Incoming by Culturenet

INCOMING

THE HUMBER WRITERS REFLECT ON THEMES OF WAR AND CONFLICT MARY AHERNE GEOFF BLANSHARD CLIFF DALTON CLIFF FORSHAW RAY FRENCH PEARL HARMAN RAY LORD KATH MCKAY NICK RUMBLE MAURICE RUTHERFORD MALCOLM WATSON

INCOMING

A Humber Mouth Special Commission 2014. First published in 2014 by Humber Mouth, Hull City Arts. This edition copyright ÂŠ Humber Mouth 2014. Copyright of individual poems, stories and images resides with the writers and artists. Humber Mouth 2014 acknowledges the financial assistance of Hull City Council, Arts Council England, Yorkshire and the University of Hull. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written consent from the publisher or contributors who hold the copyright. Requests to publish work from this book must be sent to the copyright holders.

Foreword Writers have always written about war. It is the poet's obligation, wrote Plato, to bear witness. In modern times, the young soldiers of the First World War turned the horrors they endured into a vividly new kind of poetry. Today, even if we are not on the front line, we experience war and conflict every day through blogs and tweets, radio, newsprint and television. With the escalation of war and conflict in the world it is more important than ever to remember, to confront and to bear witness. The Humber Writers, in collaboration with members of the Normandy Veterans Association Hull, present an anthology of poems, prose and artwork. Mary Aherne, Hull. November 2014

Joining the Colours There they go marching all in step so gay! Smooth-cheeked and golden, food for shells and guns. Blithely they go as to a wedding day, The mothersâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; sons. The drab street stares to see them row on row On the high tram-tops, singing like the lark. Too careless-gay for courage, singing they go Into the dark. With tin whistles, mouth-organs, any noise, They pipe the way to glory and the grave; Foolish and young, the gay and golden boys Love cannot save. High heart! High courage! The poor girls they kissed Run with them: they shall kiss no more, alas! Out of the mist they stepped â&#x20AC;&#x201C; into the mist Singing they pass. Katharine Tynan (1914)

Contents Malcolm Watson Red Horseman ........................................................................ 6 Disasters of War ..................................................................... 7 Such Splendid Youth ............................................................ 9 “They think it’s all over…” ................................................. 10 Star ............................................................................................... 12 Sub ............................................................................................... 14 Surrender .................................................................................. 15 Collaboration .......................................................................... 17 National ..................................................................................... 19 Ray Lord

Freedom Flame ...................................................................... 20

Ray French 404 ............................................................................................... 22 Cliff Dalton

Five Miles From Bayeux ..................................................... 30

Mary Aherne

Red Terror ................................................................................ 32 “Nomad’s Land” ..................................................................... 33

Nick Rumble

I Saw a Body Floating Past ................................................ 34

Cliff Forshaw Megiddo Junction ................................................................. 36 Building Jerusalem ............................................................... 38 Shaheed ..................................................................................... 40 Incoming .................................................................................. 42 Year Zero .................................................................................. 44 Pearl Harman

The Lovely Man With the Smile ..................................... 46

Kath McKay “Inside the Stasi Museum” ................................................ 50 “Extraausgabee –” Mass Media and War 1914-18, Vienna 2014 ............ 51 Specimens ................................................................................. 54 Maurice Rutherford Life in a Day with AMD .................................................... 62 Geoff Blanshard Antarctic Adventure ............................................................ 66

Malcolm Watson

Red Horseman Think you invented Total War? War is always total. Always. Ask the slaughtered old and young. Remember the smoke of Troy, the sack of Rome, Constantinople, Magdeburg, Nanking, Guernica, Dresden, Srebrenica and Baghdadâ&#x20AC;Ś Ask the shadows on the walls of Nagasaki. The ghosts have never stopped reminding you. In vain. In vain. You give me and the other three on steeds of black and white and grey no ease. No rest. Conquest, Famine, Death, my boon companions, ride out with me unceasingly under the bloody cloak of sacrifice and suffering. No gain. No teleology. Just cost. Ever the cost. And you persist in thinking that you are perfectible. You are no more perfect than the first amphibian. Your military purpose is a dream become a nightmare. The Seventh Seal is broken. The Seventh Seal is broken.

Malcolm Watson

Disasters of War One of the million shadow-men, revived to shuffle down the shady side of streets, lurches from side to side of his uncertain life, long since forgotten by his children and his wife. Passers-by cross quickly to avoid his wildly rolling eye. His elbows shoot above his shoulders jerked by some drunken puppeteer. At night he screams from underneath his bed. “Maxillo-facial wounds,” his discharge papers read, “neurasthenia, total deafness, severe ataxia resulting from multiple skull fractures.” The shell that killed his five companions buried him up to his neck in bloody mud. What smashed his skull was his pal’s head. When he awoke, bright shell-bursts bloomed as silently as flowers. Five men, minus arms and legs, lay in a perfect circle like fallen poppy petals on the reeking clay. Their heads, except his mate’s that lay a foot away and stared at him mouthing a soundless scream, had disappeared with his sanity. Their limbs hung from the branches of a splintered ring of trees like dolls dismembered, or those waxen offerings fixed to church walls by sufferers who pray. Two hundred years before, Francisco Goya saw another crop of hacked-off heads and severed arms that reached from no-one to nowhere tied to the dripping boughs of living trees, etched in his brain until he set them down on etching plates. “One cannot look” – and yet he looked. “I saw this” – “Yo lo vi.”

In the quiet of his Quinta del Sordo, stone deaf and dying, he recalls “Las Camas de la Muerte” – “The Beds of Death.” Black paintings fill the walls of every room. Remorseless Kronos chomps his children’s heads, eats his own seed, unstoppable, insane. Mankind, like Time, consumes itself. “Lo Mismo” – “The Same.”

Malcolm Watson

Such Splendid Youth “Such splendid youth: it seemed such a pity that they had to be killed.” George Morgan, ex-Bradford Pals, of his friends at the Somme. A fine day in the rest home grounds. The sun shines And they hear the sound of birdsong as they pose For photographs. One leans on crutches as he tips his cap, His right foot in a carpet slipper on the grass. Next to An empty trouser leg that’s neatly folded back. The other’s on a cushion on a wheelchair. The footrest Underneath his wooden seat was scuffed by someone else’s feet. He holds in front of him his pipe and hat where, by rights, He ought to have a lap. Except the bottom of his body’s in a sack. Two men in spotless suits of bright hospital blue Who’ve left a double line and single footprint in the dew. Three limbs and locomotion left in France among the million dead. They’ll never run, or dance, or score a try, or on a sunny afternoon, Go out to bat. But both these men are smiling. Think of that.

Malcolm Watson

“They think it’s all over…” The photos of Bobby and Jackie and Nobby in colour don’t compute. I remember them all (and the hard casey ball) black and white. And my chest hurting, not from shouting but still getting over the pleurisy. My mother had bought new pyjamas “just in case you go into hospital…” But now that the fourth goal was in, my dad walked me down to the club and bought me an underage beer, seeing it wasn’t every day we won the Jules Rimet. When the door from the lounge to the bar-room swung shut, you could see the sellotaped sign through the smoke signals from Woodbines and Capstans saying NO DOGS OR WOMEN – underlined and in capitals, so you’d know. How to look like a prat – i) spill five blokes’ beer when your knee knocks the table leg; ii) fail to notice the beermat stuck to your glass as they all say “Cheers”. After post-match analysis and shared satisfaction, someone said, jerking his thumb, “Did you know he was shot on the Somme?” He resembled a squashed Donald Crisp still looking for Greyfriars Bobby. And when you looked closely, four fingers were missing. I’d seen The Great War over twenty-six weeks, and I’d read my Sassoons and my Owens. And by this day half a century ago, half a million had gone in the mud.

I wanted to know about Schwaben Redoubt, Pozières, Hawthorn Ridge and Bouleaux, machine guns and mines and shell-holes, and gas and grenades. I wanted to know. So I asked if he’d tell me. Without taking his eyes off the screen and the replays of West German heads going down and the goals going in, and the heads going down and the goals going in, and his jaw muscles twitching, he simply said, “No”.

Malcolm Watson

Star

Families were allowed to visit the central prison in the Lodz ghetto for ten minutes to say good-bye to children, the sick and the elderly who were to be deported to the Chelmno death camp.

The boy behind the wire sits in the dust, his elbows resting on his spindly knees, his shaven nape a Norman Rockwell study, his cap too tight above his jutting ears. Two of his sisters on the other side have turned their backs and look away. One twirls between her thumb and forefinger a drooping daisy stem; a third looks down and studiously scans the stony ground. His brother gazes past him, open-mouthed, flinching, as if waiting to be hit. His mother, in her apron, kneeling down, leans towards him, arm and shoulder bulging criss-cross through the wire. She has become the quilt she wants to wrap him in. She looks towards his feet, not in his eyes. Her fingers clasp the bottom of the fence as if it were his hand. She must forget her longing and her fear. She must arm him in the matter-of-fact, hand him instructions, issue passwords, turn him into a talisman, an amulet, make him a magician, a chameleon, render him invisible from top to toe.

She is as grave as granite, as serious as the moon. This is what you must do. All will be well. All will be well. The stitching on the yellow star she sewed upon his shoulder is becoming frayed.

