Bryan Islip's Blog, page 11

In which we have served - part one

I'm not keen on flash-backs but due to this episodic format I'm bound to skip lightly over some things then realise later that they may explain a lot.

National Service for males aged eighteen finished in about 1958. By the way, for 'National Service' read 'Military Service'. Anyway I signed up for it in 1951, then aged seventeen. That was when my father and step-mother sold up and went to work and live in Singapore, myself and my eighteen years old sister Shirley 'not wanted on voyage'. Shirley promptly and disastrously married her farm labourer boyfriend, Mick, and I was propelled into the Royal Air Force. Not just the statuary two years but signed on for three. So, no problems for daddy and mummy any more - nor, as it turned out for me. With my boarding school background I very quickly and happily adapted to Service life.

For some elusive reason I was allocated to the trade of gas turbine fitter (jet engines, that is,) and after initial training at Cardington, Bedfordshire I was posted to St Athans in South Wales for technical training. Three things I remember about St Athans. One was having to embark on an exercise over many days armed with a set of hand files and a block of mild steel, and being instructed to replicate, to the nearest, merest micro-fraction, a drawing of a matchbox. Sounds simple? It isn't! Another was the theory of jet propulsion - the 'Venturi effect' - and the theory of fixed wing lift. Magical! The third thing I recall is my romance with a young lady I met up with at the nearby seaside fairground and our excursions over the Welsh hillsides ostensibly searching for elusive but delicious blueberries. Equally magical.

Having completed my technical training I was posted to real-life line duties at (I think) R.A.F. Waddington, there to service the Meteor fighters that always seemed to be crashing in those days. We - even the unfortunate pilots - called them meat boxes. In fact one of my first memories is of being one of a line of men equipped with hand torches, searching the countryside methodically for the remains of a pair of NF11 (night fighter) pilots  - and finding some as well. I'll not bother you with the details.

This was where my propensity to dream whilst at work almost cost me my R.A.F. career as well as, probably, my freedom. You see, in conducting a pre-flight check on a Rolls Royce engine I had inadvertently left off an oil cap. The control tower stopped the aircraft's take off, having spotted black clouds of smoke in the wake of the Meteor. They guessed correctly what had happened and informed the military police. I was summoned to the Wing Commander's office and given an official reprimand only minutes before the white caps arrived to charge me. Of course they couldn't do so, for I had already been punished, and I remain convinced that this had something to do with my distant father's Freemasonry.

It may well have been something similar in the event that, when I applied for air crew, I was sent for aptitude tests at Hornchurch in Essex and passed. I was then posted for aircrew training to RAF Digby near Sleaford in Norfolk. About twenty of we new hopefuls were marshalled into a cold, dark and empty aircraft hanger at six o clock, our first morning. A spot light shone on a dais in front of us. In came a much beribboned group captain, walking with the aid of a stick. We all knew him (to us, the old man) as a WW2 fighter ace. He stood on the dais looking slowly down the line of us, then spoke one sentence that I shall never forget: "Step forward any man who does not want to kill the enemy of his country." Silence. Nobody moved a muscle. But in truth we hadn't thought about killing anybody. We just wanted to jet around in the sky and pull the girls in local pubs, aided and abetted by our proudly emblazoned pilot's wings.

Part two of my National Service later ...

Happy in Bateman Street

So now it's 1955/6, I'm living in a Cambridge bed-sit with new wife Joan and newer baby baby Karen. I have a job - five  pounds ten shillings a week builders merchant warehouseman. I walk to work, suited, collared and tied  in all weathers, dreaming of becoming a writer or, in observing the Jaguars and sports cars passing along Cherryhinton Road, perhaps even a businessman. Whatever, we're on our way!

That Christmas we had NHS milk and orange juice for our baby girl and us and a christmas cake from father and a pair of shot feathered pigeons from my sister's husband Mick. That was it - five long days before my next payday. No money for cigarettes. No radio. But looking back it didn't seem too difficult and still we at no time felt ourselves impoverished. Our off-work time was spent pushing the pram about Cambridge's parks and gardens and reading books from the library. That's when I discovered my lifetime passion for Ernest Hemingway. I have a clear memory of sitting up in bed reading the final pages of For Whom The Bell Tolls , absolutely astonished at the emotional power of the man's condensed writing.

