.

The Outing

.

I

Miss Deidre Ealing of Tiny Tots School,
A woman who’d never be anyone’s fool,
Observing her charges like little buds sprouting,
Decided the next day they’d go on an outing.

Departure was posted that morning for nine;
No clouds could be seen and the outlook was fine.
Patricia was punctual with Patrick her brother,
Both dressed in their best by their pampering mother.

Aurora arrived with her mouth full of chocolate,
And Moses was there with his mouse in his pocket.
Felipe and Freddy as usual were fighting
Which usually happened when things got exciting.

And then there was Sky in her new Sunday dress,
And Maisie as always her hair in a mess.
Hermione was present, and so too was Hettie
With Ben her admirer together with Betty.

*****

Miss Ealing had hired a coach for the day;
The driver was Walter whose wits were astray.
But also the man was addicted to booze
And hid on his person some bottles to use.

And so they all boarded and got to a seat
With everyone clutching packed lunches to eat.
And as they sat ready that morning in May
It seemed they would have the most wonderful day.

For what can compare with the fun of an outing
With happy young children all screaming and shouting?
And what can compare with a coach trip together
With friends and admirers in wonderful weather?

Yet here must I crave my poor reader’s indulgence
With what will to some seem fantastical nonsense.
But strange are the ways of an old spinster’s heart
And Deidre had feelings that set her apart.

For now in her bosom there started to bubble
The thoughts that were destined to cause all the trouble.
Observing them all in her mind there began
The faintest first stir of a devilish plan.

But truth to tell Deidre Ealing for years
Had wept many lonely and miserable tears.
For love had been absent from Deidre’s life,
This woman unwanted as anyone’s wife.

No child had she ever had climb in her bed,
Nor ever had kissed any little one’s head.
Her life had been empty—except of her sadness,
To which would the jury attribute her madness.

Her only delight were the children at school,
But these she kept distant as that was the rule.
Yet all through the years she’d remember their names
And watch them enchantedly lost in their games.

She’d see them arrive at the gates every morning—
If someone had looked they’d have seen there a warning!—
She’d gaze at them all with a sorrowful eye,
Accompanied by an involuntary sigh.

And if they had looked at the end of the day,
Long after her charges had all gone away,
They’d also have noticed a faraway look
As Deidre lovingly tidied each book.

But no one took notice of Deidre Ealing,
And nobody understood what she was feeling.
When Deidre put those books back on the shelf
She’d muse how already she stood there herself.

Her place had been always some spot in the corner
Away from the children from where she’d keep order.
And always alone there she’d merely observe,
And always that distance she’d need to preserve.

*****

But now they were ready to set off together,
Her party excited in glorious weather.
And thus they departed on time as they planned
With Walter a bottle of gin in his hand.

.

II

Miss Ealing had picked for today’s destination
The castle at Windsor so loved by the nation.
The children would see there our history on show,
Their pride in which Englishmen never outgrow.

So driven by Walter, his hand round his bottle,
They roared down the highway, the coach at full throttle.
No words could their merriment ever convey
As onwards through Wandsworth they sped on their way.

But something now happened to Deidre inside her
That after would cause all the world to despise her.
Some powerful impulse beyond her control
Arose from the darkness and captured her soul.

Observing the scene there she’d suddenly grasped
That Providence here had provided unasked
A chance for relief and a salve for her pain
The like of which never would happen again.

But this now required she take charge of the moment
And conquer her weakness, her constant opponent.
So driving all fears for the future away,
She summoned her courage and entered the fray.

She orders old Walter to make for the river
Instead of that crumbly old castle at Windsor.
Today, not to history their time they’d devote,
But head for the water and hire a boat!

Now, Walter the Witless, for reasons we’ll see,
Received these instructions with obvious glee.
Though driving a coach was his means of employment,
Employment of drink was his means of enjoyment!

And as it was difficult driving at speed
While tending his own very personal need,
If ever between them permitted to choose
He’d give up the driving and go for the booze!

It seemed to him therefore before him there lay
His very ideal of a wonderful day.
Unbothered at all by his means of employment,
He’d focus his all on his means of enjoyment!