Malcolm Watson

Sub After the footage of men in life-boats, blackened and burnt, trembling like seabirds plucked from a spill, a forty second fragment rattling on the reel shows half a dozen ratings frolicking like kids. Stark naked, holding on for dear life to a line from bow to conning tower, splashing to the nose along the slatted metal skin they dance like clowns, like Charlie Chaplin, as the surfaced sub divides the waves. Sitting with their legs apart, they feel the ocean lift their rooted tackle like wrack on coral and grin like monkeys, running back as white and vulnerable as eggs a hundred miles off Freetown in the sun. They’ll wait till dark to blow the tankers and their freight to kingdom come, ploughing through the flaming sea and blazing men like curling candle wicks. All black and white and clear as day. Or yesterday. They’re taking a break from foetid air, from waiting in the dark and silent running, feeling their bollocks tighten anticipating depth charges, leaking gas and springing plates, white water rushing in. The sole survivor of the crew in his tidy living room and cardigan politely offers coffee and Lebkuchen before the tape-recorder light comes on. Perhaps some schnapps? “About your reminiscences…” He looks the young researcher in the eye. He has forgotten everything, he says. It’s all submerged. Except the surging sea between his thighs.

Malcolm Watson

Surrender Mostly, he remembers the rain. Fresh water never a problem. Nor shelter. Nor rations, for a resourceful man. And sure, he was a resourceful man. But under the permanent boom of the sea, the shriek of the birds, the patter of drops on the leaves, lay the silence. The bodies he stripped and let lie for the scavengers and insects. The palls of stinking smoke from mortared landing-craft, tanks opened up like flowers, bunkers torched by flame-throwers, soon dissolved like gossamer into the sky, replaced by order and method, routine pulled as tight as the knots in the grass round the poles of his hide. Collect water. Check traps and nets. Climb the peak and keep watch. Keep watchâ&#x20AC;Ś Even so, having let a thousand ships sail by for thirty years, he was taken by surprise, roused into disbelief, woken to a dream of speech he failed to understand and finally, politely, surrendered to unaccustomed company, bowing and saluting uncomprehended revelations.

From the cliffside of the Tokyo old folksâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; home, he watches tail-lights sliding by, a soundless hail of golfballs bouncing on the artificial grass of the thousand-tee all-weather driving range, floating past hotels where sleepers twitch like larvae in a hive. The neon Coca-Cola sign lights up and shades his eyes, lights up and shades his eyes. Under the patter of rain on the glass lies the silence.

Malcolm Watson

Collaboration Clutching her ripped Floral shift, She sees Hanks of her hair Like a waterfall Slide from her knees To the gutter. Her right eye is closed, Her cheek and her mouth Smeared with scarlet, Like lipstick Applied by a drunk. Men in overcoats Hawk and spit.

Youths with rifles And rope Look for lampposts. Through the forest Of legs, a girl in Minnie Mouse shoes Boots the breast He caressed As he talked Of Tübingen, The Louvre, the Jews. “Was the wine And the meat And the fags And the cock Worth it then?” Someone yells. Caught in this Purgatory, This dream Between chance And necessity, She still cannot tell.

Malcolm Watson

National We’d heard the air-raid sirens. And so we all jostled and shoved each other to the lobby at the front. The building turned to bricks and dust. An air-borne mine. But no-one died. Not then. The same night, the Cecil and four other picture houses got it. The buggers had it in for us, and you know why? The picture was The Great Dictator. Chaplin taking the mick, a Jewish barber taken for that crackpot Nazi. Adenoid Hynkel! Benzino Napaloni! Cried laughing at Charlie in his first talkie. Never saw the end. And all the houses in this “North East Coastal Town” were flattened. Not so bloody funny then. Nobody knew we’d had the first raid of the war, and the last by bombers, too. They say that picture got the Yanks into the war. The Cecil bombsite was still there in the fifties. The National’s still there now. What’s left of it. My great-grandson says that you can see the film on these computers. He says that Charlie has a grand speech at the end. “The hate of men will pass and all dictators die.” That’s what he says. “Look up, Hannah. Look up.” One of these days, I’ll get him to show me.

Ray Lord

Freedom Flame We went ashore on the second wave and we landed at about half past eight on D-Day on Sword Beach. I was nineteen then – most of the lads were around that age – and I was with the Second East Yorkshire Regiment. I’d had no training at all and I didn’t know what to expect really. The others had all been doing assault training but I hadn’t a clue. I went in green. Ah! I wouldn’t say I was brave really, it was more like an adventure going across... until I landed, of course. The assault group went in at about seven o’clock and they more or less went in to clear the beach. They went through as quickly as they could and cleared what they could and then the second wave went in and they mopped up what was left. There was a lot of machine gun fire and what have you. Quite a few went down and were killed. It was a bit of a hairy experience. Anyway, we got through that first day OK and we took about seventy prisoners. We spent a couple of days clearing up there and then we had a rest period and waited for reinforcements. Our next big task was to trek to the Château de la Lande. I was then assistant wireless operator to the CO of the battalion. One man carried the radio on his back and the other operated the microphone and headset. Crawling through this cornfield was a young chap. The CO asked him what on earth he was doing there and he said the bastards had shot him in the behind. The CO said to me, “Lord,” he said, “Go and see to this man and catch up with us later.” And there was me with this chap, his trousers round his ankles, his shirt round his waist and me trying to bandage him round his behind. I waited with him till the stretcher bearers came along. After that, I had to crawl through this cornfield to find my CO. There were machine guns going off and mortars dropping everywhere. I crawled up to the edge of a wood where there was a bit of a ditch there, so I got in and tried to keep my head down, bullets flying all over the place. I don’t know how I found them but I eventually caught up with the CO and his batman and the other chap, Charlie Hirst, in charge of the radio. At this point we were in a big mortar pit. This had been dug by the Germans and they knew exactly where it was and what to aim for. It was like being in a trap but we stuck it out there all afternoon and at night time we abandoned that and went into the wood itself. We found a place where 20

a tank had been dug in and then driven out and we stayed there for the night. Of course, they were still shelling us and the CO’s batman got killed there. We managed to take the Château in the end, took a few prisoners then withdrew back to Cassel and waited for reinforcements. The Germans were retreating all the time and we continued to drive them back. Of course, Caen was very heavily bombed. Why I don’t know; there was no need for it. Well we were digging in a cornfield again – it was always cornfields – to make a trench. It was overlooking Caen and of course they started shelling us again. While I was digging, Charlie was looking after the radio. A shell landed right next to us and fortunately the radio took most of the blast but I got wounded in my thigh. It’s strange but I didn’t feel any pain. I got sent back to England then and was operated on in Portsmouth in the Naval Hospital and then I was sent up by ambulance train to Leeds St James hospital. The most painful thing was them taking the stitches out. After ten weeks I was sent back to my unit which was in Holland. We go across every year now to Normandy, and to Belgium and Holland – it’s a kind of pilgrimage. At Wageningen in Holland there is a Liberation Flame which burns eternally. This year, the Hull branch of the Normandy Veterans had the privilege of bringing the flame to Hull.

Ray French

404 I should have set off earlier, I’d never catch the 15.36 now. The long walk to the station in the driving rain with a heavy bag was giving me a thirst, The Prince of Wales was just ahead. There was another train in an hour, why not have one for the road? Was I capable of having just the one? I decided I was. Someone had given The Prince of Wales a fresh lick of paint – seek medical help if symptoms persist daubed in red on the wall. I hesitated, my hand on the door. Something told me to turn around and look behind, a soldier’s sixth sense. A woman was getting out of a car; it was Tina, she’d dyed her hair red, bought herself a stylish new coat. The car was new too, a Fiat Uno. Where did the money come from? She was on her way up, I was racing to the bottom. Tina opened the rear door, bent down to speak to someone on the back seat – she had Ryan with her. I moved so that I could see past her into the car. Ryan was asleep, his head slumped to one side. It had been two years since I’d seen him. He’d grown so much I barely recognised him. There was a hole in my chest. My legs began to shake. My wife, my son. Tina grabbed Ryan’s shoulder and shook him but it was no good, she couldn’t wake him. She closed her eyes, squeezed the bridge of her nose between fingers and thumb. It had been a bad day and it was just getting worse. I couldn’t stand by and watch this, I had to do something. But Tina moved first. She shut the door, clutched her collar round her neck and ran to the chemist. What in Christ’s name was she doing, leaving Ryan like that? Didn’t she have any idea how dangerous it was? “Tina!” If she’d heard me then, it never would have happened. She pushed open the door, bing bong, disappeared inside. Told herself she’d only be a couple of minutes, it wasn’t worth the hassle of waking him, but a lot could happen in a couple of minutes. She’d left the engine running. This was it, do it, now. I opened the door and heaved my bag inside, sat down. My hands on the steering wheel looked strange. They didn’t look like they belonged to me at all. Don’t start that. Not now. “Come on, move it, you muppet.” The gear box was tighter than the Escort’s, I made three, four attempts 22

before putting it into first, then checked the mirror and eased out, nice and slow. I didn’t look back at the chemist, never stopped to think about whether I was doing the right thing. This was for real. I pulled away, changed up into second with a crunching sound, put my foot down and shuddered into third. I felt a buzz I hadn’t known since being on patrol in Helmand – the mad mixture of fear and excitement. I’d been waiting for something like this. Strange to realise you’d been waiting for something without knowing about it until it happened. I was careful to keep to the speed limit, there was no way I was going to make the mistake of attracting attention. Anyone looking at us would see a normal dad driving his son home; fish fingers and chips in front of a video, a bath, bedtime story. I turned right and headed for the George Street Bridge to avoid going through town, less likely to get stuck in traffic that way. Maintained a steady thirty as I drove up Commercial Road, past the dreary shops I wouldn’t miss – Ali’s Stores, Fags And Mags, Betfred. Slowing down for the lights I began thinking about my exit strategy. At the next lights I’d have a choice – take the left hand lane and head for Cardiff Road, follow it to the big roundabout at Tredegar House and merge onto the M4 at junction 28. Or turn right and head up Chepstow Road to Ringland, hit junction 25a, that way if the M4 was snagged up I could take the A4042 instead. Like the man said, if you don’t have a Plan B, you don’t have a plan. But Chepstow Road could get clogged up with buses and old farts tootling to the shops in their Ford Anglias. No, I’d turn left. I could barely breathe. What were the chances of coming across Ryan on the day I was leaving Newport for good? Someone somewhere must have decided it was time I had a break. Handed me a piece of luck so huge I’d spend the rest of my life wondering how I’d ever pay it back. But I knew the answer to that one already, by taking good care of my son. I started to choke up. Don’t look back at Ryan. I looked back. He was still asleep, listing slowly to the right. Not good, if I had to stop suddenly he might hurt himself. But I couldn’t do anything now, waiting for the lights to change, I’d have to wait till I could find somewhere to pull over. Tina would have come out of the chemist by now, she’d be staring at the space where her car had been. It would take a few moments to sink in, she’d look left, right, checking that she hadn’t parked it somewhere else, then the panic would grip her. She’d start screaming. “Where’s my son? Someone’s taken my son.” 23

