Giles Watson's poetry and prose
The Bones
There was nothing ghoulish about it. They were the bones of a sheep: its skull, jawbones, and the rear end of its vertebral column. My arms were clutched about them jealously, my lips pursed. No one was going to take them from me.
Not that my parents would ever have done so. The bones were perfectly clean, picked bare by crows with boyish voices, and bleached by the relentless Australian sun. Perhaps my parents were collecting wood for the open fire; I was collecting bones.
Australia always struck me as a silly place to keep sheep. It is made for kangaroos. In order to open up the pastures, farmers ringbarked the marvellous gums in the dry sclerophyll forest, leaving them to die for the sake of their sheep. Now, they too are skeletons, gaunt against the endless high Australian skies. The sheep swelter, full-fleeced merinos, choking on their own wool, bleating their longing for colder climes. When they die, the bodies are not cleared away: out there, the farms are so large that the crows and blowfly maggots have eaten all the flesh long before the corpses are found.
Bones for me were wondrous treasures. Skulls were particularly so, because I could look into the hole that once accommodated the spinal cord – into that black, mystical space that once enshrined the brain. One time, I sawed a skull in half just so I could see the inside, but the mystery evaporated with the invading light. So I collected them in sackfuls, only lamenting the fact that I was alone in my hobby, and that there was no one with whom I could trade bones the way other children trade football cards: “I’ll trade your first cervical vertebra for a right femur: I already have three of those…”
My reference book was Edmund Sandars’s A Beast Book for the Pocket. The book described English fauna, but farm animals were also in it, and most importantly of all, it had diagrams of their skeletons, each set against the black silhouette of the form of the living creature. The page which showed the sheep skeleton was ever open in my bedroom. And gradually, month upon month, I assembled the whole thing: a Frankenstein’s monster sheep skeleton. Here was a shoulder blade I found sticking out of a tussock of grass; there were the long bones found scattered on an ants’ nest; a cage of ribs detached and bleached, and at last, the bones of the feet, all lovingly restored. When it was complete, I exulted, and laughed all jigsaws to scorn.
Photograph by Leslie Watson, 1972.
The Bones
There was nothing ghoulish about it. They were the bones of a sheep: its skull, jawbones, and the rear end of its vertebral column. My arms were clutched about them jealously, my lips pursed. No one was going to take them from me.
Not that my parents would ever have done so. The bones were perfectly clean, picked bare by crows with boyish voices, and bleached by the relentless Australian sun. Perhaps my parents were collecting wood for the open fire; I was collecting bones.
Australia always struck me as a silly place to keep sheep. It is made for kangaroos. In order to open up the pastures, farmers ringbarked the marvellous gums in the dry sclerophyll forest, leaving them to die for the sake of their sheep. Now, they too are skeletons, gaunt against the endless high Australian skies. The sheep swelter, full-fleeced merinos, choking on their own wool, bleating their longing for colder climes. When they die, the bodies are not cleared away: out there, the farms are so large that the crows and blowfly maggots have eaten all the flesh long before the corpses are found.
Bones for me were wondrous treasures. Skulls were particularly so, because I could look into the hole that once accommodated the spinal cord – into that black, mystical space that once enshrined the brain. One time, I sawed a skull in half just so I could see the inside, but the mystery evaporated with the invading light. So I collected them in sackfuls, only lamenting the fact that I was alone in my hobby, and that there was no one with whom I could trade bones the way other children trade football cards: “I’ll trade your first cervical vertebra for a right femur: I already have three of those…”
My reference book was Edmund Sandars’s A Beast Book for the Pocket. The book described English fauna, but farm animals were also in it, and most importantly of all, it had diagrams of their skeletons, each set against the black silhouette of the form of the living creature. The page which showed the sheep skeleton was ever open in my bedroom. And gradually, month upon month, I assembled the whole thing: a Frankenstein’s monster sheep skeleton. Here was a shoulder blade I found sticking out of a tussock of grass; there were the long bones found scattered on an ants’ nest; a cage of ribs detached and bleached, and at last, the bones of the feet, all lovingly restored. When it was complete, I exulted, and laughed all jigsaws to scorn.
Photograph by Leslie Watson, 1972.