandchildren, and when I showed them the poems they were thrilled to bits.
“They all have copies at their houses. I don’t think I’ll be writing anymore poems, but this one is just a nice little keepsake for them to have for the future.”
Joan’s Lockdown Poem
Here I am sat all alone in this awful lockdown zone I would go to the door and give a shout
But what’s the use there is no one about
Poor mums and dads with children at home not allowed to play out or have a little roam
Teenagers too cant got to a dance or a football match and meet friends by chance
Also doctors and nurses stretched to the limit they are all heroes of this minute
Bless the scientists with their clever brains to discover the jab to fight this strain
Let’s hope and pray that it will all be over and once more we will all be in clover
But let’s not forget the bereaved from this terrible strain and pray that it will never happen again.
In their own way Elsie and Joan are inspirational just just as Captain Tom was tnationajl. Age and experience, family connections and lifelong friendships are treasures to be cherished into eternity, Simple loving thoughts and acts of kindness in Mossley and throughout the whole world are of immense value in a way that more material things are not.
I was born in Carrbrook , luckily on the Lancashire side of the brook, so that my birth was recorded in Mossley, in October 1935 and although we left Mossley in the early 1950 s my heart and longings have been in Mossley from that day to this. Place and people are very important to us all and until you’re parted from them by time or distance, you don’t realise just how true that is. Elsie and Joan are Mossley people, Thank God for their generation , and lucky, for the young ones growing up there now, they are growing up in one of THE best places in the whole wide world.