People would rush to help, what is it, love? Someone would call the police on their mobile. The lights finally changed, and I carried on. How long before they put out an alert? The registration number, the make, colour, a six year old boy in the back. The police would ask Tina for a description – I could imagine what the bulletin would say. Do not approach this man. Do not have a go. I had to get out of Newport. No more looking back, keep your eyes on the road and watch your speed. Last year I wrote off a car. One minute I was driving to Rogerstone, on a crisp winter’s morning, the next I was back in Musa Qala, fighting the Taliban, carrying eighty pounds of equipment, in temperatures of 50C. We were running out of ammo, food, water, no help on the way, forgotten. Before I knew what was happening I’d veered off the road and ploughed into a lamp post. I escaped with cuts and bruises. Lucky, that’s me. The lights at the junction were green, I hung a right into Wharf Road. No you nugget, you were going to turn left. I couldn’t afford to lose concentration, it was vital to stay focused. I took my right hand off the wheel, made a fist and punched the dashboard, three, four times till the flesh split and I drew blood. “Come on.” But I’d got lucky. Again. The traffic on Chepstow Road was light, it was a straight run to the roundabout for the M4, we’d be there in ten minutes. I felt the raw relief after you’ve thrown up, that metallic taste in my mouth. I started laughing. I’d remembered something the sky pilot had said. We were talking about luck. As in, if you were lucky you’d get out of this place alive. He told me that in most European languages the word they used for lucky at first meant happy. Except for Welsh, where lucky meant wise. If you were lucky, then you must be happy. Then I must be happy. No, wait, I’m Welsh, so I must be wise. Tina would be frantic. What would she be thinking now? My son has been kidnapped by a paedophile. I’ll ring as soon as we’re a safe distance away, put her mind at ease. “Have you missed me Ryan?” I knew he was asleep, but I needed to hear the sound of my voice, out there in the world, instead of trapped inside my head going round and round like a prisoner pacing his cell. “I’ve missed you. I know I haven’t been to see you, but I wasn’t well and I thought it was best if I stayed away for a while. But I never stopped 24

thinking about you. There wasn’t a day when you weren’t in my thoughts, little man. Not a day.” Tina said I didn’t know how to talk to him, that I frightened him. But a father needs to tell it like it is to his son, how else is he going to learn to be a man? “Do you remember the stories I sent you?” They tried it in prison, worked there, next stop the army. You’d find a quiet place, usually the sky pilot’s tent, he wasn’t so bad, didn’t give you too much grief about Jesus if he saw you really didn’t want to know, and read a story into a Dictaphone. They’d send the recording back to Britain, put it on a disc and deliver it to your house so your kiddie can hear dad’s voice at bedtime as they fall asleep. The Gruffalo, The Night Before Christmas, Winnie The Pooh, I knew them off by heart. But Burglar Bill was my favourite, I used to love reading Burglar Bill: Who’s that coming through the window? Who’s that… It’s Burglar Bill Reading those stories made me feel close to him. I thought they’d give us something to talk about when I got back, but he burst into tears and ran to Tina when I tried to pick him up. He saw something in my eyes that terrified him. “My head’s not been right. That’s the reason I had to leave you and Mam. I’m sorry I said those things to you and her, I never meant them. We all need help sometimes Ryan, even mams and dads. You’ll understand that when you’re older.” I knew it wasn’t a good idea to talk like this, not right now, but I couldn’t stop myself. My mind was filled to bursting with things I needed to say. “That place they sent me to – Afghanistan, I saw a lot of very bad things happen there.” I was getting too close to the car in front, I eased off the pedal. The rain was getting heavier, the windshield wipers on top speed, I couldn’t see more than ten feet in front of me. I glanced in the mirror again, Ryan was awake. I filled up and looked away. Two years ago I got home from Afghanistan one night and stood outside the house, looking through the window. Tina and Ryan were watching The Lion King. Tina was drinking a glass of wine and Ryan was curled up in her lap, big-eyed with wonder. The bright Disney colours flickered across their faces. They looked so happy and content without me. I knew I’d destroy that happiness if I went in. I’d been trapped on a roof, involved in a firefight that had lasted for thirty-six hours when I 25

heard someone call my name. Given five minutes to get my kit, before I jumped into a land rover and was driven to the airport. They would see the horror in my eyes. I would bring death into the house. I didn’t want them to see what was happening to me. Or face what I’d do to them if I stayed. I turned away and walked to The Prince of Wales, got a room there for the night. The next day I rang Tina. “It’s better I don’t come back.” “Better for who? We need you.” “You don’t need who I am now, believe me.” “Steve, don’t do this to us.” I put the phone down. There was something else, something I couldn’t bring myself to tell her. The army was my family now. The other guys in my unit were the ones I felt closest to. No-one else could understand what we’d been through together. If there was one thing I learnt from the siege of Musa Qala it was this: no-one was going to come and rescue you, no-one else cared if you lived or died. You only had each other. What did all those men die for? We ended up handing over control to a local commander who promised to keep the Taliban out. Two months later the town was theirs again. You’re supposed to come back home and have a quiet pint and talk about the football, watch Coronation Street. You’re supposed to go to the supermarket, watch everyone walking about like zombies. It feels like people don’t have any purpose here, no idea what life is really like. What it was like to hold the hand of your best mate after he’d stepped on an IED that took his legs. Tell him he was going to be alright as they pumped him full of morphine. To see women who would always flinch at the sight of a man for the rest of their lives. To look up at huge, beautiful starsplattered skies on night patrol and know you might be dead tomorrow. To see men who looked like something on a butchers’ slab, screaming for their mothers. Sometimes I looked in the mirror and flinched. Do not approach this man. Do not have a go. You couldn’t see more than five, six feet in front of you now the rain was so bad. I slowed down to twenty, kept my eyes on the road. “You never know what’s around the corner, do you? This morning I couldn’t face getting out of bed, the only answer was getting out of Newport, getting as far away from here as possible. I was going to go to Spain, Christ knows what I was going to do there. Then I saw you and Mam, and I knew I couldn’t go through with it.” I could feel my voice cracking. 26

“But now I’m doing something about it. I’m going to make it up to you Ryan. We’ll go to London fist, I’ve got a mate there we can stay with till we decide what to do. There’s no need to worry, we’ll call Mam in a bit, tell her what’s happening. You can speak to her if you like. What do you think, Ryan? Where shall we go?” Silence. “Ryan, please son, haven’t you got anything to say to me after all this time?” “Who are you?” I looked in the mirror. He was absolutely terrified. He looked nothing like Ryan, it was some boy I’d never seen in my life. “Who the fuck are you?” He started bawling. What was happening here? I could have sworn it was Tina. It was her, I knew my own wife. “I want to go home.” “Shut up!” Tears and snot ran down his face. I was forced to stop for another red light. “Listen son, there’s been a mistake. I thought you were Ryan. You look just like him.” But he didn’t. I slumped forward and banged my head on the steering wheel. “Please, please, please, please, please, please make this stop!” I gripped the steering wheel tighter, tighter, grinding my teeth. The car behind started honking. I looked up, the lights had changed. I drove on, no idea what else to do. “Please mister …” The boy wouldn’t stop sniffling. This had to end, now. I took the next left, Beechwood Road, drove half way up and pulled over. I switched off the engine and turned round to face him. He wouldn’t look at me. “I’m going to leave you here. You’ll be alright now. Hey, son, can you look at me when I’m talking.” He was bawling again. “For god’s sake will you stop crying? Be a man.” I couldn’t bear it any longer. I got out, began walking back down the road. I had to get out of town. Then I looked back. How long was the poor little bastard going to sit there before someone came and found him? A middle aged woman was trudging up the road on the other side, hauling a shopping trolley with one hand, clutching a tatty umbrella with the other. I ran across. 27

“Excuse me.” She took one look at me and turned away. I blocked her path. “Are you deaf?” She seemed to think I was some kind of escaped lunatic. “See that red Fiat Uno?” She wouldn’t look, I had to grab her chin and twist her head in its direction. “There’s a little boy in there. He’s lost his mam. He needs your help.” Her mouth dropped open and she stared at me, her eyes popping. Jesus Christ, I’d stopped some kind of half-wit. “Do you understand what I’m saying to you?” I had to turn away before I lost it. You try to help and this is what happens. When I reached the end of the street I realized I’d left my bag in the car. Too late now. I began walking back into town, putting distance between myself and the car and the boy. After a few minutes I was out of breath, soaked through, the water squelching in my shoes with every step I took. I saw a cab office, stepped inside. “Where you wanna go, mate?” A young Asian bloke slumped on a seat, smoking; voice friendly, eyes wary. I recognized that look. I ended up with a new nickname on the last tour of Afghanistan: 404. Broken link. You can’t afford to have those out there. “The station.” We didn’t say a word on the way. I caught him glancing at me in the mirror a couple of times. Worried he had a nutter in the back. Maybe he had. I was going to start again. I was going to do something good. Someone somewhere must have decided it was time I had a break. Life’s not like that. I was too old to believe in fairy tales. I got a single to London. The next train was in half an hour. My hands were shaking as I picked up my change. There was a bar on the station. Was I capable of having just the one? I decided I was.

