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Gloucestershire Friends: Poems From a German Prison Camp cover

Gloucestershire Friends: Poems From a German Prison Camp

Chapter 36: 2. WILLUM ACCOUNTS FOR THE PRICE OF LAMPREY
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About This Book

A collection of short poems written by a soldier in captivity reflecting on home, memory, and the experience of imprisonment. The verse moves between intimate domestic images—mother, English gardens, county landscapes—and the hardships of internment, loneliness, and comradeship, often blending pastoral detail with wartime grief and wry humor. Forms vary from ballades and sonnets to rondel and villanelle, and recurring motifs include nature, loss, longing, and reflections on duty and sacrifice. Many pieces juxtapose the small joys of remembered rural life with the starkness of prison, producing restrained lyricism that balances tenderness, anger, and quiet faith.

2. WILLUM ACCOUNTS FOR THE
PRICE OF LAMPREY

“Aye, sure, it’s pretty fish, but there’s no sale
Nowadays.” “Why?” “Well, the story that they tell
Is, as the king were very fond on ’em,
And all the fashion ate and paid up well.
And then one day our king—so goes the tale—
Ate over-hearty-like and throwed ’em up.
So all the fashion with him when he dined
Cut out their orders,—and the price cum down.
And maybe that be true, for still in town
Our council—scheming, likely, to remind
His Majesty of joys he left behind—
Sends un the very prince o’ lamprey pies
(I’ve seen un many a while in Fisher’s winder)
And so, God willing and if nothing hinder,
Some day he’ll taste again and prices rise.”