Originally Posted by John Rogers (Post 47366) It was on the Good Ship Venus by God you shuld have seen us. soory forgot the rest. Perhaps some Old Salt can remember.

Originally Posted by Harry Nicholson (Post 47358) Passage Through Bab el Mandeb (Bab el Mandeb translates: “Gates of Weeping” - these are the straits at the southern end of the Red Sea across which slaves were carried out of Africa to the markets of Arabia)

CHIEF PETTY OFFICER
He is older than the naval side of British history,
And sits
More permanent than the spider in the enormous wall.
His barefoot, coal-burning soul,
Expands, puffs like a toad, in the convict air
Of the Royal Naval Barracks at Devonport.
Here, in depot, is his stone Nirvana:
More real than the opium-pipes,
The uninteresting relics of Edwardian foreign-commission.
And, from his thick stone box,
He surveys with a prehistoric eye the hostilities-only ratings.
He has the face of the dinosaur
That sometimes stares from old Victorian naval photographs:
That of some elderly lieutenant
With boots and celluloid Crippen-collar,
Brass buttons and cruel ambitious eyes of almond.
He was probably made a Freemason in Hong Kong.
He has a son (on War Work) in the Dockyard,
And an appalling daughter
In the WRNS.
He writes on your draft-chit,
Tobacco-permit or request-form
In a huge antique Borstal hand,
And pins notices on the board in the Chiefs’ Mess
Requesting his messmates not to
Lay on the billiard table.
He is an anti-Semite and has somewhat reactionary views,
And reads the pictures in the daily news.
And when you return from the nervous Pacific
Where the seas
Shift like sheets of plate-glass in the dazzling morning;
Or when you return
Browner than Alexander, from Malta,
Where you have leaned over the side, in harbour,
And seen in the clear water
The salmon tins, wrecks and tiny explosions of crystal fish,
A whole war later
He will still be sitting under a pusser’s clock
Waiting for tot-time,
His narrow forehead ruffled by the Jutland wind.
Petty Officer Charles Causley

Originally Posted by Harry Nicholson (Post 47748) That is a great poem, Alick - and one I'd not met before. I particularly enjoyed: Or when you return Browner than Alexander, from Malta, Where you have leaned over the side, in harbour, And seen in the clear water The salmon tins, wrecks and tiny explosions of crystal fish, I've just heard Causley read this at:https://www.discogs.com/release/1222...oems-1951-1975 It's the third poem in.

What did I do, sonny, in the Great World War?
Well, I learned to peel potatoes and to scrub the barrack floor.
I learned to push a barrow and I learned to swing a pick,
I learned to turn my toes out, and to make my eyeballs click.
I learned the road to Folkestone, and I watched the English shore,
Go down behind the skyline, as I thought, for evermore.
And the Blighty boats went went by us and the harbour hove in sight,
And they landed us and sorted us and marched us "by the right".
"Quick march!" across the cobbles, by the kids who rang along
Singing "Appoo?" "Spearmant" "Shokolah?" through dingy old Boulogne;
By the widows and the nurses and the niggers and Chinese,
And the gangs of smiling Fritzes, as saucy as you please.
I learned to ride as soldiers ride from Etaps to the Line,
For days and nights in cattle trucks, packed in like droves of swine.
I learned to curl and kip it on a foot of muddy floor,
And to envy cows and horses that have beds of beaucoup straw.
I learned to wash in shell holes and to shave myself in tea,
While the fragments of a mirror did a balance on my knee.
I learned to dodge the whizz-bangs and the flying lumps of lead,
And to keep a foot of earth between the sniper and my head.
I learned to keep my haversack well filled with buckshee food,
To take the Army issue and to pinch what else I could.
I learned to cook Maconochie with candle-ends and string,
With "four-by-two" and sardine-oil and any God-dam thing.
I learned to use my bayonet according as you please
For a breadknife or a chopper or a prong for toasting cheese.
I learned "a first field dressing" to serve my mate and me
As a dish-rag and a face-rag and a strainer for our tea.
I learned to gather souvenirs that home I hoped to send,
And hump them round for months and months and dump them in the end.
I learned to hunt for vermin in the lining of my shirt,
To crack them with my finger-nail and feel the beggars spirt;
I learned to catch and crack them by the dozen and the score
And to hunt my shirt tomorrow and to find as many more.
I learned to sleep by snatches on the firestep of a trench,
And to eat my breakfast mixed with mud and Fritz's heavy stench.
I learned to pray for Blighty ones and lie and squirm with fear,
When Jerry started strafing and the Blighty ones were near.
I learned to write home cheerful with my heart a lump of lead
With the thought of you and mother, when she heard that I was dead.
And the only thing like pleasure over there I ever knew,
Was to hear my pal come shouting, "There's a parcel, mate, for you."
So much for what I did do - now for what I have not done:
Well, I never kissed a French girl and I never killed a Hun,
I never missed an issue of tobacco, pay, or rum,
I never made a friend and yet I never lacked a chum.
I never borrowed money, and I never lent - but once
(I can learn some sorts of lessons though I may be borne a dunce).
I never used to grumble after breakfast in the Line
That the eggs were cooked too lightly or the bacon cut too fine.
I never told a sergeant just exactly what I thought,
I never did a pack-drill, for I never quite got caught.
I never punched a Red-Cap's nose (be prudent like your Dad),
But I'd like as many sovereigns as the times I've wished I had.
I never stopped a whizz-bang, though I've stopped a lot of mud,
But the one that Fritz sent over with my name on was a dud.
I never played the hero or walked about on top,
I kept inside my funk hole when the shells began to drop.
Well, Tommy Jones's father must be made of different stuff:
I never asked for trouble - the issue was enough.
So I learned to live and lump it in the lovely land of war,
Where the face of nature seems a monstrous septic sore,
Where the bowels of earth of earth hang open, like the guts of something slain,
And the rot and wreck of everything are churned and churned again;
Where all is done in darkness and where all is still in day,
Where living men are buried and the dead unburied lay;
Where men inhabit holes like rats, and only rats live there;
Where cottage stood and castle once in days before La Guerre;
Where endless files of soldiers thread the everlasting way,
By endless miles of duckboards, through endless walls of clay;
Where life is one hard labour, and a soldier gets his rest
When they leave him in the daisies with a puncture in his chest;
Where still the lark in summer pours her warble from the skies,
And underneath, unheeding, lie the blank upstaring eyes.
And I read the Blighty papers, where the warriors of the pen
Tell of "Christmas in the trenches" and "The Spirit of our men";
And I saved the choicest morsels and I read them to my chum,
And he muttered, as he cracked a louse and wiped it off his thumb:
"May a thousand chats from Belgium crawl under their fingers as they write;
May they dream they're not exempted till they faint with mortal fright;
May the fattest rats in Dickebusch race over them in bed;
May the lies they've written choke them like a gas cloud till they're dead;
May the horror and the torture and the things they never tell
(For they only write to order) be reserved for them in Hell!"
You'd like to be a soldier and go to France some day?
By all the dead in Delville Wood, by all the nights I lay
Between our lines and Fritz's before they brought me in;
By this old wood-and-leather stump, that once was flesh and skin;
By all the lads who crossed with me but never crossed again,
By all the prayers their mothers and their sweethearts prayed in vain,
Before the things that were that day should ever more befall
May God in common pity destroy us one and all!