And as he now set off in search of the water,
A lifelong abstention appearing to falter,
No swifter conversion had ever there been
Than witnessed that day as they hurtled through Sheen.

Yet even as Walter was heading for heaven
(Via Mortlake and then past the A307)
Miss Deidre was bent on a journey as well,
But one that would take her directly to hell.

.

III

At length they arrive at their new destination,
Commencing events that would outrage the nation.
Her charges alight though their eyes all aglow
For what was ahead of them no one could know.

Miss Deidre now calls to her Walter the driver
(Who’s finished the gin and at work on the cider)
And tells him to find himself somewhere to park
And wait for her party there quietly till dark.

Then bracing herself she proceeds to the jetty
Where several large vessels are waiting and ready.
And choosing the finest, she hires it for cash
And has all the children embark in a flash.

The captain, a kindly old seafaring man,
Would after recall how the journey began.
The media and newspapers, full of his praises,
Would laud him in suitably colourful phrases.

Not so with Miss Deidre as shortly we’ll learn;
Her place in disgrace in our history she’d earn.
She’d stand there forever reviled like the Ripper
For what was to happen that day on the river.

For now in her consciousness thoughts were appearing
At which would the gallery gasp at the hearing.
A plan was evolving in Deidre’s mind
That many there Satan would say had designed.

Miss Deidre turns to the captain beside her,
Politely requesting he kindly advise her.
She wishes to treat all her charges to tea,
The news of which causes these innocents glee.

The captain appears lost in fog for a while,
But then reappears with a nautical smile.
Upriver he’s heard of a five-star hotel
Whose gateaux, it’s rumoured, the finest excel.

So Deidre now orders the captain to head there,
Insisting by three that her party should get there.
And thus with the children their joy unconfined
They sail up the Thames leaving London behind.

.

IV

Now, what can be said of those hours on the water
That wouldn’t be detailed by every reporter?
And what were the feelings her charges now had
As Deidre plunged to the bottom of bad?

In truth, all the children appeared quite content
To gaze all around as upriver they went.
These infants who’d never before seen the Thames
Were utterly gripped by its eddies and bends.

Their parents, it seems, had been always too busy,
Or else after work were just simply too weary,
To show them the wonderful world where they lived
Whose loveliness is the divinity’s gift.

And so when they saw all the trees and the flowers,
Whose scent is the breath of celestial powers,
Within every child by this loveliness spurred,
A sense of their deepest humanity stirred.

And nothing was uttered as all of them stared,
The youngest among them a tiny bit scared.
They seemed to feel something transcendent of words
That sang in the breeze and the songs of the birds.

.

V

But now they’ve arrived at their day’s destination,
As also have we at our tale’s culmination.
With fairylike magic when rounding a corner
Appears a hotel that’s exactly to order.

And here they debark and their host bids farewell;
He’ll sail back to Kew with a story to tell.
He’ll tell of the children entranced by the river,
Their silence unbroken by even a whisper.

So Deidre leads all her charges inside,
Demanding the very best cakes be supplied.
Meringues she insists on, and chocolate surprises;
Marshmallows, of course, and fruit salad and ices.

And when all the children have eaten their fill,
And Deidre Ealing has settled the bill,
She pays for some rooms for her charges to rest;
To sleep for a moment still dressed in their best.

And each then she kisses there lying in bed,
This child on her eyelids and that on his head.
And after she’s kissed them, she sits down to wait:
Now everything’s finished, she’ll meet with her fate.

And when they arrive with their sirens all blaring,
And during the trial with everyone staring,
Not once does she ever her feelings reveal,
Nor ever refer to her lonely ordeal.

But what of the children, perhaps now you’re wondering,
The experts admitted had met with no suffering?
They brought with them home something special that day,
A sense deep within they would never betray.

That sense would remain with them all through their lives,
As also that afternoon always they’d prize:
The beauty in which they had shared on the Thames
Revealing the mystery of what never ends.

.

Poet’s Note: Map showing route of the route across South London through Wandsworth and Sheen to Kew.

