Spectator competition winners: famous poems rewritten as short stories

In Competition No. 3256, you were invited to take a well-known poem and recast it as a short story.

Ben Hale’s ‘The Cockney Amorist’ sent me back to the delights of John Betjeman’s debut album Banana Blush (dismissed by the poet himself as ‘a vulgar pop song record’ but a favourite of John Peel). An honourable mention also goes to Nick MacKinnon, whose ‘The Rabbit Catcher’ reunited Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes.

The winners earn £25 each.

Dear Mother, just letting you know I got engaged to a subaltern after a tennis match. You know, that dreadful sport you consider so unladylike. You’ll never catch a man, Joan, you said, by racing boyishly around a court. Never beat a man in any game, you warned me, in case he takes offence. But he was charmed, Mother, charmed by my beating him outright. He admired my tan (yes, I wore shorts), and Father’s euonymus (never bore a man by talking of plants, Joan). We sipped gin (alcoholic drinks, Mother!) and I drove (a man escorts a lady, Joan) to the Golf Club. We sat unchaperoned in the car – are you having vapours yet, Mother? Yes, Miss J.H. Dunn will be married, and under an archway of tennis rackets. I am sorry to disappoint you, Mother, but I am simply too practical to be any poet’s muse. Janine Beacham/‘A Subaltern’s Love Song’

Why did Farmer Ledlow turn sky pilot? Attend and I’ll tell. His farm were out Chalk Martin way; arable, mostly. Busy enough most seasons, turn of year would find Ledlow uncommon idle. One year, 1899 he attests, as sick of comparing seed drill specifications as of the kin he hosted every Yuletide, he sallies out, telling his wife he’s checking a coppice gate but in truth merely leaning thereupon thinking black thoughts into the dimming dusk.