​An annual festival of music, speech and drama is under way in Bath – and has launched a rock section for the first time.

Talented people from across the city have been taking part in the first week of the Mid Somerset Festival.

It began on Saturday with the creative writing sections, where participants used their imagination to create poems and stories.

Categories ranged from under-eights to adults.

Both adults and children then showed off their public speaking skills in the speech and drama sessions today.

The festival is in its 109th year, and aims to encourage participation in the performing arts.

It will run until Saturday, March 20, at locations across the city.

Next week, musicians will get the chance to perform and show off their skills.

Competitions include sections for woodwind, singing, piano, guitar and orchestras.

Festival chairman Paul Johnson said: “The Mid Somerset Festival has a proud tradition of providing access to excellence in the performing arts.

“However, as well as valuing tradition we also seek to keep up with contemporary trends and to this effect we have introduced rock guitar classics for the first time. I hope that everyone enjoys this year’s festival, be it as a competitor or as a member of the audience.”

For more information, visit www.midsomersetfestival.org.uk.

The winners from the creative writing junior classes were Jake Booth and Hannah Monelle from Neston School, and Max Gall, Millie Parashar, Olivia Caesar and Madeleine Matthews from Monkton Prep School.

Intermediate class winners were Jess Caple, Jonathan Shute, Isabella King, Will Burgess and Richard Sutton.

Senior class winners were Indranee de Silva, Margaret Haslam, Dr Brian Weaving, Mary Rozmus- West, Paul Kite, and Gillian Minter.

The winning pieces are below:

MSF Creative Writing – Poem  12 – 15 yrs Young Waterstones Trophy

Winner: Jess Caple ( St Katherines School, Pill)

The Seaside by Jess  Caple

Long creamy, milky waves,

Slide effortlessly along the beach,

Sounds of children’s laughing words,

Fill the ears of chattering mothers.

The scent of sizzling, greasy chip fryers,

Mouth-wateringly wafting around the beach,

The salty sea

Burns at nostrils of hysterically screaming children.

The sight of parasols flying around the coast,

And the middle aged adults running with flying arms to catch them,

The grainy sandcastles built with love and care,

Demolished without effort by the turquoise blue ocean.

One by one the tired families slowly walk away,

The silent beach is deserted and the sea calm,

The ocean grows peaceful as if it wishes to sleep,

Hour by hour the red sun slowly sets into the horizon,

The beach recovers for another day of laughter and smiles.

MSF Creative Writing Class 141 Robin Ledbury Cup –  Poetry

Winner:  Indranee de Silva (Also winner of Highest Mark Senior Classes  (94)

TIME TRACKS, LIFE TRACKS

For my grandfather, a book lover.

I see it now, as a painting

hung  on a quiet corner

of a wall.

Distant.

An instant rendered timeless,

But not beyond recall?

I am beginning

an uncertain race.

Eyes impelled

Through a time tunnel,

compelled

to step into the tunnel

of light

within that secluded space.

A child,

I pause at the friendly door,

looking tentatively in.

See shelves, and shelves, and shelves,

like railway tracks

of some long forgotten country line,

where the journey is the thing,

not the arriving.

At its heart

the painter shows a man,

slight stooped over a desk,

an intensity of stillness in his frame.

Only a turning finger

Breaks unmoving absorption,

With motion that repeats,

Flick, flick, linger.

I watch comfortably,

waiting for head to raise,

and slow smile draw me

into the frame.

Time is no more.

In that eternity

of memory

I am there,

as I have been so many times before.

         

Max Gall, winner of MSF Junior Literary Trophy for Original Poem Class 132  -  Age group 10 yrs

Gangster PIG!

While one little piggy went market, another little piggy went home

This little piggy wrote lyrics, sitting in his barn all alone

He said “Daddy I wanna be a gangster,

I wanna be a hip hop star, this farm it’s got no hot tub , and there’s no room for my car”

Daddy pig looked all baffled, he didn’t know what to say

So he said

“Piggy hush your squealing, we’re all sausage meat one day”

“Whatever dad, I’m never done, I’m super bad, I’m number one

I’ll be on MTV its true, rolling with my piggy crew

I’ll be in my crib with all the chicks, while you still plot in straw and sticks”

With that he turned and fled the barn

They never saw him around the farm

They say he flew off to New York and signed to EMI

They say he’s making big bucks, while his Daddy’s in a pie

No pork chops for the butcher, no bacon for your roll

Coz piggy’s writing lyrics and he’s in full control

Yeah, he’s made the big time; he’s surely made it big

Our super hero gangster, our big star Hip Hop Pig.

