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A Performance Piece

by Linda Geaney

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When I said that "The Bentilean" would publish practically anything I never thought how literally, and literarily, I'd be taken. Like this performance piece by Bent' reader, Linda Geaney....

(SUNG)

"Daisy, Daisy, give us your answer do."
Only Daisy did.
Mary Ellen Deveraux changed her name,
advised to by her man, an ex-butcher
from Broomhall.
"If you don't, they'll sing,

(SUNG)

I'm shy Mary Ellen I'm shy.
At you. You don't want that do you?"
No Mary Ellen didn't.
With the loss of her name, went her
shyness, her job as a maid, bed food
and friends all vanished,
When Mary Ellen became,
Daisy May then,
Daisy did.
No longer a virgin, no longer in the eyes
of the Disapproving middle class world,
a respectable parlour maid, Daisy May
sang on the music halls.
Alfred Ex-butcher, knife thrower extra-
ordinaire and seducer of virgins, became
his manager.
He courted danger travelling frrom town
to town with Daisy and his thin wife;
whose hatchet face longed tto whirl
through the air to land deep in Daisy's
neck and nose forward to cleave down
Daisy till she fell like a split tree.
Daisy divided.
Now she sang for the boys' and gave
herself to those whose eys were more
tired than her's.
Alfred had split with his wife, or rather,
he had one nightt after finding the thin
wife, dressed like Minihaha, making
love to the acrobatic team, four men and
one girl; Alfred Ex-butcher from
Broomhall, billed as Chief Running Bull,
split his squaw the thin wife into
impossible slenderness.
This marriage break up would never be
mended.
Daisy, Daisy, give us your answer do.
And she did.
Helping the war effort was no effort,
carressing boys' heads and whispering
to them that God did care,
And Daisy did.

Linda Geaney was a full-time Creative Writing student
at Crewe & Alsager College, living and writing in
her home village near Sandbach, Cheshire.

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Copyright The Bentilean 2001
I met Linda when I was a member of the WEA's Writers' Workshop in Hanley and have been told by the tutor who still runs the Workshop that Linda died last year after a short illness. She will be much missed by all who had the good fortune to have met her.

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