Cliff Dalton

Five Miles from Bayeux I’m one of the youngest of these Normandy Veterans as I’m only 89 years old. I was just 13 when the war broke out in 1939 and still at school in Southcoates Lane. I was evacuated, of course. They stick a label on you, shove a gas mask in your hand and ship you off. We were sent out of Hull to Barton-upon-Humber. There was no bridge in those days; we went across the Humber on the ferry. It was like in the Ark – we were paired up and then sent, two to one house and two to another, and so on. I stayed in Barton till Christmas and, as I’d turned 14, I had to go back to Hull to start work. I got an apprenticeship at an electrical company called Autosparks Ltd. I stayed with them for my whole working life, 51 years’ service, and in that time I worked my way up from apprentice electrician to Managing Director. When I first started working I experienced all the air raids in Hull. The 8 and 10 of May 1941 were particularly terrible nights – they knocked the town to pieces. Before I was called up I used to do a couple of nights a week fire watching at work. You had to do it – everyone took their turn. I was living in East Hull with just my mother and father as my brothers and sister had all been evacuated. We had an Anderson shelter in the garden, like everyone, and we went in there when the raids started. Our back garden faced the dock area and by the time they’d finished a three-hour raid there was fire all the way from Hedon to our house. A great big pall of smoke. It was like watching a film – parachutes descending through the smoke. That place where we were had a battery of anti-aircraft guns and they made more racket than the bombs. There we were, me, me mam and dad, huddled up in the shelter, shaking. Sometimes the incendiary devices would hit the roof, roll down the tiles then lodge in the gutters. They were that hot they would melt through the gutter and fall through to the ground. You had to get a sandbag and drop it on top. Phosphorous bombs. Sometimes they burnt through the roof and set fire to the top of the house. They used to drop clusters of them. One night, there was a terrific bang. The door of the shelter blew completely off and, when we looked out, two or three houses away from ours had completely gone. They’d knocked the whole street down. They’d drop landmines on a parachute and they sailed down slowly but at the 30

bottom they had a rod. When the rod touched the top of the house they’d explode. The bombing went on forever. In the years from 1941 to 1944 I got used to taking my blankets into the shelter and sleeping there. At the beginning of 1944 I was called up and immediately sent to Northern Ireland. We went on the ferry from Stranraer to Larne. Well what a crossing – you couldn’t stand on your feet. We went through a medical, you were given a uniform, got your injections and all the time you did your drill. You hadn’t two minutes to spare – it was all go and you came out something like a soldier. As well as the drill and all that they gave us puzzles to do, intelligence tests. We had to make objects, solve problems, pass psychological tests. In the end I joined the Royal Army Service Corps. I was given three days’ embarkation leave which I spent in Hull. Then we were on the boat, heading for Normandy, Mulberry Harbour, but I wasn’t there for D-Day. I was posted to a 318 Company RASC – a mobile workshop – which meant I wasn’t in the front line. There were about 120 vehicles and we stayed there until the end of the war. We were parked up in Normandy in a field somewhere in dugouts. I think we were about five miles from Bayeux. Some even got to see the tapestry!

Mary Aherne

Red Terror

In the late 1970s, Ethiopia’s Marxist military rulers tortured and murdered hundreds of thousands in brutal repressions. Many young intellectuals fled to neighbouring countries to seek asylum; others escaped to the U.S. and Canada. Kukulu is a version of hide and seek and Awo and Aydelem is a game in which the questioner must try to make everyone else say “yes”.

First it was your uncle then your dad who faced the henchman, endured the cattle prods and rifle butts, the whips and pipes, his barrage of abuse, their bodies shredded to some grim collage. Although their choked confessions proved their innocence he shot them anyway, left their battered corpses to fester in the street while your family trembled in silence, hearts crumbling for their loved ones at a distance. So then they came and dragged you to that place where, trussed up on a broomstick between two desks a boy, not even twelve years old, was that his face? You knew him well, your neighbour’s kid, played kukulu, awo and aydelem in the streets with all his friends. Mute with fear, still they questioned him for hours. Is this the one? Found ways to force him to say yes. Not words but clots of blood and vomit from his mouth convinced them of your guilt: your turn, you were it. Your turn to dangle from the stick, to counter questions about a gun you never saw, you never had. What was the right answer? Awo or aydelem? These days the weeds around that shack grow thick; the cellar where you almost died is locked. A fading slogan scrawled above the door reads, “Ka hullum belay, Abiotu!” – “And above everything, the Revolution!” 32

Mary Aherne

“Nomad’s Land” Drive past the Corniche, the golden beach, the golf club offering oiled dusty browns, not greens. Then there’s that graveyard for clapped-out cars. No road signs, but the choke of trash and cans, like calling cards, tell you where you are: La Douda, tas d’ordure, the bidonville. Here is heat, dust, stench: a twentieth-century “Nomad’s Land”, home for the displaced where goats gnaw obstinately at heaps of plastic, glass and aluminium alongside chiffoniers, those tattered shirts on sticks, who sift through lumber-crowded heaps in hope of treasure, foul rag and bone stuff they can trade in markets, or send to Dire Dawa on the train. Chacun pour soi? Dieu pour personne? Is this the devil’s work or the will of Allah? Waste from the abattoir smoulders in the distance: camel carcasses, cow horns and ribs fume in a haze of suffocating grey. Bulldozers plough back and forth each day in some vain attempt to tidy up this chaos. Smudged on the outskirts, a bric-a-brac of shelters, toukhouls, their sapling frames armoured with flattened cans that once held cooking oil condensed milk or paraffin, and still bear their labels: US Food Aid, Aid for Africa, UNHCR.

Nick Rumble

I Saw a Body Floating By My name is Jack Thomas Rumble. I was born on 29 October 1925 and I have always been called Nick for as long as I can remember. On 3 September 1939, when war broke out, I was 13 years and 11 months old. Unfortunately, my family was bombed out three times. The last time everything was lost. My father, mother, brother and I were sent to Beverley to sleep several nights in the Regal Dance Hall, till such time as we could obtain a house for rent. I myself got a job as a barrow boy, barrowing concrete to make runways at Leconfield and also Lisset aerodromes. During this time I met a girl from Hull and used to go back there to see her. My family and I eventually went back to live in Hull. But the war was still on and years were rolling by. My brother, who was three years older than me, went into the army and was wounded in North Africa. I was called up and was sent into the Navy on my 18th birthday in 1943 to HMS Glendower in Wales and then to HMS Wellesley in Liverpool for extra gunnery training. Luckily I was then drafted to Hull to HMS Galatea so I was able to see my sweetheart quite often. In April 1944 I was sent to a ship called the Charles Anthony Enwright, on lease-lend from America, which was being loaded in Hull, mainly with K-rations and Bailey bridging. I was a Royal Naval gunner on Merchant Navy ships. I was still able to see my sweetheart Doris who by this time was pregnant. I applied for compassionate leave but was refused as all leave for Forces was banned. D-Day was looming but nobody knew when. However, the fact that we were in Hull helped. I was allowed to marry Doris on 10 May 1944 at 3pm but had to be back aboard by 9am the next day when we prepared to sail up to Methin in Scotland and then round to Swansea to finish loading. From there we went on to Southampton to wait in the Channel with hundreds of other ships. On 5 June we set sail in the dark, arriving on the 6 June. All hell was breaking loose. Tracer bullets could be seen as we approached. I was very tense and was in charge of an Oerlikon gun on the side of the bridge. I then started to fire where all the tracer bullets were being fired only to see this ball of flame come tumbling down. Unfortunately, it was a barrage balloon from another ship. When daylight broke we were laid off shore at Arromanches. American troops came aboard and started to discharge the ship while the bigger Royal Navy ships continued to fire over the top of us. 34

As I looked over the port side I saw a body floating by and shouted down to the crew who quickly brought a wire half cage coffin on ropes to try to rescue the body. Sadly, the tide took him past. Not so long after, other bodies were seen and some were rescued and brought aboard. After two or three days, I think, having been discharged, we sailed back to Swansea and loaded again, then headed back to Normandy. By this time the beaches had been made secure. We sailed back home again, loaded up and this time we sailed up the river Seine as far as Rouen. I remember seeing three nuns and an aeroplane sculpted out of the cliffs. We had to be very careful of snipers although our troops had advanced much further. While the ship was being discharged we were allowed ashore. We sailed again back to England then to Rouen again with bags of brown sugar and all sorts of cargo. This time the troops were being entertained in a theatre â&#x20AC;&#x201C; thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s when we saw Joe Loss and his band. Also, I remember going to the big cathedral.

Cliff Forshaw

Megiddo Junction: Route 66 forks off. West Bank: Jenin’s just a stone’s throw east, half-bulldozed, curfewed by the IDF. Assyrians, Egyptians, Ottomans, British, all yomped through here. Slid their arms round Israel’s impossibly tiny waist. Now the iron corset pinches - Green Line, Intifada cinches waist to an hour-glass these lines in sand run through. One click north, it’s Armageddon: camel’s hump or monk’s scruffy tonsure. From the bald patch, look out where Jordan’s just smudged horizon: the Valley of Jezreel’s blunt with haze. Down there, all green bits fade. It’s 40 in the shade. There is no shade. * She unplugs the plastic tappet, glugs water from its blue-ridged shell. Hot as hell, you unstick shirt from skin, wipe sweat from inside straw hat. Nothing said. Displacement activities. Blind fingers trace words. This rock’s a palimpsest that’s thirty cities deep… Lizards skedaddle. Stop. Beadily check you out; or drop to breathless reps. Press-ups. Khaki fatigues merge with dust or dark.

