MADAM – Forty-five years ago this poem was written by my sister Valerie Hodges, and was printed in your paper.

As the fight goes on to build on Baxter’s Field and the beautiful Slad Valley, I thought it would be appropriate to print it again.

Valerie and Laurie Lee share the same birthday, June 26.

He would have been 100-years-old and Valerie 69 years. Both are now in the Lord’s safe keeping.

But we are still fighting for Baxter’s Field and the Slad Valley.

I do not want to see it covered in buildings, as the Peghouse Estate has been.

I have lived in Uplands all my life and enough is enough, we must stop it.

Peghouse Farm

Sweet meadows where I play,

The leaning hazel tree,

The slope, the stretch, the grassy reach,

Will be gone thought I.

In dreams I see the browsing herd,

The golden buttercups,

The hedgerows green,

The cattle trough.

I wander in the farmyard,

I peep in barn and shed,

No rattle from the dairy,

No hobnail-booted tread.

No noisy yard dog’s bark,

No contented murmuring hens,

Ah, grassy, tufty fields,

Your days are numbered friends.

Men’s calculating minds

In bricks and mortar lay,

A violet they never find

Along the wooded way.

Soon brick and tile will mar

The green escarpment.

Ah, Peghouse Farm, your days are o’er,

O’er too, my childhood.

Valerie Hodges

January 1969

Margaret Hodges

Uplands