Spectator Competition: Midsummer

In Competition 3357 you were invited to submit a passage or poem including the phrase ‘The sukebind is late this year’, or similar. In Stella Gibbons’s comic novel Cold Comfort Farm the sukebind is a mysterious vine that flowers in midsummer, driving people into a frenzy which often leads to mollocking. Hence the heightened tone of this week’s entries. There were too many contenders to fit everyone in but George Simmers, Sylvia Fairley, Jennifer Hill and Frank Upton deserve a mention, as do Basil Ransome-Davies, Chris O’Carroll and Josephine Boyle (for her poem in which Seth the Hollywood star says ‘MeToo didn’t help my career’). The winners get £25.

The young men keep their gizzards dry

And close their lazy lizard eyes:

No pollarding of maids, I fear –

The sukebind is late this year.

The sap that used to burst the seam

Lies quite submersed inside the stream –

No swagger at the roosting gate.

This year the sukebind is late.

No quick kerfuffle in the copse,

No sudden scuffling in the crops –

The millers have no corn to grind.

This year it’s late, the sukebind.

The stooks and sheaves will rise in vain;

There’s something frowsty in the grain –

The leaves are dowdy, dusty, sere:

The sukebind is late this year.

Bill Greenwell

‘The sukebind is late this year,’ he said, ‘and tain’t just that. The dog-sorrel has gone furrity, and it looks as if the shrew-teazles have flitched, what with the water-meadow being choked with old-man’s-crotch.’

‘Is that bad?’ asked Flora.

‘Nay, lass, worse. My four cows, Lettuce, Hopeless, Boris and Phlegm, have all got the snorts, so it’llbe them for the knackers. Besides, yesterday there was a wildfire on Weaselsbreath Common and the flames blew over and burnt down the woodshed.’

‘Does Aunt Ada Doom know?’

‘Reckon she might. She was in there looking for something at the time.’

‘What on earth is happening?’

‘They say tis global warming or climate change, but I dunno. Starkadders have never been even a bit global, and it mun always be cold at Cold Comfort Farm. But the sukebind, now that’s a real worry. Themscientific folks never take account of the sukebind.’

Brian Murdoch

The sukebind is late this year;

the ripe heads full of seed

have yet to burst, each engorged sphere

swells tight with pent-up need.

Boars, bulls and rams strain at the gate

as rampant, fresh sap surges,

the woodshed, byre and haystack wait

on teeming, lusty urges.

When sultry, sensual tendrils twine

about the wains and hedges,

fair, flushing, fruitful females pine

for rough men with rough edges.

Then will the heavy-hanging weed,

priapic plant of sins,

inflame hot, fervent flesh to breed,

thus, mollocking begins.

Janine Beacham

The sukebind is late this year.

That’s quite obscure, to me, I fear.

Though forty years in the UK,

At ninety-two, I’m stumped today.

I asked my Oxford dictionary.

It said, This plant is imaginary.

That leaves the awful fact which is:

I lived my life not knowing this.

The plant offers superstition

And intense rustic passion –

it also hints at fertility,

Quite beyond my ability.

The telltale sign that it begins?

Whenever there’s cytokinins.

It will appear, so have no fear.

But yes, the sukebind is late this year.

Johannes Kerkhoven

The sukebind be late this year, lingersome Spring having clung, chill and damp as the parson’s handshake, long into Maytime. Yeoman and wench alike be famished for first sightings of its emerald splendour, haunting fecund field and orchards with yearnful eyes. When comes, ’twill be profuse in the wains as ’twas in my Grancher’s day, setting off, like gamekeeper’s gun, the gert rampancy distinguishing these parts. Then, hayloft to ditch, there’ll be engorgements, yieldings, writhings, intertwinings and the lusty conjoinment of what is swole with what is hole, all a-purpose to pleasure and what folk here-bouts do, whispering, name the Ninemonth Consequence. I have heard hedge priests call this devilry, schoolmasters ignorance, doctors madness, though half the County Asylum be full of them as stopped at their books sooner than gaze upon the sukebind and take their turn in the game of moil and squelch as conjured them hither afirstplace.

Adrian Fry

While I was scrolling in an online shop

I saw a rather snazzy little mop

and thought, as I secured it with a click,

‘Much more efficient than a clettering stick.’

I knew you’d like it as a fine surprise,

a little fal-lal to bedaze your eyes

that you could dangle from the special hook –

our shared enjoyment of a silly book.

I still do things like that, although I know

you popped your clogs a dozen years ago.

I took the shock, sippeted-up the sorrow

and scranleted a solitary furrow.

Most of the time I carry on unvexed,

a world away from our especial text,

but now and then it hits me. Oh, my dear –

I think the sukebind will not bloom this year.

Ann Drysdale

No. 3360: Wrong’un?

You are invited to submit a passage or poem in which a fictional villain offers their side of the story (16 lines/150 words maximum). Please email entries to competition@spectator.co.uk by midday on 24 July.