Spectator competition winners: A Kentish Lad

In Competition No. 3259, you were invited to submit a poem entitled ‘A(n) [insert county of your choice] Lad’.

There has been quite a fanfare this year to mark the centenary of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, but rather less attention has been paid to Housman’s Last Poems, also published 100 years ago. Hence this Housman-themed challenge, which attracted a smart and thoughtful entry with some nice Housmanian echoes. George Simmers’s offering also owes a debt to Monty Python’s Four Yorkshiremen. He and his fellow winners, printed below, take £25 apiece.

You reckon you knew misery In Wenlock and on Bredon, You say the world weren’t good to thee? Well, it gave thee food to feed on.   And you’re sad because lads marched to wars, With boots upon their feet? Th’art lucky! We longed for clogs because Of t’broken glass in’t street.   Yet every year we heard the lark Sing through the summer’s cold, And through those autumns damp and dark When pies grew thick with mould.