Rain Over St. Luke’s

I knew my father was a corporal in WW2 but I found out after his death that he was in the elite Glider Pilot Regiment and at 19, flew into Caen on D-Day +4. He was training to fly into Japan to support a land invasion when the war ended. I subsequently discovered that he had a slightly older cousin, who trained to fly in the RAF Reserve after the Battle of Britain, and was killed whilst training with international flyers in Rhodesia. His body remains there.

The poem is about the two of them, and what a global struggle did to them.

It rains, gently, on the memory
As we stand here in damp overcoats.
Did you two huddle as we do now
Perhaps shoulder to shoulder,
In 1938, under a different, gathering dark cloud?
Did you even know each other?
Cousins you were
But a village can be a big place when you’re fifteen 
And a bus ride is an adventure
And your big cousin is eighteen
And knows, just knows.

What would you know now, if you stood here with me, 
You who survived in virtual silence 
Who served and saw, and said so little. 
Flying into Normandy, Hercules loaded  
With troops and trucks and crackling radios, 
Your bird soft-landed them and you fought  
Beside your mates as they stood or fell 
Or pressed across the Rhine 
Till bloodied they hauled you back to Huddersfield 
Where in ironically oriental landscapes 
You worked among the willows to invade Japan 
Until much bigger birds dropped their 
Scarifying suns half a world away.  
 
So you sat cross-legged on the reservoirs edge 
Lonely, puzzling in the summer drizzle,  
Left trained without a purpose 
By the distant dwindle of rattle, clunk and hum. 
As the clouds turned pink in the sunset 
Did you think of your cousin, who before you  
Had felt the urge to fly 
And took to the blazing skies to learn 
But soon lay burned and broken on the scorched Rhodesian plain 
And lies still, in Bulawayo, as I slowly read his name. 
 
Here, under the cross, 
In the gentle Grimethorpe rain. 

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Stephen Linstead
Picture Nick Victor

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