allotment
1. A share, portion, or amount of something that has been allotted to someone.
1528–30 tr. T. Littleton Tenures (new ed.) f. xx In this case it behoueth eche of them to holde them to theyr chaunce & alotment.
OED, accessed 13.11.20
chaunce
4.
a. An opportunity that comes in any one’s way.
a1616 W. Shakespeare Cymbeline (1623) v. v. 226 I That haue this Golden chance, and know not why.
OED, accessed 13.11.20
I Privilege in the Present
1. Modern allotment
The process of allotment begins with belonging:
residence in community, compliance with community,
commitment to community; they first take land and air,
vegetation and water-course, which once were commons,
and ascribe it to the community, that is
for a commonality which starts from ‘round here’;
if a rule-book is benevolent, and seen as beneficent,
binding like-minds for common gain, then………
To allot, you will have elbowed, even if with a selfless
dedication, broken water-surface, been recognised
by others swimming with your current in your
common pool; to be alloted you will have known
about the elbows, how to tread water, whose
bathing cap is nod-worthy; the rules of the rules
which rule, are restricted borrowing, are not
common knowledge.
If, by chance, the alloted plot is the community’s worst,
exposed to the wilderness beyond the palisade, exposed to gales,
exposed to the run-off from the farmer’s field across the path
and from the thirteen higher plots, exposed to a time of neglect;
If, by chance, this is the allotment, it is also a statement
of status, a statement of belonging, a statement of a beginning
and of probation.
2 Repurposing slate
Barrowfuls of sheets of slate journeying again to hear
the sound of the sea, far across the globe from the bed
where its parent grains slowly sedimented into mudstone;
rock laid down as the salted water eddied,
as the currents flowed ceaselessly
across millions of orbits of the sun;
this firm and solid, strong yet brittle rock,
carried by tectonic movement, uplifted twisted, pressed,
buried until disturbed;
split along its foliation lines, machine-cut, chisel dressed, stacked,
transported once more, now differently on carts and rail and truck,
both locally and inter/nationally;
it sits in uniform sizes, (but each leaf unique with
blotches, blemishes and barely visible serrations along each edge),
until unloaded, stacked in verticals,
it awaits a skilled hand.
Slates nailed down, precisely overlapped, pinned in place,
forming again a ‘joined’ body, an illusion that the rock has
grown together again, an illusion that this time
we can continue our privileged lives
beneath it, where once was only bedrock.
The rock that turned to slate that turned to slates,
that turned the rain and wind away,
that were removed, recovered to redefine
a roofless bothy,
and those slates that proved superfluous,
were barrowed, vertically stacked,
as they awaited a third illusory breathing into life.
Nuances of shades of blue and grey,
a rough matt smoothness, a strength
with delicacy, eroded, sedimented,
weathered in more shallow time,
poeticised into a silent stoicism
and endurance (resilience, longevity,
continuance and fortitude);
a ‘permanence’ unlike the ephemeral hands
and bodies and machines that shaped,
sheltered underneath, transported it;
it stands in stacks and is.
3. A walled garden as a space in time
When they restored the broken wall
at the apex of the triangular plot,
its fractured, weathered, heaved and gravity-strewn blocks
of sandstone, heaped on the earth,
and when they mounted the iron gates, in replica design,
on those rebuilt columns of stone and brick,
the winds still blew straight off the sea;
but now they played a new wall of sound,
of rising & falling pitch,
not human sounds, but the sounds of human engineering;
and while working in the walled garden, we asked:
‘is this the same music, heard by the garden labourers
when the same air funnelled through the old gates?’
Working in the walled garden, sometimes there is silence;
and then the resident jackdaws, rooks and crows,
who have raised their young and were raised as young
from others raised as young, the corvids who roost
in the taller sycamores, seeded perhaps
from trees who pre-date the gates, rise up
en masse, circle, call, echo and respond, show black
against a clouded sky, lighter against the sun;
and as we worked, we asked:
‘is this the same sight and sound
as was heard when others
(John Robson? John Wilson? Thomas Hutchinson?)
worked in the walled garden?’
Working in the walled garden where the high walls muffle
conversations, where the conversations sometimes range
around the history of the walls, their stones of different sizes,
their brick and sandstone faces, facing south or facing north,
where the conversations are on conservation and if the tasks
allotted are too heavy, the volunteers can straighten, pause,
laugh together and ask:
‘how was the walled garden as a workplace, what regulation
ruled the conversation, laughter, pausing; was the muffling
caused by whispering, not walls; did conservation then
encompass layers of society, not taxonomies of species?’
And as we work in the walled garden and try to know this place,
we ask: ‘how was their understanding used, how often did they wonder,
how many were their choices, or did they only know their place?’
Body of Writing 