The party was travelling westwards along the A3 (not shown) and the A205, from bottom right to top left. Windsor Castle, the original destination, is about 16 miles west of Kew.

It is not recorded where on the Thames the hotel was, but the boat would have taken them westwards and northwards up the river.

.

.

.

Paul Martin Freeman is an art dealer in London. The poem is from The Bus Poems: A Tale of the Devil, currently in preparation. His recent book, A Chocolate Box Menagerie, is published by New English Review Press on whose website the current poem first appeared.

NOTE TO READERS: If you enjoyed this poem or other content, please consider making a donation to the Society of Classical Poets.

The Society of Classical Poets does not endorse any views expressed in individual poems or commentary.


CODEC Stories:

18 Responses

  1. Roy Eugene Peterson

    Another one of your fascinating trips, this one with so many questions left floating on the Thames. Was this a real trip? What was really wrong with what Deidre did? Can an unorthodox school outing be a sin? As I was reading the poem, I had so many visions of what might have transpired of what Deidre had done. In the end, I was left floating in my mind. You have a wonderful way of maintaining our interest with well-chosen rhymes.

    Reply
    • Paul Martin Freeman

      Hello Roy

      Thank you for your usual sensitive reading of my poem. I’ll shortly be writing more fully to Joe below, but will address your specific questions. Firstly, it was not a real story. Her personal name came from the need for something old-fashioned that would work in both two and three syllables. Her surname came from needing to rhyme with “feeling” in stanza 15. Ealing is a district in West London where the book is set so seemed eminently suitable.

      In the eyes of society she was a kidnapper and a criminal and had to be punished. But you ask the right question. Everything was done out of love and nobody was harmed. So where was the sin?

      I’m very glad I was able to hold your attention with my tale!

      Reply
  2. jd

    I echo what Mr. Peterson above said. I read every line of your long poem and every line held my interest. Loved the cadence but the mystery remains.
    No doubt there will be much re-reading in searching for clues.

    Reply
    • Paul Martin Freeman

      Thank you for your comment, jd. I’m glad it held your interest. It is indeed a long poem. Please see my upcoming responses to Joe and others below..

      Reply
  3. Susan Jarvis Bryant

    This poem romps along with rhythmic aplomb… it swept me up in its story and held me until the very end. I love the way your adeptly woven tapestry of words created vivid images of each character. I could see the school children on the bus with the grog-gulping driver steering them and their rebellious yet beautiful teacher to places very few children tread these days… places of excitement, adventure, love, and splendour… all snatched away in the name of ‘health and safety’ and ‘care’.

    Paul, thank you for this engaging journey on routes I have often travelled. You have made me smile.

    Reply
    • Susan Jarvis Bryant

      … not that I condone drinking and driving… or taking children to places their parents are not aware of… but the beauty of entertaining poems is that they make the implausible possible.

      Reply
    • Paul Martin Freeman

      Hello Susan. I’m delighted you liked it!

      As usual. when I started I had no idea what the story would be about. That came from the need for a rhyme for “school” in the first stanza. Deidre was not going to be anyone’s fool, but she was a lonely spinster. Please see my upcoming responses to Joe and Margaret below.

      Reply
  4. Joseph S. Salemi

    This reminds me of the long narrative poems of George Crabbe (1754 – 1832). But the poem ends very flatly — what the hell happened? Why did the teacher do this? What was the upshot of it all?

    If the poem is based on a real event, there needs to be some imaginative fiction added by the poet to bring satisfying closure to the story. Reportage is OK, but sometimes not enough. Why is Deidre on the way to “hell”? Why will she “meet with her fate”? Why is the nation “outraged”? Crabbe never left readers hanging like this.

    Reply
    • Susan Jarvis Bryant

      Joe, I understand your point and maybe the poem would benefit from a tidy conclusion, but I quite liked the loose ends. I thought the teacher’s reasons for behaving in the way she did were addressed:

      Her only delight were the children at school,
      But these she kept distant as that was the rule.
      Yet all through the years she’d remember their names
      And watch them enchantedly lost in their games.

