Born in India,
In the time of gin and quinine,
Feathered hats and feudal Officers
This curly haired son of the Empire
Now dozes in my easy chair
Oh the joy at watching him eat
my puddings;
Love and custard doled out of a Sunday
To a man who is my daughter’s grandfather
A man of layers, mostly wool.
His eyes still belong to the boy in short trousers
Mad about steam engines;
They came home in a troop ship
Months of slow chugging back,
Torpedo drills and dry-mouthed fear for their lives
This is the boy who played beetle
And slept in a metal box
Courtesy of Herbert Morrison
Spent summers in the gardens with dogs who ate the butter
And sicked it up in the flowerbeds
Waved off to Marlborough in a boater, just a baby,
He still can’t face damp toast and won’t eat milk puddings
The things those blue eyes must have seen,
The dust he must have touched…
He sits now at the head of our family,
A bizarre mix of Yorkshire practicality
And old guard class
His Uncle’s hands have touched Churchill’s;
They delivered his children
And when I hold his hands,
Its like reaching back to then
When we went to war for the pink bits on a faded map
And went without, and understood duty
He remembers The Blitz, and for this alone I am prepared to love him,
But that’s the least of it.
He can explain, in entirety
The private lives of steam engines-
How they got hot enough to drive the pistons,
To pull the mail, the milk and Kentish strawberries
To the suburbs, clackety-clack over the bridges
He would design as a man
I love to think of this mop-headed
Boy, licking sun-warmed strawberry juice from his lips
And I wish I was alive to love him,
Back then.
