Local Hero

Tags

9th Dunbartonshire, Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, Blighty wound, Clyde, Clydebank, gas attack, Kilpatrick, King's Shilling, Picardy, shrapnel, Titan Crane, Wilfred Pip Squeak, Ypres

Robert- gassed at Ypres.  Lived to 90s

Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders

My hero.

 

Photo- Stephen Sweeney.  Titan crane

 

The trench gaped to receive him at last,

over seventy years since he’d escaped its maw

at Ypres.  Other bombshells had been cast:

his daughter’s death at four; her hair as straw-

hued as bales bedded in Picardy barns.

She’d waited for him in the nether tier,

between the pewter Clyde; Kilpatrick tarns –

close to where he’d toiled as an engineer,

in ruts of rusty shipyards, hail or thaw.

 

I stroked Wilfred, Pip, Squeak in childish awe;

loved the sepia photo of Five Bobs;

marvelled that only one of them came back

to supplement the King’s shilling with jobs,

where the main goal was to avoid ‘the sack.’

It was little better than digging graves.

I used to ask him how he’d survived the gas.

He said he’d run away from its green waves.

I asked him to recount how lads would burn, en masse,

lice from their tunic seams with candle flame,

until they heard shells crack.  Then and I unrolled

his trouser leg, amazed he was not lame,

with that lump of shrapnel, which was pure gold,

as a Blighty wound, taking him away

from the Front line, to Palestine.

 

The cranes, his guard of honour, now gone too.

 

 

.

 

 

Building The Queen Mary

Tags

Blue Ribands, Clyde, pistons, Plimsoll Line, rivets, RMS Queen Mary, The Grey Ghost, The Starlight Club, Turkish Bath, White Star line, Yarrow boiler

(RMS_Queen_Mary_Long_Beach_January_2011.jpg David Jones

derivative work 2011 File Upload Bot Altair 78(talk))

 

Grandfather sat at the prow of my bed,

his pipe smoke furling from a brown funnel.

Tell me again: what was the very first thing

you had to do, to build The Queen Mary?

(single-handedly, I probably thought.)

 

Och, it’s all about rivets – lots of them.

 

Sitting up, I tucked the quilt round my legs,

replicating the outline of a hull.

We sipped tea from imaginary cans,

eating chocolate wafer Blue Ribands.

His narration of yard life, like Yarrow Boilers,

never ran out of steam; their flow increased.

 

The fog came down. Make the noise! Make the noise!

And he would drone the deep ‘A’ of its horn.

We flitted round The Grey Ghost arm in arm,

measuring the umpteen miles of carpet;

swimming in the pool and dancing, dancing,

at The Starlight Club. What’s a Turkish Bath?

 

Enthralled by the bright sparks of his stories;

strengthened by many blow-by-blow accounts

of what lay beneath the dimpled surface,

I never felt held back by rusting chains.

 

I was swaged and took on his impressions. So,

now, decades later, I am assuaged,

having been sent down the slipway of life,

christened and launched on that maiden voyage,

into a specially widened, dredged channel,

to follow my White Star: plated and sealed

and watertight through the symbiosis

of the riveter and the riveted.

 

A lucky four leaf clover propeller

directed my course down the Clyde and out

into the North Atlantic. Now retired,

far from home; docked like the grand old lady,

I have righted myself from past rogue waves-

listing, but not sinking, because of him

and the ballast he laid down in my hold.

 

Below my Plimsoll Line, when fog comes down,

I still feel the pistons of his heartbeat,

attuned to my own and powerful still.

She’s Leaving Home

Tags

Art Deco, Celestial City, Clyde, Clyde-built, dredgers, Dumbarton Rock, Flybe, Glasgow airport, Glasgow University, John the Baptist by Da Vinci, Kilpatrick Hills, Luftwaffe, Paisley, River Cart, Singer Factory, soor ploom, speug, Titan Crane

Yes, folks, I’m back.  Here’s a wee poem for you, describing my thoughts as

Flybe took me out of Glasgow Airport:

SHE’S LEAVING HOME 

Instead of a speug’s* view at ground level,

I have a skewed vista doon the watter.

There’s a lump in my throat like a Soor Ploom,

as my keen eye picks out Dumbarton Rock,

before the plane’s wing and cloud wisps obscure

the Ben and those Kilpatrick Hills – cradle

of my childhood.  The tributary Cart,

where mighty hulks dragged their chains,

buoyed up those liners that would cruise the world,

while dredgers kept the channel free of silt

and every vessel seemed to be Clyde-built.

A solitary crane marks the spot

where political tourniquets strangled

the life out of industry and population.