      A first-grade teacher friend of mine said one of the saddest things was not being able to comfort a child who runs to her with arms held up for a hug after hurting him/herself. There are rules against this in the UK.

      Most of the lessons I’ve learned in childhood are through spontaneous acts of kindness… which I think this poem portrays. The teacher would most certainly be banished to Hell by the PC police… but that leaves the driver… now, he is a puzzle. But do I need all the pieces fitted together? I’m still thinking.

      Reply
    • Paul Martin Freeman

      Thank you for reading and commenting, Joe. First of all, I’m delighted you actually read it to the end. It’s 200 lines!

      As I’ve explained above, it’s a made-up tale. I used a reportage style but felt I was giving enough clues from the outset to indicate it was not a real story. The alliteration in the description of the children in stanzas 2, 3 and 4, for example.

      The poem comes at the very end of my book, The Bus Poems: A Tale of the Devil, so it’s a little unfair to expect the reader to understand the meaning of the final stanza which seems to have disappointed many. Following Maimonides, in the Kabbalah, “what never ends” is God (“Ein Sof” in Hebrew: “there is no end”).

      https://www.newenglishreview.org/articles/maimonides-as-the-greatest-jewish-mystic/

      With Man made, as we believe, in God’s image, and having, as I put it in the book, “One foot in time and one eternity” the eternal world of God underlies or is the context of our own temporal one. This idea is explicated in the story of the Devil’s visit to London, the main one of the book. What happens in the present tale is that, taken out of their ordinary drab manmade world and exposed for the first time to the beauty of the natural one, the innocent children, “utterly gripped” by what they see and awestruck into unwonted silence, sense that world of God and their rootedness in it in a shared mystical experience:

      And so when they saw all the trees and the flowers,
      Whose scent is the breath of celestial powers,
      Within every child by this loveliness spurred,
      A sense of their deepest humanity stirred.

      And nothing was uttered as all of them stared,
      The youngest among them a tiny bit scared.
      They seemed to feel something transcendent of words
      That sang in the breeze and the songs of the birds.

      This is the experience that, as the poem makes clear at the end, will remain with them all through their lives—we can assume, blessing them.

      The poem is also about loneliness, lack of fulfilment and madness. Deidre breaks out of the role imposed on her by society and kidnaps the children. Then, having achieved what she has always needed—something so small but just enough to allow her to feel some kind of fulfilment as a woman—she accepts the consequences of her actions without trying to explain or justify herself. Thus she is an enigma to the jury who can only believe she is mad. Yet, though for the world she’s mad, we might also see her as a noble soul as, stoical and dignified, she remains true to herself. Having lived her life unwanted by anyone and her pain unrecognised, now that she has what she needs—the memory forever of that miraculous afternoon—she’s not about to go explaining herself to people even though that might make things easier for her. She has, after all, committed a crime, and it is right, she believes, to suffer the consequences. But then again we might ask: is not such an Iago-like, self-imposed silence—itself born from isolation—a kind of madness? It is for the reader to make sense of these things.

      We come now to the deeper meaning of the poem. Deidre, who in her pain acts only out of love and brings only goodness into the lives of those around her, blessing them, is condemned not by the PC police but by the conventional religious establishment. (Note the condemnation echoed by the narrator is in religious terms.) Now count the number of children. There are twelve of them. So what I’m doing in this tale is, as in the main one of which this is a faint echo, retelling part of the Christ story with a nondescript, despised woman as heroine. In essence, Deidre’s pain is the means by which the world of God breaks through into the world of Man.

      I have, of course, played a few tricks on the reader to build the tension, suggesting terrible things are about to happen. But I feel this is justified by the fact that nobody who was not there knew what happened in the hotel or what was in Deidre’s mind. As far as the world was concerned, this mad woman kidnapped the children and they were lucky not to have something even more dreadful happen to them before they were rescued. We might say also, this is “loud rumor” speaking—the chatter of the ignorant.

      On a deeper level, the poem is about things we don’t understand so its very mysteriousness is part of the meaning, although that may be frustrating if we’re looking for simple answers.

