Evening in Ipswich

The streets are glowing with cinema lights,
A trolley-bus whines with its rumbling load:
Over hunched-up gables the stars are bright
Frost-bitten points above Woodbridge Road.
Bicycles lined up by Woolworth's door
While round the counters the factory girls
Rush in their giggling threes and fours—
Eager for lipstick, or pins for curls.
At a long street's end, a glimpse of masts
(Faint black lines on a deeper black)
Where on the river a gas-light casts
Across the Orwell a shivering track.
Up on the hill, the villas rise—
Pseudo-Tudor, row upon row:
Lights in the kitchen where Kathleen fries
Jack's high tea to the radio.
Around, the Suffolk land lies dark—
Wood and heathland, grass and plough.
Dim lights in the mansion in the park,
In the pub window a cheerful glow.
New-old Ipswich! Where neon tubes
Glow as they writhe round a Tudor beam:
Medieval churches squeezed between cubes
Of concrete factories for Suffolk cream.
Cold, in the street my spirit urged
Lampoons of the town without remorse:
But I think more kindly, my ire is purged,
As I drink in the bar of the GREAT WHITE HORSE.

23 November 1938

NOTES

• Papers, MS, in a letter, presumably to CMP, on Great White Horse Hotel paper; begins: 'My sweetest, Here to cheer you until my arrival tomorrow, a Poem which I have just finished, having (as usual) wooed the Muse when in solitude . . . Lots of love, Stuart'. The leaf dated by ?Peggy [not SP's hand] in MS in top left: 'Written in Ipswich – November 23rd 1938'
• Included in Songs from the Battlefield 1939, Guido papers, TS, nd, thus ⋜1939
• Charles Thomas, TS note (10-i-1998): 'JACK and KATHLEEN are just fictions, I think. This v. interesting. I suspect it refers to a visit, and stay, at Ipswich at about the time the Prehistoric Society of East Anglia became the Prehistoric Society, under Grahame Clark and co. Possibly SP had to stay on overnight. The date certainly fits.'