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Wordworks by Roy Ray
1942
They said the ‘Anderson’ would protect us.
So Dad built it before he went away.
Mum said he worked so much overtime at the post officethat digging a hole that deep
took him ages.
Old Mr Matthews and old Mr Garratt watched him over the fence.
They understood.Mr Higgins and Mr French watched him too......
Dad heard them laugh quietly behind his back.
Dad’s now been away two years.
Tonight, once more, I’m blanket wrapped and clutched in protective arms.
Our scramble from cosy bedroom to cold air raid shelter is propelled by sirens,
lit by probing searchlight beams
and Mum’s small Ever-Ready torch.
Inside the Anderson a single candle flickers and slowly revealsthe silent, still figures huddled in our bunk beds.
Sleepy eyes, now wide open look up as if to seethe relentless pulsing drone that is filling the air.
“One of ours “, says Mr Higgins.
“Right,” says Mr French.......
Guns bump and thump and the explosions that follow say otherwse.
Six decades pass.... a stirring of the subconcious....
and the gradual realisation
that the smell of damp London clay
in that corrugated nocturnal place
with its dark unspoken fear ,
will always be with me.
Roy Ray |
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| Blackout.
Day is white
Night is black.
Black is evil.
Evil means fear,
silently transmitted
from mother to me.
Roy Ray |
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| Air Raid Warning
Two notes rise and fall
in wailing discord
radiating a sickening fear
across a darkened town.
Later, those notes,
now in harmony
will soothe and relieve.
Until tonight.
Roy Ray |
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| Doodlebug
A funny name
for an unfunny weapon
of mass destruction.
A jet propelled bomb
radiating terror
as it pulses towards us.
Then ten seconds
of chilling silence
as we wait.
Roy Ray |
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| All clear
The sirens ‘all clear’ fanfare
brings the tearful and the fearful
from out of the ground
from under the stairs.
On a street with no men,
aproned and turbaned women
gather in two’s and three’s
at the end of their fragmented night.
Always the same question.......
“Who got it this time?”
Roy Ray |
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| Bomb site
The gap in our terrace
where a bomb extracted a house,
now becomes a playround stage
where small boys act out the dramas of
Cops, Robbers, Cowboys, Indians and War,
watched over by towering walls
of patterned paper
carrying family histories
up the invisible stairs,
past rooms now gone- ...
Their suspended fireplaces
staring out into space.
Roy Ray |
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| Shrapnel
Dawn
another house gone.
Soon, small boys will forage
for the truffle of the rubble.......
shrapnel.
At school, trading will be brisk
in this hard currency of the playground.
A small piece for Ginger’s best conker,
a large piece worth two sets of
‘Famous Cricketers’ cigarette cards.....
as usual, Len Hutton will be missing !
Roy Ray |
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| Dog-fights
At school we fight over anything-
marbles, cigarette cards and conkers.
These are fighting times.
But today we stand in the school yard
eyes straining upwards
watching the white vapour trails
high in the pale blue sky.
Each childlike scribble
silently charting a deadly duel.
United now, we watch our heroes
the Spitfire and Hurricane pilots,
some barely out of school themselves
not able to vote but
prepared to give their short lives
for King and Country
Roy Ray |
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| School
A mile walk to school each day
clutching our dinner money and a twist of salt and pepper.
In a loop of privet twig, girls collect dewy spider’s webs.
Boys head straight for the railway crossing
where the steam locomotive sometimes stands.
Later, in the school playground, the lucky ones will boast of
speaking to the driver!
I like the Primary school.
Kind elderly teachers take the classes,
sometimes in the underground shelters.
Love drawing best of all and
thought everyone else did.
I draw planes - mostly ‘ours’-
Spitfires and Lancasters.
Sometimes ‘theirs’ -
Mescherschmidts and Heinkels.
Most of all, I like drawing maps.
Roy Ray |
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| Moving pictures
With sixpence to get in and tuppence for a bun
we queue at the Playhouse cinema
for ‘Saturday morning pictures.’
Soon, our small shrill voices sing
to the ball that bounces along the words
up there on the silver screen.
Cheers greet Roy Rogers and Trigger
galloping across the Wild West.
Shrieks of laughter follow the technicolor antics
of Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck and Pluto.
Silence greets the Pathe newsreel.
A black and white world
where bomb doors open slowly
to release evil black shapes
that flutter down out of sight
and reappear one by one as holes
in the moving city map below.
Now, there are other images of conflict
more chilling,
beyond even adult understanding.
