It's Still Life

An Undated Note Inserted in Brigid’s Diary

Part 11.1, Avignon

If this diary is ever found, know first that we did not leave England lightly; we gave it our backs, our hands, our winters, and still it asked for more …more hunger, more silence, more gratitude for wages that would not keep bread before a child, nor steam in the pot.

When the threshing machines came, they came not as progress but as theft of humanity, swallowing the autumn work by which labouring families had always carried themselves through to spring.

So we broke the machines, and some burned barns, and I was among them — not from wildness, never that — but because starvation had already entered the cottages and stood there like a magistrate counting ribs.

In Sussex the cry rose for bread, for fair wages, for a few shillings more each day that might keep life in the body, yet the newspapers named it war, as though the poor refusing to starve were guilty of sedition.

Then came the arrests, the gaols, the lesson made public: leaders condemned, two sent to the gallows, until every fire we had lit seemed to cast its light forward onto a noose.

Felreil said we must leave before England made an example of me as well, and so we crossed the water with smoke still in our clothes and fear at our heels — if justice lived there, it had chosen the landlords’ table over ours.

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Written for Denise’s Six Sentence Story including the word “steam”.  Some images created with Midjourney; all writing is authentically my own original work.©Misky 2006-2026.