George Willis
Poet who survived the war
1919

Originally Posted by rustytrawler (Post 48565) Thank you ALICK and well done regards rustytrawler

Originally Posted by Harry Nicholson (Post 48583) Thanks, Alick. It makes for a reflective read. Brings to mind my old dad who was wounded on the Somme. He got home - which is why I'm here, I suppose.

Ballad of the Breadman


Mary stood in the kitchen
Baking a loaf of bread.
An angel flew in the window
‘We’ve a job for you,’ he said.

‘God in his big gold heaven
Sitting in his big blue chair,
Wanted a mother for his little son.
Suddenly saw you there.’

Mary shook and trembled,
‘It isn’t true what you say.’
‘Don’t say that,’ said the angel.
‘The baby’s on its way.’

Joseph was in the workshop
Planing a piece of wood.
‘The old man’s past it,’ the neighbours said.
‘That girls been up to no good.’

‘And who was that elegant fellow,’
They said. ‘in the shiny gear?’
The things they said about Gabriel
Were hardly fit to hear.

Mary never answered,
Mary never replied.
She kept the information,
Like the baby, safe inside.

It was the election winter.
They went to vote in the town.
When Mary found her time had come
The hotels let her down.

The baby was born in an annexe
Next to the local pub.
At midnight, a delegation
Turned up from the Farmers’ club.

They talked about an explosion
That made a hole on the sky,
Said they’d been sent to the Lamb and Flag
To see God come down from on high.

A few days later a bishop
And a five-star general were seen
With the head of an African country
In a bullet-proof limousine.

‘We’ve come,’ they said ‘with tokens
For the little boy to choose.’
Told the tale about war and peace
In the television news.

After them came the soldiers
With rifle and bombs and gun,
Looking for enemies of the state.
The family had packed up and gone.

When they got back to the village
The neighbours said, to a man,
‘That boy will never be one of us,
Though he does what he blessed well can.’

He went round to all the people
A paper crown on his head.
Here is some bread from my father.
Take, eat, he said.

Nobody seemed very hungry.
Nobody seemed to care.
Nobody saw the god in himself
Quietly standing there.

He finished up in the papers.
He came to a very bad end.
He was charged with bringing the living to life.
No man was that prisoner’s friend.

There’s only one kind of punishment
To fit that kind of crime.
They rigged a trial and shot him dead.
They were only just in time.

They lifted the young man by the leg,
Thy lifted him by the arm,
They locked him in a cathedral
In case he came to harm.

They stored him safe as water
Under seven rocks.
One Sunday morning he burst out
Like a jack-in-the-box.

Through the town he went walking.
He showed them the holes in his head.
Now do you want any loaves? He cried.
‘Not today’ they said.

Charles Causley