      Thank you for this opportunity to explain the story and for the association with Crabbe. I am honoured by the comparison—even if I failed so miserably at the end!

      Reply
  5. Julian D. Woodruff

    Some meandering thoughts … This is a long narrative, but enjoyable to read, start to finish. Could it be told more concisely? Perhaps, but maybe not so effectively. On the strategy: the rhythm and consistent but loose rhyming deliberately (?) give the whole the feeling of a romp, which points of the narrative directly counter; while the insistent end-stops suggest the prim and proper character the adventure was supposed to have had.
    Is it based in fact or fancy? The teacher’s name and the specifics of the route suggest yes, the bus driver’s alcoholism (I hope!) suggests no.
    The ending does seem somewhat adrift. A section on the (specific) responses of children, their parents, the public, and the press (perhaps with Paul’s occasional comment) might reinforce what I suppose is his take on the affair, and also provide a springier springboard for the reader’s thinking.
    One can’t dismiss the teacher’s delinquency, but at least equally important is the loneliness & isolation she experiences. On this point a brief quote from a recent essay by Anthony Esolen, “The Importance of Place” (The Catholic Thing, 8/5/2023) is apropos: “’No man is an island, said the Reverend Donne, but modern life seems organized to prove him wrong, by making each one of us an insular zone of desire …” (On this idea, see Susan Jarvis Bryant’s comment.)
    Thanks, Paul for a thought-provoking read.

    Reply
    • Mary Gardner

      No, no; please, Paul, do not make it concise! I loved the romp and the surprise and the mystery – and the relief at the end that Miss Deidre did not commit anything gruesome. Well penned!

      Reply
      • Paul Martin Freeman

        Hello Mary. Thank you for your kind comment. Don’t worry I have no intention of rewriting it! I’m glad you liked it.

        Please see my response to Joe and others in which I’ve tried to explain what the poem is about.

    • Paul Martin Freeman

      Thank you for your comment, Julian. I’m glad you enjoyed it. If you did!

      Please see my response to Joe above.

      Reply
  6. Margaret Coats

    Paul, this is one of the cleverest plots I’ve ever read–and I enjoyed it thoroughly. This may be a long poem by current standards, but the effect surpasses what some of us will remember from the much longer 1969 novel “The French Lieutenant’s Woman.” It had two or three endings, but “The Outing” has as many endings as there are persons in the story. We can imagine that teacher, driver, sailor, hotel staff, children, parents, school administrators, expert witnesses at the teacher’s trial, and the general public will have every shade of viewpoint. What happened? The teacher (by her own decision and at her own expense) treated the children to a day of extraordinary fun contrary to school policy (gateaux instead of packed lunches) and kissed each of them (also against school policy). The occasion fulfilled the teacher’s desires for love. You, Paul, are careful to have experts testify that no harm was done. You leave judgment open to readers who will probably focus on varied characters and aspects of the tale. We decide whether it is a good story, and why. As a child, I might not have cared for the teacher’s kiss or the disorder of the day. As a parent, I would want far more control over what my children were doing. But as a human being, I love this story of seemingly impossible desires fulfilled with no harm done. I remember a few moments like that in my life, and they are treasured memories that still make me happy. Since it is only a fictional story, I can appreciate the rollicking verse and the escape from worldly pressures that it implies, while thanking you for making me think of deeper realities in memory.

    Reply
    • Paul Martin Freeman

      Thank you so much, Margaret. That is an absolutely astonishing compliment, all the more so coming from someone with your depth of reading and experience. Thank you so much!

      I’ve tried to convey to Joe above what I think the ambiguity was about. But your insight into my work never fails to amaze me and perhaps you’ll see other things.

      Reply
  7. C.B. Anderson

    Aside from the predilections of Walter, I thought this poem fairly tedious. Get to the point, find closure, and don’t keep us hanging forever! And, above all, polish your rhymes.

    Reply
    • Paul Martin Freeman

      Hello CB. Do feel free to send me a list of my unpolished rhymes. I’m always willing to learn. Also, sorry you thought the poem tedious. Clearly there’s more learning there as well that’s required!

      Reply

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.

Captcha loading...

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.