The Ballad Of Ernest Wood Shardlow Poem by Martin Ward

I found a photograph
of a soldier: here the ballad begins.
His mother was just a young girl;
my great grandparents took him in.

The love of a mining family,
this young boy would know;
they adopted and nurtured him:
Ernest Wood Shardlow.

When Ernest was still a boy,
he worked down in the mine;
in the dark of Morton pit,
for twelve hours at a time.

Ernest minded the ponies
and kept them from harm:
men and beasts in ajet black crust;
half a mile beneath his auntie's farm.

Men talked of war in the bowels
of the earth, breathing dirt and dust;
far from fresh air and daylight, they would
haul and hew and do what they must.

Ernest walked twenty miles to Derby,
in his heavy colliery boots;
leaving family, job and home:
severing his boyhood roots.

Making the ultimate sacrifice
by taking the King's Shilling;
Ernest Wood Shardlow:
patriotic and willing.

His name is on the Cenotaph
on Morton's main street,
where every year a poppy wreath
is placed with love beneath.

No longer a forgotten photograph
amongst long-dead kith and kin.
Ernest Wood Shardlow:
this ballad honours him.