The following item was originally posted in February 2004. Normally I wouldn’t re-post an entire piece, but this one’s coming round again for a couple of reasons. Firstly, Sam came across the poem & said nice things about it, which pleased me because, although it’s one for which I’ve always had some regard, I have wondered from time to time whether its very specific cultural reference points lock it up too much. So I’m airing it again to see whether it travels.
Secondly, it’s only just become apparent that we’re going to have to move house rather more hastily than was the plan. The tenants who have been in Emma’s little 2-bedroom terraced cottage in Hitchin have decided to move out this month so we need to sell up & find ourselves a 3-bedroom place with some dispatch or we'll be stuck with both rent & mortgage repayments for several months. Trudging around Hitchin looking at what’s available has revealed that, for all its overall prettiness & character, its back streets & their generic Victorian housing could be gathered up & transplanted to any small dormitory town across the British Isles. So all hopes of finding that unique residence with room for all my books, a car parking space & a decent sized garden have dwindled.
Thoughts turn inevitably at such times to those parts of the world in which one would most like to live. For both of us, that part of North-West Cornwall called Penrhyn would do it every time. Hence the return of the wheal dreaming of last winter…
WHEAL DREAMING...
When I am rich beyond the dreams of avarice, I shall buy a house on the North Atlantic coast of Cornwall, preferably near the village of Zennor. There is something only reluctantly of England about this part of the British Isles; it is in most respects very distinctly somewhere else. Although the Cornish language died out in the 18th century determined efforts have been made to restore it. There is even an active, indeed, lively, Cornish nationalist party, Mebyon Kernow.
England’s only real historical stake in Cornwall was tin mining. The heyday of Cornish tin mining was between the 1840s & 1860s – a time of massive industrial growth in Britain as a whole. But recessions & diversification in the use of metals laid the industry low & the last working tin mines closed in the late 20th century.
The mines were all known by the prefixed proper noun ‘Wheal’, from the Cornish word for mine working, ‘whel’. These dark & dangerous places often bore romantic names – Wheal Jane, Wheal Martyn, Wheal Henrietta.
In the pretty coastal town of St Ives there is a tiny lane called Wheal Dream. Captivated by the name, I imagined it to be on the site of a long-forgotten tin mine. I speculated on its fate in a poem.
WHEAL DREAM
So I shall build it here
to rest upon and pierce
to the core this,
the old world. I claim
the seams of tin,
the springs loaded
inside rock. My drills,
my hammers will release
their tension and I
shall be known
by the hard-drawn smoke
that, rising, wires
my stone-dream
to the sky.
Tinmaster.
And my dream
shall falter in
a world that moves
too fast. And I
shall dwindle too.
My name will rust;
my span of arms
outstretched would bridge
the tiny artery
of the lane
they have named
Wheal Dream.
pic from: www.a1imaging.net/stock_ images_miscellaneous.htm = 2
11:07:06 PM 
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