This entire series of songs are the most personal and autobiographical I have ever written.
I have never delved so deeply into folk and personal stories as here a sign of the influence of attending a great Scottish Cultural Studies course at Nottingham University.
In this case the family story (now more detailed thanks to other family members input) revolves around my great-great grandmother and her ‘flight’ as it turns out now from southern Ireland not Ulster as I presumed in 1995. The story is simple she was catholic from a small village..Borrisleigh in Tipperary. It looks like her marriage to a serving British Army man Private Charles Mead precipitated the flight from Ireland (allegedly at dead of night in a fishing boat) to escape persecution by Irish Independents long before the Anglo-Irish War. He too was a catholic I now believe not a protestant but accepting the ‘black and tan’ was treated as even worse than the old ‘enemy’.
They were then sent to Ranikhet in the Himalayas which modeled on an English village in 1880s where my great-grandmother Mary was born on the 15th December 1888. Below her birth certificate.
Here the ‘English Church at Rani Khet’ from a postcard.
and the officer’s mess
This location and photos have only been uncovered recently.
I have amended the song lyrics from what sung on tape from Bombay..to Ranikhet and my Great Nan’s son Jack Everitt was wounded not dead at Arnhem but that whole other story.. and song one day…
The Ballad of Ranger Best referred to in the original recording is a poem by James Simmons which refers to the murder in 1972 of a 19 year old Irish member of the British Army (The Irish Rangers) who abducted from home when on leave from Germany and executed by the OIRA.
For now here the song and lyrics
BALLAD OF THE ORANGE TREE
Born in England’s low chalk hills
Where the river slides through the willows
I never knew how tangled grew the tree
Of my mother’s family history
Then one day the photograph emerged
My great-great-grandmother by the kerb
Of a backstreet somewhere in Reading
Her Irish features bold and striking
All I’d heard was rumour and hint
Of how they’d fled Ulster, her Catholic
Outcast for marrying a Protestant man
Who wore the dreaded Imperial tan
Sent to Raniket, my Great-nan’s birthplace
The army connection didn’t break
Three generations since have wed the gun
One of them was wounded at Arnhem
And now with great sadness I see
My cousin proud to be in the British Army
Luckily he’s never been made to serve
On streets where she could never return
Nothing of her past now remains
Each Irish connection wassliced away
Our family grew on in a different place
Like an orange tree in a wooden crate
Staring at the photo here back home
My mother’s every action seems to show
More and more of those hidden roots
As if a hybrid had produced old fruit
Four generations on here I stand
A false map of Ireland in my hand
Every time I try to trace back my tracks
Hurt and shame come hurtling back
Scraping back the soil in a barren field
I find a rusty gun stamped in with the heel
A family sown with King’s Shilling seed
But rooted in Thames Valley green
Then I read the Ballad of Ranger Best
And feel friendly fire burn at my chest
How can I avoid peeling back the skin
To taste what this bitter tree roots in
By Shaun Belcher
Sing, rant and scribble