Inspired by Memories of Eastbourne Evacuees Group
By Richard Potter
John Davies is a local poet who worked alongside students from Eastbourne Technology College who interviewed second world war evacuees. They wrote their own poems based on the memories of the evacuees. To read some of the students poems please click here. The poem below was written by John as part of the workshop.
Waves
by John Davies [aka Shedman]
For Year Seven and the former evacuees who were all part of the WRVS Second World War Project at Eastbourne Technology College .
I feel as if my father’s with me in the shed
which is impossible now he’s dead,
though in the times of which you tell
he was lucky, alive and well,
serving at Mombasa or Kandy ,
Reykjavík or Scapa Flow .
He had albums full of photographs
taken on convoys to Murmansk
or passing through Suez .
He threw them all in a skip.
He’d moved on from that part of his life, he said.
He’s moved on now, he’s dead.
A shadow like a fish moves over sea and field,
roof and street. The shadow seems more real
than the thing that throws it, whose aim is
singular, lethal, made to kill. The shadow
flies its deadly mission over heath and town,
keeps flying still, as if suspended in history
never to land, never to explode. Imagination
can do this, make anything happen, in the past
or in the future. But truth is often stranger.
Where it fell – in Eastbourne on St Mary’s
church – the hymnals and prayer books
flew like birds to the roof of the pub next door.
While my father in photo-reconnaissance
took ‘happy snaps to beat the Japs’,
a youngster hid behind a wall as bombs
fell on Sussex . My father rode the giant storm-
pushed waves in huge steel ships gunned
to the gunwales, squadrons chasing
across magnificent oceans - Indian,
Atlantic , Arctic - breakers crashing over
decks. The stories those pictures told,
and how I searched them in box rooms,
garages, sheds, attics, cellars, cubby-holes
to know the man I warred with out of love.
Still hiding, the boy in Sussex , looks above
the wall and sees a crater a hundred yards away
and jagged shrapnel all around, hot in the hand.
Where he lives now a German plane
buried itself in the Sussex chalk.
He watched the Flying Fortresses litter the sky,
hundreds in formation heading for Dresden
or Hamburg , and blessed their flight. One fell
in flames but tiny little mushrooms billowed
in the evening light. It gave a good feeling,
he said, that the Germans would be bombed.
The London Blitz had lasted fifty-seven nights.
This boy then, an evacuee, had returned home
to Sussex after months in Radlett, Hertfordshire.
He was billeted with a coalman, who also delivered
milk by horse and cart. The horse knew where
to stop at every house, and when it reached
the last would gallop home. The coalman’s wife
picked the little boy, crossed-legged in the hall,
when all the other children had been chosen.
It was like a fairy tale, once upon a time,
how the coalman’s wife took a shine to the boy,
the child she never had, the promise of the future,
something certain going forward, better than coal,
better than milk. And how his own mother, coming
to Radlett one day, sensed immediately the change,
the temperature, and urgently desired her boy back
home, away from temptation, away from desire.
Twenty twelve year olds hang on his every word.
They are his gift to the future, these words,
these children. These waves. I imagine my father
here, listening. What can history be when those
who lived it leave? Where a body was, there’s now
just empty space. And still the boy hides behind
the wall, still the shadow travels over sea and field,
and a photographer takes his picture of the waves.
Special thanks to Reg Bottrill for his wonderful stories.
Written while reading Austerlitz by W. G. Sebald.
©John Davies 2010 All rights reserved