A Londoner's Recollections

I penned these in recollection of my time living in London during World War Two.

Dunkirk, 1941

The sky is dark tonight,
Heavy clouds, no stars, no moon.
No need to listen for the banshee wail,
The low rumbling drone of iron death.
So--sleep, sleep and sleep.

Always alert, the mind picks up in sleep
A soft, murmuring sound from the Thames nearby.
Out of bed, into shoes and coat,
Down to river's edge.
An endless stream of boats passing by:
No lights, engines muffled, silent crews
Headed for the sea, leaving a gentle ripple on the banks.

Some return, some are lost.
Returning they carry the weary, the wounded,
The sad human flotsam of Dunkirk.

("Ransacking shipyards, the navy managed to send 1,000 motley vessels, ranging from a cruiser to lifeboats and small private yachts, on the cross Channel shuttle. In the end, they saved 338,000 men--and England." - Excerpt from the War Memoirs of the late Sir Winston S. Churchill.)

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SAFETY

The banshee wail opens a hundred doors Slammed shut behind people fleeing toward the Underground,
Each trammeled with bedding, books, knitting.

Children are few.
Most are safe
Carried by long, sad trains
Into the countryside to the care of strangers.

Down the clanking escalator onto the platform, cold, marble walled.
Each family claims a space for the night, To sleep through trains, coming, going, Passengers picking their way
Past the odours of a hundred people cramped in the airless Underground.

For a while they talk, sing, drink mugs of tea,
Then silence,
Listening to the muted war sounds
and feeling the shaking, the showers of dust.

Into their noisome refuge comes a brilliant sight,
A Scots pipe major, kilted and plumed,
Upright and strong.
He strides to and fro,
His bagpipes calling minds to hills purple with heather,
Burns running clear over polished stones, And ancient castles echoing battles of long ago.

---

The Red Cross: England, 1944

An archway grey, a cobbled courtyard cool and green,
Empty stables, ring of harness hushed,
But still the ringdoves coo in lofty cotes And ruffle feathers till they fall
Like snowflakes and scatter on the grass. The palace proud in crimson brick
With oaken beams and Tudor chimneys tall, Elizabeth the Virgin Queen lived here
And breathed her last within these palace walls.
On summer nights from out the archway window
She called to Walter Raleigh waiting below. At midnight they stole across the grass;
In Thames' dark silent tide they noiseless swam
Their silent ghosts still haunt the riverside.

Did ghosts depart when solitude of years
Was broken by the crash and whine of jazz,
Now played on grass where archers plied their bows,
And men that streamed from Columbus' New World,
Not gaily clad, but all in earthy drab? Young girls came too, and laughter
Echoed through the palace's cold stone-
For many there would not be a tomorrow.

The pianist playing syncopated beat

Then--a throbbing hum, a hush, a sighing whine,
A crash...
Windows bursting in, the musky dust
Of plaster. Everyone lies flat and still.
Then slowly rise, and shake off splintered glass
And choke and gasp in clouds of centuries' dust.

Beneath the heavy oaken beams lie crushed Young people whose tomorrow is eternity.

Forever they haunt with Raleigh and his Queen
The empty, shattered shell, in silent watch.
In blackest night, the piano faintly plays The plaintive unremembered melody.
Or could it be the unremitting rain
That patters down through thickly leaved oaks
And runs in rills across the cobbled stones?

Moira Grinberg January 2001

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