But soon enough came the implosion. Joan had unfortunately allowed a joint of ham to boil dry in our  landlady's saucepan. Much smoke, panic, anger and confusion. When I got home from work we're on the road again, destination unknown, everything we owned trundling along in that lovely new Silver Cross

Bateman Street was and still is a long terrace of three storied houses with basements, mostly given over to flats or bedsits for American Air Force families. Here was our next home, starting off with a basement flat, then one on the ground floor. I think we progressed to the top floor but cannot be sure. However I so vividly remember our neighbours, USAAF airman Richard Lilley, a 20 years old backwoodsman from Washington State and wife Beaulah with and their three children (one a year!).

I could base several novels on our next three years. Or several chapters in my autobiography. But sufficient to say here that Richard and I and Beaulah and Joan became close friends. Richard loved, in descending order: guns of all kinds, his racketty old Dodge, Hank Williams, and rambling on the lookout through the East Anglian countryside. We became Saturday night poachers and Sunday lunch pheasant eaters. I never knew and still do not understand how a man could move so silently through dense, pitch black forestry.

Meanwhile I secured my very first job promotions - from A W Morlins' warehouse to A W Morlins' trade counter then to junior buyer in the office. The men in the warehouse used to look up to me at my first floor desk near the window singing 'The working class can't kiss my arse, I've got an office job at last.'. They meant no unpleasantness. They knew I was and would remain one of them. One of everybody.

I could go on to tell you about my near death experience on the river Cam, about seeing Richard shoot a swan in full flight - with bow and arrow! - and about how awful it tasted, about smart young salesmen trying to sell stuff to me and watching them drive off in their company cars, me thinking, 'I could be doing that; and oh yes, I could be doing with that Morris Minor', about Richard's repatriation and his scheme to suck gold out of the mud at the base of a certain waterfall in the Cascade mountains; 'Hey, Bryan. Why don't you guys come out and partner up? Then about Joan becoming pregnant again, inspiring me to begin applying for salesman jobs as advertised in the Telegraph.

Good times. Happy times. Enough for now ...

My parents and their post-traumatic family

As earlier indicated, when my parents separated and divorced in 1945 that was the end of all family life for me, then aged eleven and also, I strongly suspect, of my sisters' family lives. Two of them went by Order of the Court with mother, myself and Shirley with father.

My junior sister Tina died many years ago - of substance abuse I was told. Although my youngest sister Maureen is going strong and still makes her way with great resolve, her life has been anything but a bed of roses. Sister Shirley, two years my senior, also endured many problems long before her death by cancer this year. In her early twenties Shirley had left her baby son with estranged husband Mick in order to 'emigrate' to Hong Kong, but eventually, after yet one more disastrous love affair she returned to live by herself in  Milton Keynes for the duration of her life.

So I would guess that, even though I have suffered so much through the long and fatal illnesses of my two wives, I have probably had the least destructive fallout from the wartime shenanigans of Mr Edwin and Mrs Marie Islip. I remain convinced that my teenage passion for Joan and our marriage, together with my exposure to her York city family was my saving grace. And then of course our emerging family and my burgeoning business career produced an early need to forget history and get on with life. I've been very content so to do, and for the most part happily, and for the most part successfully. 

I heard nothing at all from my mother for fifty years. And then one Saturday afternoon in 1994 the phone rang at home in Lee-on-Solent. A female voice on the other end asked, "Is that you, Bryan" and, you can believe this because it's true that, for reasons I still cannot explain, totally unsurprised I answered; "Yes it is, mother." I went to meet her in St Leonards-in-Sea, where she told me the sad tale of her life. It turned out she had been living in some poverty with the latest of her lovers, without knowing it within a long stone's throw of my father in his seaside apartment. My father didn't know it either, in spite of having been resident there for twenty years with his new wife (ex wartime secretary), my step mother. Through mother, Shirley and I then caught up with Maureen who told us that she and Tina had been consigned to a Salvation Army home for children soon after the family breakup. The place of their confinement and shameful abuse was called Strawberry Fields. (Of The Beatles fame). Long since well and truly and thankfully closed.

My previous slice of life blog ended with a comment about my Olivetti portable typewriter, compliment of Auntie Kay, and my very first short story. I do so wish I could see it now. Maureen, in clearing Shirley's house, apparently has seen a copy. Anyway I remember it was a murder mystery about a jealous husband's attempt to kill his wife by filing a weakness into the breech of his wife's shotgun. When the lady pulled the trigger on a flighting pigeon it blew her head off. Wrong lady! Unfortunately for naughty husband, his wife had lent her gun to her friend, husband's lover. So there!

