Home Front
Oh good, you’ve got some leave she said.
She called it out across the day-room
re-inventing National Service:
his absences at Catterick
until demob and marriage in the fifties.
He was used to gathering
her memories like faded ribbons
trailing from a broken maypole:
a gentleman or officer
should take her arm and join her in the dance.
Over strong sweet tea and talk
of ration books what he remembered,
clear and sudden as a fragrance,
was walking homeward in short trousers
on a wartime Wiltshire autumn evening.
On the undulating road
down from the village green a bike
came ticking through the dusk, and turning
he’d plainly recognised his father.
But hindsight said he must have been at Arnhem.
Page(s) 17
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