Little sun-driven engines discover fissures, skitter off on erratic missions into stone, seeking tunnels, caverns, water-courses… It all began round here, you think: Big Bang, the One True... and then that other thing... * You watch as what slipped skin through rock ghosts back. Now tiny restless dynamos materialize; you see saurians play tricks with their stored-up thunder. Basilisks. Blood cool from rivers underground, stripped to nerve, low bump, mere lobe, they outstare, throb with something ancient, limbic. Your mind’s on rifts, cracked stone, hind-brains; things contrary, strange; cloven or twinned; things winged yet featherless; mythic, primeval; that crossroads where what slid, crawled, or crept met the newly and clumsily bipedal. Back at the car, you’re already headed north. A dragonfly shimmers on the aerial’s stamen. She turns the key; unwinds the road to Nazareth.

Cliff Forshaw

Building Jerusalem Ten measures of beauty gave God to the world; nine to Jerusalem and one to the remainder. Ten measures of sorrow gave God to the world; nine to Jerusalem and one to the remainder. The Talmud Two Voices You’ve seen that poster? The young Israeli soldier’s burying his prayer here in the Wailing Wall. His rifle’s slung at his elbow, stock tipped from the strap bow-strung from his shoulder. These huge stones make us all feel small. Above and beyond is al-Haram al-Sharif. Another poster, the Tourist Office’s, makes that gold mosque’s rising dome the must-see sight. Up there, Abraham quivered with his knife; Mohammed ascended a staircase of light. Temple Mount’s out of bounds to Jews by their own Holy Law; and off-limits to non-Muslims these last tense weeks. Security’s real tight, so I’m sticking out among the Hasidim in their old country, old century, black and white. The bus rattles through the sun-struck shtetl. Last week, another martyr blasted off to heaven right here – dressed as a Haredi, I heard: black coat, white shirt, black suit, the broad-brimmed hat. I’m guessing he already had the beard. And, undercover of that black black suit, that newly-laundered winding-sheet of shirt, doubtless beat a very special heart: one that knew injustice, indignity, spite, or grew sullen at some subtler private hurt. 38

One sullen spark, long fanned, may start God’s love to smoulder in any heart. One day that love may burst into flame with such force the soul escapes its cage of ribs and rips your world apart.

He was raptured up right through this bus’s roof: this jagged crescent’s a witness to his light. Small stars now stud the dark where rivets discovered their holy vocation, shunned the night and aimed themselves at sky, his moon.

Bedeck the walls, the deck is flower-strewn, confettiblown: the petals and stems of washers, bolts, sprays of glass, bouquets of skin; the ecstasy of flesh dispensing with the need to be; the jolt of bodies beside themselves in joy.

He came. He went. An exemplary life. He undressed himself right down to the marrow of his soul, took nothing with him, bequeathed his companions all. Yet powerfully persuaded his Mitteleuropäischer guests, who have come so far, to strip off their Sabbath best, and dance, here in the hot Middle Eastern sun. And now even those wallflowers, too shy to hang up their long black coats, can’t help themselves – they’re nodding heads and hats and beards. Soon they’ll be fingerclicking, toe-tapping, getting down and dirty to the beat. And on this bus now trembling at the busy stop as you fumble on the step for change, who knows what may have caused another drummer’s heart to quicken while the diesel ticks?

Cliff Forshaw

Shaheed Other side of that great new Wall, the deconstructed town (90,000 souls) half-stands: crunchy rubble, tutting choppers; street-arabs dodge that tank-track sound. What’s left is mainly walls. Jenin. The not-quite-fallen lean on each other, sketch a corner, put a hearth in parenthesis, bracket off a bath. And what’s left of many walls is sky or a vision of laser-printed saints: A4 martyrs aimed at Heaven, an apotheosis bristling AK47s. One scrawny generation thought Charles Atlas; now, after pics show pecs pumped with ironmongery; bigged up, lumpy with whole hardware bins of nails. Hard enough for Allah, flashgunned brief hours before their fame. One, from where the new wall slices olive groves, wears that green headband. God’s élite – No one kicks sand in this commando’s face. Streetside galleries of the Shaheed: Hamas. Fatah. Jihad – a verse from the Qur’an bleeds through screen-grabs, heroic deeds they’ll ink to light. 40

.... ripped-up roots, a lonely boot, the snap of wasp-striped tape; fluorescent crews harvesting the red communal fruit from sticky tarmac. Faces strobed: the shadow’s veil, the siren’s call to oxyacetylene prayers. Something close to history hanging in newly-stung air.

You’ve seen this face: bespectacled, studious in the freshers’ photo. A little out of focus, fuzzy with an idea of beard. Or snapped a year or two back: that graduation trip to Al-Quds, aka Yerushalayim. In the background, Al Aqsa: just like the poster – that blinding mosque, sun detonating on its golden rim.

Cliff Forshaw

Incoming Hizbullah, exhilarated, exhaling Allahu Akbar! as rocket launchers whoosh Katushkas …over the border, in the olives, you rely on the nearby Jewish village’s siren, wind in the right direction…

[South-facing shelters, the hillside’s tachycardia. Out of here, all clear, you’ll be lucky to be breathing walls, your neighbour’s dust.]

… to give you maybe one thousand heartbeats or one hundred shallow breaths to find your wife, mother and her granddaughter: Fatima on the rooftop hanging washing; Zeinab scooping Leila from the garden.

Cliff Forshaw

Year Zero (Plus Thirty) $3 gets you in to where the calendar stopped just outside Phnom Penh. Eyes drop; the guide’s been pointing to these little bits of people littered along the path: odd shreds of red or blue poking up through earth. Here’s a bandage of a skirt; there, the sleeve or pocket ripped from a shirt. It’s all rag and bone, but somehow still hard to believe in the down-to-earth persistence of these tatters in the weeds. Could be arrows, fossils, artefacts from way before the year dot: tiny white needles seem to have stitched this muddy seam back together. Ghosts flower from each ditch. The past seeps up underfoot. This ground’s both sewn and sown: these rags seem planted to take deliberate root in the mind’s soil. Either way, what leads us up this garden path is rhetoric.

We walk over footnotes to that huge cairn of skulls: find more bones talked into this intricate and tall seventeen-storey memento mori of a dry-stone wall. What holds up the white-washed stupa is a steel and glass cabinet: a transparent sepulchre of skull-filled drawers clicked each into its place. Vertebrae. Hard not to think of knuckles, of how alike all bones are. Hard to believe, where guards laboured hugely by these pits, in what seems like natureâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s rhetoric. In the hollowed field, no pathetic fallacy: hesitant but massing, flitting, flickering hinged light, littering reds, yellows, whites, along erratic flightpaths. Hard to believe even here, where the past is privatised, that butterflies are just butterflies: no other meanings being born from all those years of grass, these rows of zeroes at the bone.

Pearl Harman

The Lovely Man With the Smile Ken and I met in 1943 when I was 17 and he was 21. I’d taken advantage of a lull in the bombing to go to a dance at the Wenlock Barracks on Anlaby Road. He walked into the hall and he stood out immediately as the only sailor in a crowd of soldiers. He was just back from the Middle East. Ken really knew how to dance, which was my favourite thing, and he had such a lovely smile. That was Ken – the lovely man with the smile. We both fell head over heels in love and he wanted to marry me straight away but my father said it was too soon and I was too young. However, my father said if Ken still felt the same way when the fighting was over then he would have no objection. Ken joined the Royal Navy on 3 December 1941, and his first ship was an armed merchant cruiser which he said looked a bit like the Titanic. During the war, he found himself dodging U-boats in the Atlantic and Japanese kamikaze aircraft while serving with the British Pacific and East Indies Fleet, known as “The Forgotten Fleet”. On D-Day, 6 June, 1944, Ken served on an armament barge which sailed out of Plymouth docks. And that’s why he became part of the Normandy Veterans’ Association. He was finally demobbed in May 1946. During the war Ken had been separated from his brother for six years. They finally met in Sydney harbour and I think it was a very emotional reunion. The middle brother was less fortunate as his ship went down in the Mediterranean where they had been mine-sweeping. He would only have been 19 or 20 years old. Because of the magnetic mines, the minesweepers had wooden decks. A German bomber attacked them, strafing the wooden deck so that it caught fire and then went down. Seven of the men, including Ken’s brother, escaped and swam to the Greek island Laros where they lived in a cave for a number of weeks. They were all wounded as the German plane had followed them and shot at them in the water. The Greeks used to visit them every day with food and drink but unfortunately two of them died of their wounds and had to be buried there. Eventually the Italians captured them and they ended up in Germany in a prisoner of war camp. Ken’s mother received a telegram which read, “Missing, presumed dead”. They had to live in terrible huts, were given poor food and had no clothing because in the Med they’d been in just their vests and shorts. I think they had one shirt between them which 46