Next time back to me and Joan and Karen and Cambridge.

Christmas must be coming ...

'Tis the season to be jolly, tra la la la la la la ... and very welcome, too!

After a couple of weeks of  really rough weather I look out of my window this morning on to a vista of arctic innocence; snow-clad mountains, dove-grey skies, pewter loch, garden shrubbery battered but unbowed and little birds making a field day of my seeds and left overs. They will need to, if they are to survive the next winter months, immediately followed by a need to fight for mates and nest sites. Reminds me of the old ditty; North winds do blow and we shall have snow and what will the robin do then, poor thing? He'll hide his head under his wing, poor thing ...etc.

I'm getting ready for my party on the 23rd. But to tell the truth it's looking a wee bitty anarchic right now. I've only invited my village friends verbally, by casual meeting. No little RSVP cards, so I don't know the numbers for sure. However I'm catering, with much more than a little help from my friends, for around forty souls. One expert lady harpist plans to bring her instrument along for a rendition of Christmas carols. I hope we don't spoil her super musicality with our singing. I / we'll be doing our best not to. Anyway I got down from the attic our boxes of decorations, unused these two Christmases past whilst Dee was so ill, so the tree is up with baubles and lights now well a-twinkle. The makings of mulled wine are all to hand, both alcoholic and non-alcoholic. (Both types look the same in the glass, which makes consumers of the latter  less self-conscious, I fancy.) And all the little tidbits courtesy of the lady owners of our village shop.

Yes, 'tis the season to be jolly all right. Perhaps for a second childhood, too! When I attended the Poolewe Christmas Market last week I, in common with all the stallholders, was required by our lovely organiser, Alison, to don an elf costume. Ready for a laugh? ... I had made the mistake of venturing at one point into Santa's Grotto ...
.and I hadn't touches a drop, m'lud

Early times for a married man

Throughout the early months of 1955, with my new wife already pregnant we stayed with my sister Shirley and her husband. We shared their rented farmworkers cottage in the village of Moulton, which sits close by the eastern edge of Newmarket Heath. I had bought a used bicycle for my daily commute the 14 miles into Cambridge and the 14 miles back . Flat country, big winds, hard miles to work at a Builders Merchant where I had secured a job as warehouseman. It took all my youthful strength and energy toting lead pipe and sheet, baths and sanitary ware, tiled fire surrounds, asbestos corrugated, copper pipe and fittings etc, etc.


On August 31st I received telephoned news that Joan was in labour in the maternity ward of Newmarket General hospital. My boss, (it has to be said with some reluctance), gave me permission to leave early. I pushed myself to the limit riding into a head wind - at one stage beyond the limit in fact, for Joan always told people of how I arrived just after the birth, hot and sweaty and with trousers out at the knee where I had fallen off my bike. It mattered not, for I was a somewhat bemused - if very proud 20 years old father to a rather beautiful baby girl. I made Karen Jane's cot out of an orange box and the remnants of some worn out curtains.

Early mornings on weekends and holidays I / we would scour Newmarket Heath for luscious field mushrooms and raid the late summer hedges for blackberries, and I shot many a pigeon, using my brother-in-law's twelve bore. Also sometimes a rabbit or two. I recall how I would not pull the trigger unless the shot was a dead certainty, for cartridges cost money that I could only afford if the result was a meal for Joan and myself and my sister and brother in law. Of course, on occasion a clucking, strutting cock pheasant would accidentally get in the way of my shot!

This was my introduction to a farming village life now long gone. Everyone seemed to know everyone and therefore everyone else's business - albeit none of what went on behind closed doors! All our foodstuffs were bought at a general store about the size of your living room. Tthe church and the village pub were the twin centres of our little Suffolk metropolis.

However I was well aware that we were living on borrowed time in cloud cuckoo land with my sister in Moulton, and that I would soon have to seek our own accomodation. The obvious place was Cambridge, as close to my place of work as possible. So before the year was out I found us a bedsitter there, Cherryhinton Road in fact. Just myself and Joan and a suitcase full of clothes and a few more bits and pieces along with our happy little baby in her brand new Silver Cross perambulator, (a gift from a distant  father who on rare occasions came down from Olympus into contact).  Oh, and my Aunt Kay's present of an Olivetti portable typewriter, birthplace of my very first short story. 