MSF  Creative Writing Class 130 Poem under  8yrs.

The Snow by Jake Booth (Neston School)

Snow

Crunchy as walking  on a pillow  of sand.

Snow, soft as a cloud, smooth as fur on a dog

As flat as a stone  on the ground

As great as summer.

Class 133 Poem  11yrs  Creative Writing Trophy

 The Baby     By Millie Parashar (Monkton Prep School)

 I’m sitting in the hospital waiting for my mother, apparently I’m getting a sister or a brother.

 When Daddy first told me why Mum had a big tummy.

 I thought he was joking so I found it rather funny,  then he said he was serious I didn’t know what to do  until I had a brainstorm and thought it all through.

 At first I was scared, then I was mad, then it occurred to me I was the opposite of sad.

So then I told my Daddy I’d be a good girl, so he told me to get up and give him a crazy little twirl.

Guess he was happy about my good news, because afterwards, he brought me, a dainty pair of shoes.

So I’m sitting in the hospital waiting for my mother, oh, here she comes with my little baby brother.

     

                                  

Winner of Class 144 (Senior Classes)  Poem suggested by Visual Stimulus MSCF Silver Award  

Bags of Bones by Mary Rozmus-West

After thirteen years, the remains of 25 year-old Melanie Hall were discovered, “dumped by the side of the road like a sack of garbage” (Pat Hall, Melanie’s mother)

For thirteen years her parents’ fear tears in their dreams at the crumbling plastic,  

which shrouds, in sunlight and rain, cold and darkness, their daughter’s hidden

remains in undergrowth by the side of a motorway.

The secret of her location and whoever killed her cowers in bags

used for garbage, along with her cheekbones,

skull and jaw, battered and bashed, her bones and blood, flesh,

hair and crystallised tears of terror, crammed into five black bin bags

bound with blue polypropylene rope.

Lighter now than thirteen summers ago when the secret

was dumped in the night on the roadside, lying hidden

until found by the workman.

What lured him towards the hidden sepulcher and will he ever forget the hoard of bones

nestling in shreds of dancing clothes?  

Did he secretly wish he had never discovered that coffin of tears,

her parents’ nightmare, the plastic mausoleum of light-haired liveliness, lovely alive, lonely in bin bags?

Hidden so long, these bags open now to the light,

but the secret still sticks to her tear-washed bones.

Class 137 Poem  15 – 19 yrs

Jonathan Shute

Riddle of the Waterfall

In a petrified, primeval forest,

Swirling water surges.

The soaring emerald paradise,

Mirrored in the depths.

From trickling reflections,

To a torrent of deadly fury;

The end is a rampant rapid,

As born are the mighty falls.

A myriad diamonds,

In the single cascade,

Instantly plunge,

In perpetual beauty.

Thundering and roaring,

Shattering the silent forest,

Carving through dark rock,

In blazing showers of light.

Bitter torrents sparkle.

Boiling water bubbles.

Shimmering curtains part,

As rock and spray collide.

Water’s pounding strength,

Wreathed in a fragile mist,

Of peaceful rainbows,

Above frenzied froth.

A mirror of creation,

From a torrent of shards;

A mighty new river is born,

At the end of the rampant falls.

As the mighty falls end

A new river is born

To a mirror of creation

From a torrent of shards.

From mighty oblivion,

A new river is born.

Class 131 Hannah Monelle 8-9 years

Poems

When you try to think of poems,

They’re just not in your mind.

They’re underneath the sofa,

Or maybe in the chair?

But when you really need them

They’re just not there!

They could be in the garden,

Underneath the bush,

Or maybe in the brambly lair,

But when you really need them

They’re just not there!

Teacher says

“We’ve got 10 minutes left.”

But when I go to her and say

It’s not my poem day today

She looks at me without a care

and says

“Don’t be silly child, it’s already there!”

Winner of Sonnet Class   146 Sonnet by Gillian Minter

I PASS YOUR HOUSE

The road we knew dissolves in pools of night.

Familiar bends are drowned in dregs of day.

The crazy sunset sky gives up the fight,

And I, a stranger now, have lost my way.

Then suddenly, between the darkening trees

A stream of light spills out onto the lane.

My car slows down unasked, as if it sees,

Like me, the house that I have found again.

And there, as always at this time, you sit

A beer in hand, in front of the TV;

At ease, alone, making the most of it,

Enjoying, it would appear,being minus me.

The engine dies.  My heart is running fast.

I go to turn.  Think twice.  And drive on past.