Ealing
And my friends can hear your voice,
Let me hear it too.” (Song of Songs, Chapter 7, verse 17)
we used a razor, a bottle, American gum
and then for our trouble we had Vera Lynn
singing to us over a homemade wireless.
We stared across the Mediterranean.
Two years before, I was on the Isle of Wight:
sixteen weeks of infantry training.
I didn’t mind the PT, John, it was the marching –
first time on parade I was terrified.
We had this old sergeant who’d been in years;
he would bully us over the drill square,
but then he’d sit in our billet and talk to us.
I think now he needed to sit and talk to us.
I was sent to Suffolk to join the Berkshires,
we dug in amongst the beet and potatoes;
then twenty-eight days leave, back in Ealing,
walking my girl in the long summer evenings.
Then back to the regiment, the other loyalties.
I know you travel with your work, John,
but I saw the world with the Berkshires:
we sailed to South Africa, India and then Iraq
where we spent a winter under canvas:
watching the warm breath of each other,
planting seeds along the perimeter wire –
the face on the sergeant major when they flowered in the spring!
He kicked us onto lorries heading for North Africa;
we were held in reserve at El Alamein:
the light from artillery shells lit up the evenings
I read letters from the girlfriend back in Ealing.
* * * *
So, you’re taking your wife to Sicily this summer?
We first saw the Italian coast in forty-three;
standing in tin-hats on a ship called “The Canterbury”,
the rations wrapped in colour-paper napkins
and us with our Enfields and Bren guns!
Sometimes I can remember those moments.
I was corporal of a section with seven men –
for fifty years I tried not to think about any of them.
When I came back to Ealing, I was twenty-one;
my girl was happily married with a daughter;
she wanted me as godfather; I met Maggie at the christening –
I remember her flower-patterned dress, her smiling.
I worked thirty years as a tailor, fitting gentlemen
and I never spoke much about anything to any of them.
Maggie’d laugh, say the dress was plain gray –
She passed away last early May, resting in the garden.
On Anzio beach I lost all of my section.
I couldn’t do anything for any of them.
I got someone in to concrete over the garden,
it was so untidy without her. It was chaos.
They disbanded the regiment. The survivors,
we sat and gathered bits for a wireless,
just wanting to hear a voice that wasn’t us.
Maggie had a womb that couldn’t bear children.
I’m not replanting the garden, it’s done.
Some memories have to be covered up.
Alone in the garden, the smell I’s smelling
was the flowers we had grown in Iraq.
* * * *
You should have been at the street party we had last Sunday.
Angie said I had to go, I smile when she bullies me,
‘cause then she just sits and chats in the kitchen.
I think now she needs those chats in the kitchen.
When those boys and girls come home from Iraq
someone will need to take them up to the shops,
to make them care for what’s ordinary talk,
stop them trying to tidy up everything;
to play them songs like those of Vera Lynn
and watch their breath in the winter evenings.
2009.