But that's another story.

Some thoughts on my past

After being diagnosed with 'advanced cancer' I blogged about how I would be taking time out to review things over the eighty years (seventy conscious ones) of my lifetime. 'Things I have done and things I have left undone'.

Trouble is,  I guess like most of us I tend to forget, accidentally or on purpose, the actions or experiences of which I am not proud or which made me (and sometimes mine) unhappy. The reverse is also true. So I remember the green fields, forget the dark and barren ones. Also, fields of any hue are not necessarily fit for publication here, and I must remember that the words of an old man with little to lose can still hurt, and I have no wish to hurt.

However in looking back I can say these things ...

I was and still am most unhappy about my parents' divorce and the long term splitting up of the family into which I was born. To this day I do not think divorce acceptable. A deal should be a deal, marriage included for better or for worse. It is one's job to make it better, whatever the developing circumstances or human frailities. If one  cannot make it work happily one grits one's teeth and get on with it, taking care above all not to hurt your offspring, ( your primary raison d'etre). Forget the palliatives and self-justifications. Tough but necessary. A deal is a deal - for sure one of the pillars of human civilisation.

I was very, very unhappy about the loss of my mother when my father committed me to public (boarding) school aged eleven. It took me a number of years to find an acceptable balance. However, I have looked back with increasing affection on my days at Abingdon School. I realise now how I learned far more than English and Science and Mathematics and Latin and Greek. I learned how to live, i.e., to quote Kipling (from memory); how to meet with triumph and disaster and treat those two imposters just the same. This is a fundamental building block of contentment during one's life on earth.


Male birds all had to fly the nest aged seventeen or eighteen in my youth. It was called National Service. Of course I had actually flown my own family nest aged only ten so I found life in the Royal Air Force not all that much different than life in my boarding school. But now I had real wings. I quickly learned about living and prospering with young men from all backgounds, about girls and the contest for girls, about the inescapable realities of money in and money out.

I was very happy indeed, the week after my demobilisation, to find myself with a brand new family - a lovely young Yorkshire wife - even if I had right then no visible means of supporting it (her). So we lived in a succession of bedsits and flats in Cambridge. I canvassed factories and businesses looking for a job - any job, until I secured warehouse employment with a small builders merchant. Looking back, those fields seem indeed so very, very green. We had nothing but each other, and very soon our family, but at no time did I/we feel impoverished. I learned then that it's not about what you 'have' in any material sense, but about the truth in the biblical 'Faith, Hope and Charity (i.e. Love ) and the greatest of these is Charity (Love). 

Love for each other and for the human history on which our present is built; for the 'arts' and for the the world at large, and all that's in it. It is our inheritance to love and look after as best as we are able. We have to try harder, much harder and much more effectively, at that. More later.

Seeing Dee

Today is November28th. At 13.41 hours tomorrow, one year ago, Delia's laboured breathing stopped for ever. I've had some beautiful messages this week. No surprise. I don't know and cannot define what is a 'special person' except by indirect allusion. That is, through the words and the eyes of those with whom she came into contact. Famous she was not; fame would have frightened her for she was a one on one person, even amongst a crowd of one on ones. But all the evidence is that Delia Mary was indeed that special person.

Whilst we can only live in the present we do so, for better or for worse, on the cushion of the past . This poem is published in today's Gairloch and District Times ...



Seeing Dee
I see her still, and willso long as I have seeing eyes aliveto the hills we walked,with those beloved dogs.So many, many lovely days;so many, many trackless ways.The hills are winter muted now,their lovely colours sombreas if in respect or tribute to she who, leaving me alone,embarked on that adventurethat all that lives must know,this harder, emptier year ago.
I see her still, and willso long as I have seeing eyes aliveto the stony, bouldery shoresor riverside woodswhere we would each dayin all weathers find a seat to eat our picnic lunchoften in silence, contentto watch the play of light, oft-times the drift of rain or snowon hill or moving water, smile atthe play of otters, divers, others,listening to the crying of the gulls.
I see her still, and willso long as I have seeing eyes aliveto the crystal seas of Wester-Rosscold, clear, summertime blue,‘remote’, where she would take off her clothes and, breathless,slip nymph-like in to swim,framed by deep, dark-waving weeds,laughing at me, at the cold; or for the simple joy of it, lithe mermaid in a perfect zone,the one, forever gonethat we had made our own.
Bryan Islip(for Delia, 04.12.1944 - 29.11.2013)

Cancer - progress report

When someone tells you that you have advanced prostate cancer you tend to enter a dark tunnel, not necessarily in fear but not knowing what kind of a world now envelops you and what kind of world awaits, if and when you eventually emerge from the other end.