Patchwork fields look as if they have been stitched

into a quilt by a local giantess,

the boundaries hemmed in by Paisley thread,

before Singer stopped treadling out machines

and its Art Deco clock had its hands tied,

as the shriek of town sirens was stifled.

I see my house, my school, the High Flats,

where Luftwaffe rained down a thousand bombs,

before I saw the light of day.  Yon spire

of Glesca Uny soars toward the sky;

beckons to a Celestial City,

just like the finger of John the Baptist:

a pointer to a life outside the frame.

Education – the sky was the limit.

And now I can never come truly home.

Photo by Stephen Sweeney, Wikipaedia Commons

• speug- a sparrow
• * soor ploom- a sour plum-flavoured sweet

Immortal Memory

Tags

Auld lang Syne, caber, Clyde, Cutty Sark, First Lady, Gay Gordons, haggis, Holy Willie, Immortal Memory, John Barleycorn, Red Rose, Sassenach, Selkirk Grace, Sevres vase, soor ploom, Steinway, Strathspeys, Strip the Willow, Tam O' Shanter, tea clipper

Aye, hullo there!  It’s Candia again, dear devotees.  I’m

just recovering from delivering The Immortal Memory speech at

the PTA Burns Supper at St Birinus’ Middle School.

And what a night it was!  Snodbury did fairly well as Master of

Ceremonies, considering he’s a Sassenach.  The School Chaplain

stuttered over The Selkirk Grace, but by then he’d already had a

wee dram.  Or two!

I sat on the top table, next to the School Secretary and Diana

Fotheringay, who seemed to be the partner of The Acting Head.  I

don’t know how she knew him. She seems to be rather an efficient

social climber.  She may have been discomfited by the secretarial

attentions directed at her beau during the evening.  However,

they were probably professionally-motivated.  (Perhaps that’s

the excuse Hollande gave to his First Lady before she took herself

off to hospital, allegedly smashing a Sevres vase or two on the way.

Anyway, Snodbury looked like a floribunda between two thorns.

One of the Junior Masters got up on his hind legs and sang A Red,

Red Rose, to continue the botanical metaphor.  He was accompanied

on the school Steinway by the choirmaster.  It was quite a poignant

rendition and the tenor seemed greatly affected until he had difficulty

with the top note and blushed at his underachievement.

Consequently the choirmaster could not help his facial expression,

which was akin to that of a disgruntled man who had just peed

on a thistle.

Frankly, he should have transposed the key for an amateur performer.

The local publicans had been grouped together on The John Barleycorn

table and members of the clergy were drumming their toasting glasses

on their Holy Willies table.  By the time they were hauled up to their

feet by Sixth Form girls who had waited on their table, to tapselteerie

some Strathspeys, they had managed to steady themselves, under

the vigilant gazes of their soor ploom wives.

I enjoyed stabbing the haggis, though I shall be sending the school

my dry cleaning bill.

Tam O’ Shanter went down well and at least everyone now knows that

Cutty Sark is more than an eighteenth century tea clipper built on The

Clyde.  The Sixth Form girls adequately demonstrated this sartorial

point in their dress code for the evening.

I observed a flash of seamed stocking in The Bluebells of Scotland.  The

School Secretary was ubiquitous and strategically placed herself next to

Snodbury for Auld Lang Syne.  It annoys me when people ignorantly add for

the sake of  to a perfectly crafted line.  Still, they don’t know any better.

Curiously, Diana Fotheringay didn’t seem too concerned.  Mind you, with

legs like that on display, I could see the attraction would wear off. I’m

referring to Snodbury’s hirsute limbs, of course.  Cabers don’t come into

it!

Poskett, the choirmaster, walked out at The Loyal Toast.  He fancies

himself as a Republican!  Or he just fancies himself, full-stop!

I saw that he had to be partnered by the songster in The Gay Gordons,

but I doubt this had any sexual significance.

Well, Rabbie, we did you proud.  The staff didn’t seem to fraternise with the

parents over much, however.  One father seemed very much out on a limb

until that rather heavily-jowled Housemistress from St Vitus’– no doubt

released on good behaviour for the evening, scooped him up to Strip the

Willow. He wasn’t a bad looking chap.  I sneaked a look at the name on his

place card- it was Maxwell, or Boothroyd-Something.  Maybe he’s responsible

for that infamous troublemaker in Castor and Pollux’s class.

The last sighting I had of the deflated songster was of him hanging around

the fringes, like a knotless thread on a tartan travelling rug.  His eyes were

fixated on the Housemistress as she whirled around the floor with Poskett,

the choirmaster.

I should think that he has no chance and no worries regarding Poskett.  Her

gaze was continually resting on that Maxwell fellow.