Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough!
It isn’t fit for humans now,
There isn’t grass to graze a cow.
Swarm over, Death!
>
Come, bombs and blow to smithereens
Those air -conditioned, bright canteens,
Tinned fruit, tinned meat, tinned milk, tinned beans,
Tinned minds, tinned breath.
>
Mess up the mess they call a town-
A house for ninety-seven down
And once a week a half a crown
For twenty years.
>
And get that man with double chin
Who’ll always cheat and always win,
Who washes his repulsive skin
In women’s tears:
>
And smash his desk of polished oak
And smash his hands so used to stroke
And stop his boring dirty joke
And make him yell.
>
But spare the bald young clerks who add
The profits of the stinking cad;
It’s not their fault that they are mad,
They’ve tasted Hell.
>
It’s not their fault they do not know
The birdsong from the radio,
It’s not their fault they often go
To Maidenhead
>
And talk of sport and makes of cars
In various bogus-Tudor bars
And daren’t look up and see the stars
But belch instead.
>
In labour-saving homes, with care
Their wives frizz out peroxide hair
And dry it in synthetic air
And paint their nails.
>
Come, friendly bombs and fall on Slough
To get it ready for the plough.
The cabbages are coming now;
The earth exhales.
April 3, 2008
‘Slough’ by John Betjeman
Posted by aelianus under Regnum Britanniarum | Tags: Slough |[25] Comments
April 3, 2008 at 9:03 am
Doesn’t scan quite as well with ‘Cumbernauld’ but the sentiment applies
April 3, 2008 at 5:50 pm
Ahem…
Come global warming (“Whaur’s it cald?”)*
To bleak, concretey Cumbernauld:
It’s car-parks, “centres”, subways scald
Until they crack.
Glenrothes, Irvine, Livingston
And East Kilbride have thee outshone,
Thou foulest bum-plook e’en upon
North Lanarkshire.
Fair Cumbernauld’s best boast of all?
The realm’s first ever shopping mall.
Shrink-wrapped, deep-fried, deep-frozen all:
Joys-R-Not-Us.
May UV rays confound the ned
Whose vile addictions must be fed
By theft and fights and daytime bed.
And Buckfast wine.
So let the scorching sun and wind
Put right the planners’ work, who sinned
When they their blueprints never binned:
To dust return.
*“What’s it called? Cumbernauld!” was the slogan used in a publicity campaign for the town.
April 3, 2008 at 6:09 pm
Gasp! BA, I am honoured beyond words that you should choose to publish your heartfelt if damning verses on our humble blog. (Profound bow)
October 3, 2014 at 8:06 pm
Ditto
April 3, 2008 at 6:23 pm
Pshaw, pish, tush, &c. The honour (of appearing in such fine Catholic company as your blog affords) is all mine, dear sir.
(Bowing right back atcha)
April 4, 2008 at 9:25 am
[…] April 3, 2008 McSlough Posted by Benedict Ambrose under Gonnae no dae tha’, McParody With all due apologies: if you require an explanation, look around here. […]
April 4, 2008 at 12:23 pm
I take it all back. Bravo, that man.
April 5, 2008 at 12:27 am
Altogether impressive.
April 5, 2008 at 5:38 pm
I lived in Slough during my first two years on this earth. I’m still trying to recover. It truly is a very uninspiring place.
However it is surrounded by nice countryside and villages and some of the out-skirts are nice such as Farnham Royal and Stoke Poges.
April 8, 2008 at 10:37 pm
That’s wonderful, Aelianus, well done.
April 8, 2008 at 11:06 pm
They are by JB and BA not me!
September 14, 2009 at 11:07 pm
You bluddy terrorists….its always about bombs.
God bless this town.
December 17, 2009 at 4:43 pm
fuk off this is my family home ur talin about. slough is the best place to live and this town will stay forever u have my words u crazy nutter! John stop it are u from slough cos i want to stop this
April 29, 2013 at 5:43 pm
So out of date, yawn yawn. Even Betjeman apologised for his vile words.
November 7, 2014 at 11:45 am
what wonderful use of the written word Sabia Hussain, and you nearly managed to spell some words correctly. If ever Betjeman was worried if his poem was justified one quick read of your post would have put him firmly back on track. I was raised in Slough and I thank god every day I managed to escape. You only have to read the local news (6/11/14) to see teenagers setting pit bulls on each other followed by vicious stabbings. Slough was once the model of social and multicultural integration. My best friends from school hailed from India, Pakistan, Senegal, Italy, Poland and further afield. We all got on in the 70’s and early 80’s. What has happened to turn it into a ghetto based town where cultures that once lived side by side in harmony have formed their own enclaves, with all the problems that brings. Is it the ratio’s that have changed the need to integrate or do modern immigrants have a different mindset to the “happy to join in and embrace the local culture” that we used to have.
December 4, 2015 at 12:38 pm
[…] on the brink. For some reason I couldn’t get the words of John Betjeman’s ‘Slough‘ out of my head, and went to […]
February 24, 2016 at 10:37 am
Thank you Sabia for making me laugh so hard. I think John B would have enjoyed that response. Benedict Ambrose, look up Goldy Lookin Chain doing “Newport” on youtube to see how it’s really done in the 21st Century.
May 24, 2016 at 7:02 am
Funny poem! I live in Slough and this describes the townspeople perfectly!
October 7, 2016 at 11:51 am
Rubbish sixth form poetry!
October 25, 2016 at 9:00 pm
[…] Sit on your arse for fifty years and hang your hat on a pension’, the speaker rants. Meanwhile, John Betjeman’s ‘Slough’ (1937) gleefully invited bombs to fall on the the town of Slough, to obliterate ‘that man with […]
November 23, 2016 at 10:32 am
apparently John Betjeman only used Slough in a poetic way as an example of all the things he hated about industralisation – which of course was very unfortunate for Slough as the poem showed such strong feelings – his daughter appologised on his behalf many years later … but whether Slough has become a shocker in its own right remains the decision of those fortunate (or unfortunate) to be living in the said town … and like all poetry we perhaps we should learn to see through the words to what they really represent … in this case a dislike and unacceptance of JB’s changing England
February 4, 2017 at 1:28 am
Beauty *or lack thereof) is in the eye of the beholder. So it is with Slough!
June 7, 2017 at 2:07 pm
I want to create a blog that has a creative layout like what you find on MySpace, but with more traffic. I’m not a fan of the Blogger site. . . Any suggestions?.
September 9, 2021 at 5:24 pm
rubbish poem i did in year 8. my teacher jabbered about tinned minds and robot children who were all the same for 1 hour straight. a good thing is she bellowed COME every time she read it to us and called one of my classmates hot.
September 14, 2021 at 10:37 pm
Morrissey did it better with “Everyday is Like Sunday”.