Well, I've finished round one of my hormone treatment and I have to say I am indeed feeling a lot better. Mind, I was never and am still not worried about dying. As Shakespeare said, We all owe God a death. But I have less pain therefore less need to pop the analgesic pills. Most importantly for me, I'm able to do more; almost as much as I was doing before Delia disappeared from sight, 29th November, down that dark tunnel..

The light at the end of my tunnel may be as yet only a pinprick but my curiosity about what awaits grows day by day ...

The doctors said I would l lose my 'libido' (interest in the opposite sex, for the uninitiated). Difficult to say when passing my 80th birthday whether that's true. My libido must have been nearing its sell-by date anyway. They told me I would likely be beset with occasional hot flushes. True but so what? And that I may develop breasts of female conformation. Interesting indeed, but hasn't happened yet. I'm fascinated. There's always a silver lining!

I have believed that my tunnel - and yours - will end not in a brick wall cul de sac but in another place. Christianity and other religions say it's a better place. In the meantime I plan to resume my painting and especially my writing, (this blog included), and to persist with marketing my cards and prints and calendars etc. And of course to maintain my links with our extended family and with a good and satisfying social life here in our small West Highlands community. 

Above all I now have time to think.Think about what has been and what may be to come, not just for me but for the physical and spiritual world into which I was born in 1934. Shall I and indeed any of us be leaving a better world that that which we entered? What part has one's own presence played in this, however infinitessimally, for better or for worse? 

IN WOUNDED FIELDS

 
IN WOUNDED FIELDS


Prologue
We wander down the subterranean shaftIn which the museum at Albert, Picardy,Conceals from this town’s normal life The bloody, muddy face Of World War One,The stinking trenches And all the wounded fields.And you can hear the dying;.Taste the death down here;In our strange silence I do not want to stayWhere no words comeBut find I cannot quickly take myself away....
In the souvenir shop on the way out Of the brick-arch tunnel, cold stone floor,Before reaching the fresh air of the townWe look in silence stillThrough sickly memorabiliaAnd at the history books:And from a nice French lady buy oneCalled;“Violets from Oversea;”By Toni and Valmai Holt(Illustrations Charlotte Zeepvat) That tells how from chaos flowered poesy,Avoids the use of the word ‘hero,’Of poets speaks without hypocricy.
And outside in the thin October rainAs I look high up to the golden virgin, Child in her outstretched hands, against grey sky, That surmounts the Town Hall (Known to the soldiers as The Angel of Albert,)And later, reading of those soldier poets - I know I have to say some thing.To some of them, anyway. 
Bryan IslipOctober 96
Note: Words italicised throughout In Wounded Fields are those of the subject poet.

To Charles Hamilton Sorley; 19 May 1895 - 28 April 1915

Hello pale youth, lip touched with thin moustache,Captain, D Company, Suffolk Regiment,Cross-Wiltshire running old Marlburian:At you fast sped the unkind spinning lead  At Loos to drill your helmet, still so new.How all too true your words of how...“Earth...            Shall rejoice and blossom too            When the bullet reaches you.”
Wherever did you stow your socialism, Your bitter sense of anti-Kiplingism?When you packed up your old kit-bag, and whereYour liking for Goethe & Rilke, Ibsen?(Not for Hardy, your love of him had lapsed)Your marchers...”All the hills and vales along...            The singers are the chaps            Who are going to die perhaps.”
But listen, you could have been one of those Pieces of living pulp  you so dreaded havingTo carry back across that no-man’s waste:Or one of those with you at Ypres who Had breathed deep of the gently shifting breeze,Blinked, blinded by its gift of British gas,Coughed out their sightless time in yellow pus.
You could have been...have been the dramatist,The best, John Masefield, Poet Laureate said,Since that Stratfordian, if you had lived.“I am giving my body,” you wrote, (I think He’d like your shocking words,) “To fight againstThe most enterprising nation in the world”But Charles how straight you stood, your flag unfurled!
Sighing, you folded; sank spent-muscled downInto that slime and no-one said soft things:No bands of angels took thee to thy rest.They never found you, Captain Sorley, did they?Though lost you not for minds cannot decay,And you would know, sweet twenty, soldier prince,It matters not in what dark earth you lay...
...And after in your muddy kitbag thereThey found your cry against what Brooke had said:Your cry; “Say only this; that they are dead.”****            To: Leslie Coulson      July 1889  -  October 1916

