Poem inspired by Tapestry

I, Miss Lorina Bulwer

The words spill out,

Tumble over themselves.

They say, why am I here?

The rant goes on at length,

Suddenly lucid thoughts prevail

Slow and deliberate,

Speaking of people she has known

With Royal connections

The Maharajah of Kelvedon

Caught in a tapestry web

Dr Pinching from Essex was the bearer

Of the good news.

A properly shaped female

Not a eunuch or hermaphrodite

But Aphrodite!

Did her birth confuse them?

And send her to the workhouse?

Sister and brother sealed her fate,

Parental death bore her there

On sibling’s arms.

To that place where nothing lives

Except despair

And Turnbridge and Powell.

Lives preserved in linen and thread

Lives preserved in linen and thread.

Shame on famous families

Great names hide there,

Gurneys, Bulwers of Wood Dalling,

Did they know?

The plots are uncovered

One by one by this tortured soul.

It hurts me to read,

I feel sick and tired,

Reality holds her with a thin thread,

Fate sealed here, but she knows

Truth will appear one day.

For now, she hides it

In a cupboard to preserve.

Hilary Hanbury  January 2017

Lorina was an inmate in the lunatic wing of Great Yarmouth workhouse where she angrily embroidered her letters on trailing lengths of patchwork fabric, venting about being locked up and abandoned by friends and family. Her furious hand-stitched letters, painstakingly sewn together while she was incarcerated, have long fascinated me.

The tapestry was found long after her death over a hundred years ago and has recently been on display at a number of Norfolk Museums.

I am presently writing a novel inspired by her story.