they took turns wearing. Eddie, who was a bit of a daredevil, befriended one of the guards in the camp and persuaded him to let him out on a night. He would go into town and try to barter the Red Cross parcel chocolate for clothing. He was like that, Eddie, a bit of a daredevil. Back home during the war the sirens went off most evenings at six and you had to pack up and stay in the shelter all night until six in the morning. I’d get home from work, have a wash and Mam would have my dinner ready on the table, then into the shelter we went. The shelters ran in between the terraces on Hessle Road. One of them just had a few benches where you sat shoulder to shoulder with everyone else all night with nothing to do, and you certainly didn’t sleep. The other had some makeshift bunks and my mam would try to put some of our belongings on these during the day – like booking them really! – so that we could stretch out during the night and get some rest. In the morning you’d come out exhausted to see the chimneys down, windows shattered, floors covered with glass and soot everywhere. I’d help my mother to clean up a bit and then walk in to work where, often as not, there’d be the same devastation. We’d have to clean up the mess there also and stick a sign on the door “Business as Usual”. You couldn’t go anywhere without your gas mask. You know the huge mound in Costello playing field? There was an anti-aircraft gun placed there and we used to call it Big Bertha. You could hear her all over Hull when she went off. A mock-up of the docks was built near Paull to lead the German planes away from Hull. Once they hit an oil tank on the docks and the blaze could be seen as far as Scarborough. They frequently dropped landmines on the town – I remember seeing one caught in the overhead tram wires and there was a terrific landmine blast on the Boulevard. I got a perforated ear-drum during the war. The convoy that Ken had worked on in the Atlantic, protecting merchant ships bringing supplies to Europe, was hit after Ken left. After the war, everyone wanted better jobs but it wasn’t easy. Ken decided to go back into fishing and he stayed with that for fifty-one years. We got married in 1948, when I was 22, at St Mark’s Church in Gipsyville. There were no shoes to be bought and clothing was very scarce. I saved enough coupons to buy material and my friend made the dress for me. I borrowed a veil and managed to find some peep-toe canvas shoes in Woolworths – 6d each of course – and I silvered them. We had to make our own earrings of course. We were so poor in the beginning that we had to live in a Nissen hut on Jenny Brough Lane in Hessle. The Army was finished with them so the Council took them over and let them out to couples and families who 47

needed somewhere to live. Some were made out of concrete, which were a bit drier and warmer, and they were kept for families with children. We had a corrugated iron one which was pretty awful, wild really. The ground was rough, it was damp, and of course there was no heating. Blackclocks and earwigs everywhere. If you put the kettle on you’d have to turn off the light otherwise the fuse would blow. The window was at the top of the wall and if you wanted to look out you had to stand on a chair, or a crate; orange crates was what we used at the start! We cooked on paraffin stoves with a glass bottle of paraffin hanging upside down over the pan. If you ruined your breakfast with paraffin then that was it for another while because everything was rationed. We both worked seven days a week full time to save up and eventually after two and a half years we got a flat in Anlaby where we lived for six years until we finally moved into our own house in 1959. Because Hull was an embarkation point, a lot of trucks and tanks passed through the city to get to the docks. I remember Boothferry Road – you couldn’t see it for tanks. There were lots of different nationalities here too – the Free French, the Americans came a bit later, and of course the Canadians were at Brough. We all met in the dance halls. There was no alcohol allowed – you just got a cup of tea and a bun. Some of the lads went out to the pub for a beer in the break. A lot of the girls sailed off the America to marry their sweethearts, the GI brides we called them. They thought they would be film-stars. You could see them in their pretty dresses and fur coats on deck. Of course a lot of them ended up in the middle of nowhere, or found out that the men they loved were already married. Many of them came back home again.

Kath McKay

“Inside the Stasi Museum” In House 1, Ruschestrasse 103, busts of Marx and Lenin in the foyer, off white walls. In Erich Mielke’s office, a 1960s wooden desk, wood-panelled cupboards, clunky black telephones, a tape recorder, a shredder. His bathroom, kitchen, bed. On other floors, a filing cabinet with 58829 scrawled; a plastic bag of unrolled audio tapes; an order form: Bestellzettal 24/1/79. Trails of wires behind glass. A scrap of paper with Durch das Militar. In specimen jars numbered and labelled, cloths scented with the sweat of interrogees, taken from chairs they were questioned on, topped by brown and green covers, now pinned to the wall. Bags of papers shredded by the Stasi: 85, 86, Berlin 22/8/88. One more year and my grandmother, who used to live in Prenzlauer Berg, would have been safe.

Kath McKay

Exhibition “Extraausgabee – !” Mass Media and War 1914-18, Vienna 2014 Untitled In the Prater area of Vienna in 1916, Children taken to the park “played war” in a trench specially dug for the offspring of soldiers. Four year olds squatted with wooden rifles and rat-tat-tatted at the unseen heads of the enemy. Carers were pleased that after their exertions, the children slept well. The book of “heroes” Calligraphers who had learnt their painstaking art over years wrote the names of German soldiers killed in the First World War, tracing out the lines in a medieval gothic script that mimicked each shrug of the shoulder, each turn of the head, each finger pressed on a rifle: Hans, Hermann, Rudolf, Werner, Wolfgang, Dieter. This side of the water names that could have been German were carved in stone: Herbert, Walter, Paul, Michael, Roland. Untitled Each country had a Kriegspressequartier, a War Press Bureau. Glorious victories, patriotic battles, unselfish sacrifice. Each country has a “black room” where they hide the photos the public were not allowed to see at the time. The solitary limbs, the face without an eye. Oldyoung men staring at nothing.

Battleground cinema Come, take a rest, watch battle scenes in our cinema tent. Handsome, healthy soldiers, marching for their country. Buildings blown up in one sweep. We will edit the film so that the battle is won. We will light the battle field not to be too bloody or messy. We will craft the narrative of war: beginning, middle, end. You will see that it is necessary to support this war. Your duty. You do not want to be different to your friends. Come, watch. Untitled A half-burnt bookshelf stands in for the critics of war. Nobody listened. Their books were set on fire. If in uniform they were shot. Our “connies” were kept in Richmond Castle, Dartmoor, Aberdeen. Families were spat at in the street. Hindsight is a wonderful thing. Still here Today, from the train near Brough, a ploughed field was full of seagulls, all perched equidistant from each other, as if in an art installation, squatting or pecking at the soil. The first day of autumn cold and rain. We drew up our collars. “This will go on,” we said. The train skittered past ovoids in muddy fields: “Still here, still here.”

Kath McKay

Specimens There were a lot of dead things that summer. A seal washed up in the Narrows, its body bloated like a slug, and the papers were full of people all over the North getting shot or blown up, as they settled into their car, or walked down steps from one area into another to buy cigarettes or crisps, or sat in the pub for a drink. And then there was the car crash. My friend Jinny and I had taken a notion to go up to the folk night at a pub in Kirkubbin. The bar looked like a public urinal, and was about as comfortless. Painted snot green, it had red leather banquette seating and a few bar stools, which meant most of us had to stand up. The Guinness tasted watered down, the beer was piss weak, the peanuts felt like they had been handled before, and the crisps were stale. There were a couple of country and western bands on that night as well as the usual folk musicians: some woman called Philomena Begley, and her band, the Country Flavour, alongside a local band. The older locals, swaying in time with the music, and staring glassyeyed, loved Philomena. All I could hear were words like “Mother”… “Lonely”... “Rambling”. Then she launched into “Truck driving Woman” –“my daddy taught me everything I knew/ and this woman’s gonna fill her daddy’s shoes”. People smiled in amusement. As if. Her band left the stage, and then the audience decamped to the bar and rushed back with full glasses. A teenage girl cleared her throat and sang a lament in Gaelic in a high pure voice. We stilled ourselves, not even lifting our drinks to our mouths. A local show band broke the spell, and soon people were up dancing and clapping. We carried on slurping and swallowing and tapping our feet and then we too were up and moving, and everything became fuzzy. At one point in the evening, a space cleared around an elderly couple as they inched across the dance floor. Bone thin, with sparse white hair, hers pulled into an untidy bun, his greased back from an almost translucent forehead, they held each other as if they might break. We didn’t know it then, but a fortnight later they would be dead. How we ended up with two young turds that night I’m not sure, but the lads sidled up to us, and bought us a drink and I suppose in the dim light they looked OK, it wasn’t like they were ugly or anything, and we were the youngest on the floor by a decade. They both had dark curls and blue- green eyes, not unhandsome the pair of them, but I’d heard them shouting and carrying on earlier, and the older men taking them aside 54

warning them. Yet it was the most natural thing in the world after the pub closed for them to offer us a lift home: the alternative a walk of eight miles along dark country roads, with the buses long finished, and there being no taxi firms for miles. Not that we would even think of getting a taxi in those days anyway, taxis were out of our league. The night would grow colder, and we’d be at the mercy of whatever drunken drivers went past. Better the devil you know. We got in their car. About a mile from the village, the driver, who’d been smoking and humming tunelessly, suddenly braked. There was a loud bang, the sound of stones shattering and I was flung forward, winding myself against the front seat. Jinny fell sideways and the door flew open, and then she was on the ground, moaning and crying, scratched and bleeding. “Jeezus,” said the lad. “That was close.” I unfolded from the seat, and creaked my neck, moving it gingerly from side to side. There was a grating sound, and a pain down the back of my left shoulder. The lad pushed the door open. The sudden cold hit me. The front wheels, surrounded by bits of wall, were in a ditch, the windscreen was cracked, and two curious cows lumbered up to us through the dark, staring with gentle eyes. Jinny was hopping round. The cuts on her leg weren’t deep. She was OK. “Good job we were so drunk,” I said to the driver. We didn’t know the lads’ names. He looked blank. “We were so relaxed we didn’t hurt ourselves much.” “Oh.” He nodded. With the aid of a torch, the driver’s mate inspected the dent in the front of the car. He shook his head. There were no marks on him. “I’ll come back for it tomorrow,” said the suddenly sober driver. “I’ll tell me da a cow ran out in front of it.” His mate snorted. Even me, no countrywoman, knew his da wouldn’t believe him. Cars were valuable in the country. “Only some old banger, sure.” The driver kept on, as if rehearsing his speech to his dad. “Insurance.” We ignored him. Jinny and I linked arms, and began walking, and the lads followed behind. The summer night was cool against my thin jacket. We were all sober now, Jinny and I in charge, the lads seeming much younger than us now, just lads. I knew we had the upper hand. They were scared of us, in awe. They’d never been out of the province in their lives, while we were other, from over the water. We weren’t stuck in 55

