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Geoffrey Holloway

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Home Front

When I was nine the war was called reading.
Percy Westerman, Dumas, Sabatini.
It was a good war.

I slept with four pillows under my bolster.
Duelled in our long mirror,
sprang out on the world from behind doors.

There were five of us in the house.
Me, Grandad (half-paralysed),
two surplus females:  my mother, aunt -

and Uncle Bill, my breathing, pure hero;
forever nudged to tell me
‘what it was like’;

who taught me to right-dress, slope arms
with a poker, and about his bayonet instructor -
‘Stick ‘em till their guts blush’.

The other Bill, the one I wouldn’t know,
was gassed at Passchendaele;
discharged to scuff the workless street,

a khaki leaf gone winter-grey -
his only victory scrounging ‘a bob or two
off the girls’ to get drunk Saturday nights.

Well, one Saturday he cured his cough.
Quite simply;  falling in the river.
And he never was good at getting up.

And two months on
Grandad, who’d lost a son in that war
(and now Bill because of it)

made me throw my poshest pistol
- it fired real blanks -
into that same running wet

my tears after it.

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