“Who spake the Law that men should die in meadows?”You ask and I reply, ‘Man spake that Law,’(Though in regards to other than himself;)And in pursuance since the dawn of human Kind has killed and died in meadows, townsUpon the seas and hills, now in the air And after questioned why, and was it fair.Why? But no-one knows - and fair? Who is to care?
“Who spake the word that blood should splash in lanes?”You ask and I reply, ‘You spake that word,You, Sergeant, for by just being there -Proud member of the London RegimentRetreating last from lost Gallipoli- With all those men, some khaki some in greyWho’ll fight until one colour wins the day‘Till thick in lanes the dead, the dying lay.
“Who gave it forth that gardens should be boneyards?”You ask and I say it was ever thus,Beneath the beauty always lie the bonesThat nourish it, upon which it must feedAs feeds nobility in war upon the lost, The crying of the dead, the awful dying:You who vainly fought, near Albert lying,Your bones now ‘neath the nodding flowers, sighing.
“Who spread the hills with flesh and blood and brains?”You ask and know the answer: it is youWho trained your smoking gun upon the foe,Who covered hills with screaming shot and shellTo deaden all that runs or flies or grows.For more than this ask your creator God,Your fingers stiffly clawed into the sod, ‘Till agony is spent with all your blood.
‘All the blood that war has ever strewn is But a passing stain,’ you wrote... before the start...

*****
To Francis Ledwidge      August 1887  - July 1917

Did you still, “Hear roads calling and the hills And the rivers, wondering where I am,”At Hellfire Corner, sitting drinking teaAs arced unseen that deadly mortar bombWhich was to end an Irish poet’s dream?
A long way sure, from Owen, Brooke, and thoseSmart young men in smarter khaki clothesWho never mended any metalled roadYet were your brothers of the silken verseAnd knew as well as you the smell of death.I wonder what became of all your clan(Nine children to evicted farming man:)Perhaps your father was a dreamer too,Dreaming,“Songs of the fields,” just as you,His Celtic longing more than mind can bear.But what genetic streak of ancient GaelGave will to write and sensitivityTo know; “And greater than a poet’s fameA little grave that has no name;”  tell me,You school-less twelve year old adrift, tell me, Lance Corporal Francis Ledwidge, fighting man,Sometime Slane Corps of Irish NationalistsNow Inniskilling Fusiliers, enrolled To kill the foe of She who’s not your friendAnd fight for her through hell’s Gallipoli.And how, I wondered, could a poet write In winter trenches on the brutal SommeOf lilting “Fairy Music” (“Ceol Sidhe”)?Was still the barred cuckoo so real to you,In Crocknahara meadows by the Boyne?
Always you yearned for mother, Ireland,“The fields that call across the world to me,”And now near where the spires of Ypers stand You dream your dreams, denied reality, Beneath your wild flowers ‘till the end.

****
To Roland Aubrey Leighton: March 1895 - December 1915

We searched the lanes, found you in Louvencourt’sSmall cemetry amidst a company Of stones standing straight-rowed to attention, Smart white in a slow rain, near where you died; ‘Lieutenant R A Leighton 7th Worcesters,’Says your monument; said that telegram.“I walk alone although the way is long,”You said, in private lines in your black book,“And with gaunt briars and nettles overgrown;”What pain you meant by this we’ll never know. Just such a light so bright as yours alignsThe many-splendoured ones on which it shines.
She capitalised your ‘Him’ as godheads doWhenever afterwards she wrote of you.
Yes, “Life is love and love is you, dear, you”You wrote, prize scholar bursting sweating out Of your illicit wet night dreams of she,Who’d written to herself ;’Impressive, he,Of powerful frame, pale face and stiff thick hair.’Would you we know had she not loved you so?Dee likes to know you in those violets,Pressed brown and withered, desiccated now,You sent to Vee from shattered 'Plug Street' Wood,Picked from red sticky ground around the head,The horrid face and splintered skull that sheMust never see?... She, Vera of the V A D?
Who, from your sceptic pact with her enticedYour secret taking of Rome’s hand of Christ?  And I, not knowing of you very much,Looked in that brass bound book at LouvencourtRead this year’s batch of private messagesTo you, young friend, mostly from those unborn When that one, shiv’ring in his field grey,Unsurprised to see you that cold night, glad Of the Christmas gift, squeezed the steel trigger,Exploding pain into your youthful frame...From far and wide they’d come to speak their grief,So many words to you who wrote so few.Why stood you there, why dare the guns, Roland?‘Hinc illae lacrimae;’* your code...I still don’t understand....            * Hence those tears’ ....   (Terence)

