Verses from the past

[Harry Nicholson]

Passage Through Bab el Mandeb

(A memory of the Brocklebank steamer
SS Marwarri in 1960)

The steam turbine throbs down the Red
Sea road, through the oiled steel deck,
the rust-streaked hull, in the dreaded
dripping sweat of the Red Sea road.

You have never seen such colour,
it’s a molten sea of brass, splashed
across with mazarine, and Mocha
burns in orange low away to port.

The sky, blinding at the zenith,
fades into asses milk along the horizon,
across the ovens of Punt,
Eritrea and the Sudan.

Javelins in volleys -
flying fish pursued by nightmares -
break surface, trailing
necklaces of silver.

Then, like salamanders dancing
in a furnace, tortured islands
rise up twisted dead ahead -
shimmering anvils of the sun.

Vapours exude
out of long-dead mahogany.
Decades of varnish soften
and creep down bulkheads.

The banded funnel exhales
black smoke in rippled pulses
that hover, then drift away astern.
The phosphor-bronze screw thuds out


the passage of time. But
the crew are ghosts in history now,
scraps of memory, as the old ship glides
through the Gates of Weeping.


Begun 2003, revised Oct 2010 for the Brocklebank Reunion.

Harry Nicholson, one-time radio officer, SS Marwarri.

(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)

[Makko]

Harry, were the gates of weeping not also known as the gates of hell?

I can feel the heat and blinding light, especially the blue sky turning to asses milk on the horizon!

Rgds.
Dave

[John Rogers]

It was on the Good Ship Venus by God you shuld have seen us. soory forgot the rest. Perhaps some Old Salt can remember.

[Hugh Shuttleworth]

Originally Posted by John Rogers

It was on the Good Ship Venus by God you shuld have seen us. soory forgot the rest. Perhaps some Old Salt can remember.

Try Oscar Brand - he recorded Good Ship Venus and a lot more - Rugby Songs?? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MsOQq09g4vQ

[Hugh Shuttleworth]

Originally Posted by Harry Nicholson

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)

Did the Straits of Bab el Mandeb perhaps a dozen times each way on Brock ships; then on Lumen and then Luminetta every two to three weeks each way on the Raz to Jaz - Ras Tannurah to Jeddah charter.

The Red Sea always appeared the deepest blue of any of the seas I sailed.

[al1934]

A favourite of mine, which reminds me of some of the grizzled old CPOs I have met, written by the late Charles Causley who was a Cornish writer and poet and who served in the Royal Navy in WW2:

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

[Harry Nicholson]

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.

[al1934]

Originally Posted by Harry Nicholson

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.

Thank you, Harry and for the link, which I have been listening to just now. I agree with your choice of the extract, which reminds me of Malta and the Far East.

I also love Timothy Winters and the Ballad of the Breadman, which I have stored on my PC with CC reading them. Wonderful good old Cornish voice.

Have you read Hands to Dance and Skylark, which is his short story (less than 200 pages) of his service in the RN?

We have visited his father's tiny village of Trusham in the Teign valley, which CC knew well, not far from where we live.

I must admit that I have only stumbled upon this thread after being a member of Shipping History for years (and SN before that).

I have just finished writing my life from a small boy to my service in the RN in a book, which I am currently proof reading, hopefully for the last time. Book Printing UK will be printing a short run for me. I wanted to sell it but am finding it a bit of a hurdle and haven't even got the ISBN, etc sorted yet. It's a labour of love which I should have done years ago when I was younger.

I hope I don't get penalised for breaking copyright laws by printing Chief Petty Officer ... (Seems to me that everything is a sin these days)

[Harry Nicholson]

Hello, Alick. Thanks for Causley recommendation. It's out of print, but I've just ordered a used copy via Amazon.
Writing memoir is an absorbing pursuit - I'm on with my third. Memoir raises all sorts of memory, and at this distance I wonder how accurate. But, no matter, I've concluded that the stories we tell about the past are valid enough so long as we catch the spirit of the times. Best wishes for yours. I'll look up Timothy Winters.

[rustytrawler]

Hi Harry the best memoir i ever red was a book called Angela's ashes by Frank Mccourt all about growing up in Ireland (nothing to do with the sea) it was also a film but the book is better, a great but sad book full of laughs and desperation. Regards rustytrawler

[Harry Nicholson]

Hello Rusty. It's many years since I read that one. There are so many treasures to read, and all the while time flashes by. I'm reading Thubron's 'The Amur River' currently -- taking it slow because he is such a fine travel writer.

[rustytrawler]

Hi Harry the best memoir i ever red is Angela's ashes by Frank MCcourt,is about his upbringing in Ireland (nothing to do with the sea) It was also a film but the book is better, a sad but uplifting, and funny memoir about his life as a child in 40s Ireland. MCcourt was a brilliant writer and story teller. Regards rustytrawler.

[kauvaka]

Kia ora! Fully agree with you Rustytrawler, Frank McCourt was a great author and I recommend Angela's Ashes as an excellent read. It deservedly was awarded a Pullitzer Prize, the subject alone is worthy of a read. He also wrote another good book Teacher Man.

[rustytrawler]

Teacher man was his last book. His second book starts when he leaves Ireland, on the Irish oak and starts his new life on his own in America, the second book is called Ti's he only did three books, Ti's is also a great read.

[al1934]

Irish writers - dunno if anyone else has read JP Donleavy's books? I read The Onion Man once and couldn't put it down. Completely outrageous and very funny.

[BobClay]

Watching the news of late brings to mind a verse from a T. S. Elliot poem.

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

[Engine Serang]

After reading the book, watching the film and seeing him on numerous Talk Shows I'm convinced Mr mcCourt has a vivid imagination. Fiction rather than Autobiography.

[BobClay]

Under the wide and starry sky,
Dig the grave and let me lie.
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will

This be the verse you grave for me:
Here he lies where he longed to be;
Home is the sailor, home from sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.

Robert Louis Stevenson.

[al1934]

I must go down to the sea again, to the lonely sea and sky;
I left my nicks and socks there - I wonder if they're dry?

With apologies to Spike Milligan, who should apologise to John Masefield...

[al1934]

I first came across this poem when I was a teenager serving in the Royal Navy. It was handwritten on sheets of paper and I was so impressed by it that I laboriously copied it out by hand and learned it by heart. I have carried it around with me for many years, although I can no longer recite it all from memory. My grandfather served in France in WW1 and I have always felt it is the sort of story he could have told. I have recently learned that George Willis was the author. Alick Lavers

Any Soldier To His Son

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

http://www.firstworldwar.com/poetsan...ertohisson.htm

http://www.forcespoetry.com/poemdetails.asp?ID=221

[rustytrawler]

Thank you ALICK and well done regards rustytrawler

[al1934]

Originally Posted by rustytrawler

Thank you ALICK and well done regards rustytrawler

Glad you enjoyed it, RT

When I was young I could recite it word for word - those were the days!

[Harry Nicholson]

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.

[al1934]

Originally Posted by Harry Nicholson

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.

Glad you enjoyed it, Harry. I have always considered it to be a very profound example of what life was really like during that war. It says more to me than the armchair historians ever could. My Grandad was there from 1916 and they kept him there until 1919 before he could come home, although that is never mentioned.

[al1934]

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