Images that should not confront the eyes
nor invade the mind of a small boy
Roy Ray |
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| Wordworks by John Charles Clark |
writing fragment
wherever a
soldier has
fallen to meet
his cross on
the blood-choked
soil of history his last fond
thoughts of home
erased by the
thundering guns
of man's hatred
for man
and wherever
a nation's colours
lie soiled in the
mud of battlefields;
tomorrow's silence
will be as a memorial
to those named and
un-named dead |
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Nineteen nineteen.
spring of a
new year's
round;
the skylarks have
returned;
but a hush
hovers over
the farms, villages,
towns and cities
this year:
for the first time
the common man
has been honoured
in his own
green land;
family names on
the monuments
of war:
fathers, sons, brothers,
uncles, cousins, nephews
and friends;
men of the world:
the silence of the
never returned
still oppresses the
nation's air |
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1940 Auschwitz.
end of the line/
guards shouting
orders/shuffling
of tired feet
down the platforms/
grey sky/
mass whiteness of
breath on the cold
air of the day/
left, right division,
separates the
beloved/
weepings, sobbings,
pleadings, of no
avail/brutality/
barbed wire/
smoke billowing
from a large
chimney stack/
deafening silence
as despair falls
among us/
even the birds
refuse to sing/ |
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WWII/Holocaust.
in the morning,
when the bombs
ceased to rain down,
a kind of peace
returned:
but we were left
with a cry of anguish
deep inside us;
one that could not
be uttered;
we stood, silent
witnesses, motionless,
made stone-like in
disbelief that this
could be happening:
it seemed that after all
this, no effigy of the
human form could
ever be made;
for any attempt to make
it would have no
meaning, not after what
had been seen to be done
to man, by man
we had desecrated
our own image.
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15th Sept 2001.
a shock to the system
reverberating outward
into our anxious days
and broken nights
the media images
continue to re-run
in our restless minds –
ungraspable
they are forever falling
hand in hand; two specks
on the screen,
two tiny dolls,
falling – falling – falling
in our disbelief we
silently cry: ‘at my
time, let me not
fall alone.’
on the street today
I passed a butterfly lying
crushed on the ground,
its colours in disarray |
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18th March 2008: Suicide Bomber.
media image,
young girl
eight or nine I guess,
long dark hair
drawn back from
the face; ‘butter
wouldn’t melt’ look;
eyes direct to camera:
‘girl next door’, you
see going off to school,
all over the world,
every day:
the shot taken in 1989:
what happened inside
this girl’s head and
heart in the
intervening years
up to 2008
when she killed thirty
people and herself,
as a woman
suicide bomber?
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Summer holiday 1949
iron shod hoof marks
drying in the mud of
the lane;
lucky shoes when
hung over the doorway:
welcome flagstone coolness
on entering, kissing my
face after the heat of
the fields:
heady smell of cut
garden flowers and
country cooking
enters my nostrils;
the love in my aunt’s
eyes as she drinks
me in;
Suffolk summer of
an eight-year-old,
a green world full
of acorns, pigs, chickens
and cows;
so different from the
devastated bomb-sites
of London, my usual
playground. |
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Old school photograph: 2001.
scanning the old
photograph, the
years peel away:
row on row of
remembered faces,
with whom I spent
my formative years:
tall, short, rough,
tough, soft, weak,
rich and poor;
forty-eight boys
the class of fifty-one:
there among them your
cherubic face; along
the line from mine
in the second row:
not that I knew you
well, but you were the
first person I met that
I felt sorry for:
we were both poor boys
but you seemed poorer:
three rows up, stand
the better off boys,
in their Clark’s sandals;
we below, in our black
plimsoles, socks around
our ankles;
our pockets bulging with
cigarette cards, alley marbles
and jacks:
what became of you
Joey, you and all the
others?
life led us different ways;
the eleven plus, the
instrument of our severance:
fifty-nine years on, we
are still ten years old;
awaiting the shutter to
click, and our individual
roads to open:
for that brief moment
in our lives, we stood
together, shoulder to
shoulder in innocence;
before the winds came
and blew us apart
forever.
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Wordwork
acorns
apples
baths
beetles
bicycles
birds
books
brambles
bricks
butterflies
buttons
cartridge cases
caterpillars
cellars
china
chimney pots
chrysalis
cigarettes
clothes
coal
coal holes
coins
coke
concrete
conkers
corrugated iron
curtains
doorknobs
doors
earth
earwigs
education
eggs
fencing
fireplaces
floorboards
flies
flowerpots
flowers
forks
fortylegs
frogs
fruits
glass
grasses
grass snakes
hedgehogs
keys
knives
lampshades
maggots
metal
mice
moths
nails
nests
nettles
newts
nut trees
pears
pipes
plaster
ponds
psychology
rats
rope
sashcord
sheds
shrapnel
shrubs
sinks
silverfish
slates
slow-worms
slugs
snails
sociology
spiders
spoons
staircases
thorns
timbers
tiles
toilet basins
trees
tyres
vegetation
wallpaper
washing poles
water
wheels
windowframes
wireworms
wiring
wood
woodlice
worms
my
childhood
London
bomb-sites
playground
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