this place, like them. We didn’t have to answer to a father. After about half a mile, they began asking us questions: “What were the Beatles like?” “Did you know them?” I hinted that I’d met John Lennon, and mentioned “family connections”. It was like the year before when I went to the Soviet Union as part of my course, and young Russians asked me did we always have afternoon tea. I realized then I could make up any old shite. “Yes,” I told the Russians: “Earl Grey in a teapot, and home-made scones.” We arrived home at dawn and fell into bed. Two hours later the sun streaming through bare attic windows woke us. We were quickly up and out. I’d promised Jinny I’d help her down at the Marine Biology Station, labelling samples. Her PhD research was on creatures that lived between the grains of sand. She spent a lot of time at the edge of the lough in wellies, collecting samples, a lot of time peering into salt water, and filling specimen jars, or whirring sand around in a centrifugal spinner. When she wasn’t working she was always fiddling: planting up seedlings; collecting fungi; bird watching; snipping bunches of flowers. Now she rushed in and thrust a pile of sample jars and sticky labels into my hand. “Got to finish an experiment,” she said, and was off. I dutifully began writing out labels. I had a terrible headache, and my neck felt stiffer than the day before, so I was glad to do something mindless. In those days my writing was neat, legible, I wanted people to see what I meant. There was something soothing about the Greek and Latin words: nematoda, copepoda, polychaeta, gastropoda, rotifer, ciliate. I had no idea what any of the words meant, and I couldn’t grasp the idea of something so small you couldn’t see it, even though Jinny had shown me fantastic sci-fi creatures under the microscope, with their bugeyed heads, their segmented bodies and their curling tails. Quietened by the words, I wrote away. And then the phone rang, and there was a short, terse conversation. “Yes,” I heard her say. She handed me a waterproof. “Come on.” We piled into the Land Rover driven by Michael, her boss, a wiry man who said little. Pat, the round, red-faced boatman, joined us. He had a rolling walk, from his years on boats, liked a drink, and favoured pungent filterless cigarettes. Aidan, the new lab assistant, a shy and 56

muscular young man, made up the party. They threw ropes and ladders into the back of the Land Rover, and we were off. The day had started off sunny, but as we neared the coast the sky darkened, the temperature dropped and waves grew ferocious, with a wind off the sea. Sea mist hugged the rocky coast: it was difficult to make things out. Everything looked ghostly and insubstantial. I could imagine shipwrecks washing up on this shore. Word would travel that a boat had struck the rocks, and country people materialize from the isolated cottages around, milking the stricken boats after checking for survivors. Bloated bodies still turned up occasionally, driven by the tides, sometimes with a bullet in their head. We were collecting a dolphin: something bigger than meiofaunae, their usual specimens. “The coastguard saw it this morning when he was doing his rounds,” said Pat, directing. “Up this way.” We climbed over rocks encrusted with limpets and suckered with kelp, over dark green pools where small fish swam and crabs scuttled under stones. We trudged on. I regretted wearing plimsolls, and not the heavy duty boots of the others. Jinny had that look of the scientist on the hunt. I was just another pair of hands, with no specific knowledge, no noteworthy skills. “Storm’s coming.” Pat cupped his hand to light a match. He pushed his hood up. I felt the first gash of rain on my face. And then we rounded the point. The dead dolphin lay near the water’s edge, flurries of water moistening it as if to draw it back in the sea, its upturned side nibbled ragged. Blue grey, with a snub nose, a dribble of white chalk fell from its mouth, its dead eye stared. So still, so flat on the greyish sand, the sight winded us. We drew in breath and bowed our heads. Jinny’s specimens under the microscope were wriggly and alive. Here was a salty, sweetish smell. Seagulls squawked overhead. Then the others kicked into work mode: “Bottlenose dolphin,” said Jinny, circling it, making notes in a plastic covered notebook. In a quiet precise voice, Michael spoke into a small tape recorder, as if he was testifying in a court of law. Aidan took out a tape measure, and held out a length to Jenny. They put on gloves, and peered at the gash on the dolphin’s side. I stared at lashing waves, and imagined living in this place. Occasionally you’d hear of an old woman or man found wandering the roads, or clambering over rocks. Some said the sea drove you mad in the 57

end: that twice a day ebb and flow of the tides, the waves coming in, and the waves going out, no matter what. “We have to be quick, so,” said Pat, ever practical. “The tide’s turned. It’ll be coming in soon, sure.” So they covered the dolphin with a tarpaulin, and laid it on a board and roped it to the ladder, and Michael and Aidan hoisted it up between their shoulders and Pat gathered up the rest of the stuff. The mist hovered as we hugged the rocky cost. The rain grew heavier, soaking through my trousers. At one point, I fell behind, slipping and sliding, no grip in my inadequate shoes. When I lifted my head as they rounded the point and headed inland, I could see the whole funeral procession – Pat, like a stocky priest, ahead- Michael and Aidan shouldering the dolphin, Jinny at the rear. At the Marine Station, I left them to unload the land rover. We’d be falling over each other, and I had no skills to offer them. Reading Dostoevsky and Aristotle didn’t count. The dolphin would be put in the giant freezer, and the next day Jinny and Michael and Aidan would dissect it, making careful notes about their findings. I wondered why the dolphin had died. There’d been rumours of oil spills, a leaking fishing boat had limped into harbour and there’d been more dead seals up the coast. I’d overheard Jinny and her colleagues discussing mutations in meiofaunae. People said the paint the fishermen used to protect the underside of their boats was toxic to marine life. I’d thought of this coast as a haven from Belfast. But something was changing. I didn’t understand any of it. All I knew was that I wanted to be away from people. Everyone knew everybody here. They all had relatives in neighbouring villages, and news travelled fast. Going into a shop you exchanged stories as if they were tender. So I walked, out of the village along the lough road, enjoying the quiet. The lough coast was more sheltered, there was little traffic this time of the day and the water was restful on the eyes. Deceptive. I knew how strong its tug was. Every year a child drowned underestimating the pull of the tides. For now, each ebb of the tide uncovered more rocks, more land. All along this coast there were small islands like Cullen Island that could only be reached at low tide. I’d sit in the hide. It was a good viewing point for birds, a refuge for anyone cut off by the tide, and the few who canoed down the lough. There would be no one about. I turned down the wet pebbly path to the hide, and saw the outline of a man inside. No matter. I’d exchange polite greetings, make a show of looking at the lough’s birdlife, turn back. I was fearless in those days. 58

It was the driver from the car. He hadn’t struck me as the solitary type. Maybe his da had given him an earful and he was taking a moment. I relaxed, and we greeted each other as he stood at the hide entrance, friendly enough. “Come in,” he said. “Take a wee look at the seals.” So we sat in companionable silence watching the mottled grey mournful faces of the seals, as they swam with grace, and lumbered onto rocks. I stood up to go. I was ready for a bath, a cup of tea. “Thanks,” I said. There was a whiff of fresh salt from his direction, and I turned, drawn to him. We pulled each other’s clothes off, and clawed each other where we stood, and coupled: quick, sticky and desperate. Afterwards he wrapped his arms around me, and stroked my face with roughened hands and then draped his jumper round my shoulders and patted his coat on the floor, and we lay down. His body was white and bony. All anger and hardness gone, there was the look of a younger man on his face. He opened his mouth as if he wanted to tell me something, and then a great tenderness surged over me and we ran our hands up each other’s legs and arms and kissed each other all over. I must have dozed, for I came to chilled, and the smell of fresh salt had given way to the stench of rotting seaweed and the sickly sweet of the dolphin’s corpse. He had a bar of Cadbury’s fruit and nut with him, so we devoured it, fully dressed by now, looking out through the hide windows. We spoke about the weather, and the possibility of a record high tide. He zipped up my coat for me, saying the tide was on the turn, that we needed to leave, and patted me on the back, and then we walked off separate, home. In the pub that night Jinny and I drank whiskey chasers. I swallowed three before they made an impact on the cold. It was supposed to be summer, but I was chilled to the bone, and my neck still ached. A friend, Ben, was with us from Edinburgh. Ben had been schooled in England, and sounded posh, unScottish. After a while, the driver turned up, as I knew he would. There was nowhere else to go. He stayed in a corner with his mate, and then came over. I felt myself blushing. I still didn’t know his name. It seemed too late to ask now. I made small talk, enquiring about his car. He shrugged. “This here your fella?” He turned to Ben without acknowledging him. “No, he’s my friend.” 59

