Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

Then, one day, the USA came to Nottingham. The city was loud with 2,000 G.I.’s in hep-cat uniforms sporting badges bright enough to pop my eyes with envy. Some had names such as Zane and Brodie and Al, monikas which Ernie and I thought could have been given only to genuine cowboys. The Yanks strolled about in noisy groups as though they owned the place. The roughest of them congregated outside a couple of the most notorious pubs in the city centre - the Eight Bells and the Sawyers Arms. There they competed with the local riff-raff for the hard-faced, brass-voiced women who might or might not have been professionals.

     When Ernie and I ventured into town in the hope of finding excitement after a boring week on the estate, we gawped in admiration at the Yanks’ confidence as they coasted the town, calling to pretty girls on their shopping trips - besotted young machinists and typists who saw only the sunshine of America in the young men’s smiles, and dreamed of dating a crooner.

     To Ernie and me, they all looked like crooners. Even their uniforms wouldn’t have looked out of place in a musical. We wondered what the Yanks thought of our decrepit old city with its drab miles of ugly terraces, cobbled streets and old-fashioned, useless lampposts. I wondered, too, what they thought of our common accent, as dreary as the rain that reflected the depression in the eyes of our parents.

     Ernie and I were excited by the thought that for the Yanks home was exotic New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Dallas, perhaps even Hollywood. We didn’t realise that most G.I.’s were small-town hicks; farm boys who had never strolled the boulevards of Hollywood or the Avenues of Manhattan.

     Many of them would die far from home. On D-Day they were among the first to parachute into Normandy, still in darkness. Tragically, a German division had just moved into the area unknown to Allied intelligence. Our Yanks floated down in their midst, a lot of them dying as the startled German troops cut them to pieces with their raking fire. Others dropped into deliberately flooded fields and drowned because of the enormous weight of equipment they carried.

     Only 800 of the original 2,000 soldiers returned to their camp in Wollaton park, their stories becoming part of the city’s mythology. My favourite was one about a soldier in a platoon that fought its way into the church at Sainte Mere Eglise. Ordered to signal to the rest of the group that the church was now in friendly hands, the soldier sat down at the organ and swung into Chattanooga Choo-Choo, Glenn Miller style. You could always trust a Yank to do things with flair.