****
To: John McRae: November 1872 - January 1918

Youth steals away from all who live, McRae,Though weary not the sons the Highlands yields, Canadian now (except on Empire Day,)You’re ‘uncle’ to the boys in Flanders’ fields. You wrote;“In Flanders Fields the poppies blow;”And midst the dogs of war you heard the lark,Went on; “We shall not sleep, though poppies grow,”(If generations new allow the dark.)They say you wrote it by first morning lightOne bloody Ypres day in May, ‘15,As German chlorine robbed men of their sight,Oh, few men see what you, Doctor, have seen -Seen six out of each ten CanadiansSans life sans love sans laughter; sans all sans...
Did you, Lieutenant Colonel John McRae,Veteran of Boer war, Loos and Passchendaele,For them your prayers say each dying day?Your healing hands artillery did lay?But did, for you, sometimes the tumult fade,Did agonies relent as words unfold?Recalled within your notebook was peace made;“A little maiden fair / With locks of gold.”?And left you more than she a-weeping and, Before the war fell you for Lady R...?Why never did you let a wedding bandBe-threat the edge of sword Excalibre? I hope you filled life’s chalice to the brim -And that you knew not Haig, but pitied him.
Then April, seventeen; with crimson endWas Canada, enobled nation made - On Vimy Ridge. And afterwards you penned; “The Anxious Dead;” and you were not afraid.Oh Jack McRae, few men were loved as you:Men clung to you as shadows cling to men;Still wear your poppies to hold glorious whoFound glory in a dark beyond their ken.The horse you cherished led your black cortege,Turned boots in stirrup irons to say you’re dead,Men's tears at Wimereux were not of rageBut love for one ashamed to die in bed...And in the going down of every sunSome shall recall your words each one by one.
Called MacUrtsi was each poet to your clan,Goodbye Doctor, MacUrtsi, McRae, Man.

****
IN WOUNDED FIELDS
Epilogue


And so I had my discourse with these poetsAnd with the others from that book Who’d gone to war with heads held high but knew Scant glory in the mud, and died,Yet found their songs and verseIn such a torrent rushedAs might have changed the world
I thought of how wild flowersIn brightest beauty blazeWhere ordure thickest lies - It's stink by glory overpowered.
This place of peace holds very little traceOf what had come to pass those years before.But rust away as may the swordsI shall remember poet’s wordsAnd we shall remember themLong after all the blood and all the bedlam,Long after time has healed the wounded fields.

Bryan Islip
October 96

No fear of the grizzly

Two years ago this month I blogged about that great big grizzly bear (otherwise known as cancer) that confronted us (Dee and me) as if when walking around to the corner shop for a bottle of milk. Dee had been diagnosed with non-hodgkinson's lymphoma. Then exactly one year ago I told of how, after the most aggressive chemotherapy, she was signed off as untreatable with only 'weeks or months' to live. She duly died 29th November last.

Now it's my turn to meet that grizzly, having a couple of weeks back been diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer. Tumours have invaded my bones. I am having hormone therapy that will hopefully stem the rate of proliferation and the growth of these tumours at least for some time and maybe even for some years but that great big old grizzly does loom large.

So now for me it's taking stock time. That is, taking stock of my past seventy nine years; the things I have done and the things I regret having have left undone. And of the present; living alone if surrounded by good people, good friends and close but distant family (even if with much of life's flavour faded away following the death of  Delia). And of the future; how best to use the time I have left and the sixty four dollar question: then what? Anything?

I'll be addressing all three stock-takes in the following blogs, but let me say just one thing now; I have no fear. Really. Life is an adventure for each of us if it is to mean any damn thing at all, and death is an even bigger - indeed is an ultimate and inevitable adventure. Pain is an irrelevance. If one believes in the promised land one has to say just; bring it on!