He gave me a look as if he didn’t believe me, and then something hardened in his manner, and he went back to his mate. “Probably thought he was in with a chance,” said Ben. I turned my body so that Ben couldn’t see my expression. My head was telling me that it was madness what had happened, the result of watching too many films: all those crashing waves, all that Celtic mist. I wasn’t from here; we didn’t have anything to say to each other. The village would close around us. The lad returned, well tanked up this time. He kept one hand in his pocket, and I started. I knew nothing about this man, or his connections. If he thought I was playing with him, I had no idea what he’d do. Up in Belfast people were getting shot or abducted, bundled into cars. A body was laid out at the foot of Cave Hill. There were rumours of witchcraft and Satanism. He smiled at my discomfort, and spoke softly so that Ben couldn’t hear. “Tell your wee friend here.” I looked over at Ben, blinking in that mild mannered way he had. “Tell him not to bring himself in this here pub again.” “Aye?” “Aye.” He drew himself up to his full height. His breath smelt of beer and smoke. I wanted to laugh, but I kept my face poker. His hand pressed deeper into his pocket. “I’ll shoot him if he comes in here again, so I will. We don’t want any of his sort. English, you know.” I said nothing. I was from Liverpool, Jinny from Birmingham. Ben was Scottish as far back as he knew. Ben left the next day as planned. I told him nothing of the threat, and travelled up to Belfast with him and stayed there for a fortnight, going to the library each day, immersing myself in study, reading about Greek philosophers and the human need to create meaning. At night I dreamt of the dead dolphin. When I woke each morning, the room smelt of salt and rotting seaweed. After ten days I decided to go back down to the village and speak to the lad. I owed him that. In my women’s group, one girl had been talking about a man who had closed down on her after sex. I couldn’t forget that look on the lad’s face: open, hopeful, as if he might expect something different. I phoned Jinny and said I would be down the next day, Saturday. “OK,” she said. “I’m a bit busy though, you’ll have to amuse yourself.” 60

Was there a touch of frost in her voice? Then she softened. Jinny could never keep up a grudge. “We’ll go the pub. Oh, by the way, that lad who was driving came round the station asking for you. What would he want?” “Dunno.” “He’s never called here before. Is something going on?” She waited for me to speak. Down the wires, I could hear seagulls squawking. They’d be swooping into bins near the lough edge, carrying off bread crusts, hovering on the wind. If I told Jinny, she would go on about how it was OK for me just visiting, but she had to live in the village full-time, fit in. “Of course not,” I said. “I probably left something in his car. I’ll speak to him tomorrow. If he calls again, tell him I’ll be there after two.” Late that afternoon, while I was in the library reading about the suppression of desire, those lads were killed as their car took a blind corner too fast on the lough road, and ploughed into the elderly couple’s mini. Both cars ended up in the lough. The older couple were found, but bad weather meant the search was called off, and only resumed after a few days, when the tides would have carried the lads’ bodies to the head of the lough and back out towards sea several times. On Saturday I walked by the side of the lough with Jinny, watching the divers coming up empty. “People think water is magic,” Jinny said out of nowhere, as we tightened our hoods against the wind. “I read about an investigation once, when scientists found that the public believed that anything they dumped into water disappeared. That was the end of it, they thought.” I peered at strands of seaweed bobbing on the water. Nothing disappeared, not even the things you couldn’t see. They changed and mutated, were transformed. The two lads were found four weeks later by a fishing boat, their bodies bloated and nibbled by fishes, and pitted with scars from being dashed against rocks. I imagined them deep beneath the lough, with the glutinous dolphin, and the sightless seal, and the old couple, and all the people shot at their door as they put their bins out, or walked down the steps to McClure Street to buy cigarettes and cheese and onion crisps. You feel nothing, but there is unnatural quiet, and everything goes dark.

Maurice Rutherford

Life in a Day with AMD This January morning, bright and cold, where night had spread crisp hoar along the drive I almost saw it white, but heard its scrunch walking unaided to the waiting car, and guessed the driver’s face, confirmed at once by his “G’mornin’, Mate!”, said , not with grace, but gruff and warm and welcoming, the stuff of fellowship, and off we went again sorting the problems of a world we’d left suspended when he’d seen me home last week. Des dropped me outside M & S, “Take care!” I paid the fare I’d rounded up before and stepped inside the door where baskets wait to snap your fingers when steel handles meet; this time I won our fight, asked for the shelves where cakes would be and chose the Bakewell tarts whose use-by date, the girl read out to me, would see me through the week. I don’t now try to tackle tasks alone; I’ve learned to ask assistance when in need. It’s always there. Bold sun was prising off the lid of mist to open up the bay of Bridlington and peer at me from far across the sea when I came out again into the street; it challenged me to face its steely stare. Not one to turn my back, I set towards the harbour, passed its stacked-up lobster pots and glimpsed against the glare two cormorants splayed out to dry – or were they mooring bitts, and this a teasing slip into the past?

A bare two years ago, my Love and I would walk this harbour wall to watch the dive of cormorant or shag, her favourite birds, and count subaqua seconds till they broke through widening collars, with their catch or not; we’d marvelled at the unseen distance swum. Careless, to drop my guard. I felt again that pain of happiness revisited. I looked away to circumambulate a patch of ice, or something cold and dark. Two cups of coffee later, kindly words had helped fend off the black dog, freed my mind for further Singles shopping, mostly food, my thin white stick a staunch friend crossing streets. I caught the double-decker, sat downstairs close by a bell-push. Now I’m back indoors preparing vegetables, wastefully paring them twice in places, to be sure they’re clean, chopping them carefully to keep my fingertips intact for other chores. Today I’m cooking lemon sole, green beans I’d grown last summertime and frozen sliced, with Maris Pipers diced to help them crisp when oven-roast; I’ll do a roux, white sauce spiked with a dash of dill, then warm a plate. The table will be laid, the way it was, but not for two - how long can one pretend? Remember, yes, of course, I always shall. For company as I sit down to eat, there’ll be a Merlot, or a suave Shiraz.

These past few months, my kitchen’s broken out in spots: adhesive orange plastic humps I think their name is “bumpons” - placed to draw attention quickly to a favoured heat or washing programme, or to mark the point the dial on my microwave should stop before the porridge overflows its jug; another one’s strategically stuck above the porch door lock, to guide my key unhesitatingly into its slot. The dishes done, and doors locked for the night, relaxed, here’s when I’d write a line or two of poetry in HB pencilled draft, but after AMD hit both my eyes that pleasure seemed denied, till caring friends and family had badgered me to try a large-print keyboard with advanced PC. This sounded scary, so I backed away as “terminally dyscomputerate”. How doubting, pusillanimous – and wrong! I’m seeing, as I type, the screen’s black wall fill up with fluorescent yellow lines of letters one inch tall (or two, if wished) on this the first computer I have owned, which makes recording of these words a joy I’d thought forever lost. And that’s not all I’m now “on line”, with emails to exchange and website explorations, YouTube too! The phrase is hackneyed, but it’s true to say no day now offers me sufficient time.

There are no stairs to climb to reach my bed, nor do I have a god to hear my prayers, but every night, and in the mornings too my thoughts are for the opthalmologists whose monthly clinics hold my sight in check with swift injections, and my orisons go out to scientists, and â&#x20AC;&#x153;guinea pigsâ&#x20AC;? in human form, who pioneer the way for fortunates like me: thanks for this day, eccentric though my view of it must be. AMD : Age-related Macular Degeneration.

Geoff Blanshard

Antarctic Adventure Geoff Blanshard has been a standard-bearer for the Normandy Veterans Association of Hull for many years. He has also been involved with the Poppy Appeal in Hull for over 20 years. His career in the Forces took him to a number of different locations around the world. Here, he talks about his experiences in the Antarctic. “Join the Services and see the world”. This is very true when it is possible to change from over 120 degrees Fahrenheit in Borneo to 60 degrees Fahrenheit in the Antarctic in one year. A change from getting your knees brown in the sun and your feet cold and frostbitten in the Antarctic. The Antarctic secondment is for 18 months with the British Antarctic Survey, which is responsible for all scientific research and exploration in the British Antarctic Territory. The extent of the Antarctic region below 60 degrees South comprises over a sixth of the world’s surface and the continent itself is larger than the combined areas of Europe and the United States; the depth of the ice is up to 1,400 feet. Leaving Southampton in October on the R.R.S John Biscoe which is an ice-strengthened vessel belonging to the survey, we set off south calling at Montevideo for fuel and mail and then on to Port Stanley in the Falkland Islands. Here the survey had its headquarters where everyone is kitted out with everything that is necessary to last a winter on the bases further south. The R.R.S. Biscoe’s first port of call after Port Stanley was Signy Island, a small island in the South Orkneys which is the centre of biological studies in the territory. There we carried out hydrographic survey work. There was quite a funny incident there. Someone suggested that we should have penguin for tea, so one of the lads picked up the tent peg mallet and gave one of the penguins an almighty whack on its head. It just shook its head, looked up and walked away as though nothing had happened. We gave up on the idea of penguin for tea after that. Our next port of call was Deception Island. Rough seas were caused by the winds of the roaring forties and furious fifties which certainly lived up to their reputation, but as we went further south, icebergs and pack ice were encountered and our speed was considerably reduced. One day we only made twelve miles headway. Deception, a volcanic island in the South Shetlands was used as a base for the survey’s aircraft. 66

The aircraft fly south in the spring to carry out survey work and to put down depots for the day teams in the field. The next port of call was Argentine Islands which was my base where I was to install and run the new generators. Unloading began immediately, as the pack ice could come in and trap the ship or the ice cliff could break off. Eventually all the stores were unloaded and the ship left us to go further south. By mid-winter, June 21st, there were thirteen members on the base to carry on the scientific programmes. These included meteorology, with radiosonde balloon flight with radar wind tracking, also geomagnetic observations, information about the ionosphere and the ozone layer. During mid-winter the outside work was feeding the dogs with seal meat and filling the water tanks with snow. There is a continued darkness during the months of May, June and July, and to alleviate the boredom there were various inside jobs to be done. Every weekend, from twelve o’clock on Saturday, the cook had time off from his culinary labours and the unfortunate assistant cook on duty took over the cooking duties. When a man’s turn came round he always kept strictly to his previous menus. This was infinitely easier than spending the whole afternoon studying the cookery books with possible unfortunate results. Being a Yorkshireman, I decided to introduce to my companions a genuine Yorkshire Pudding, and, somewhat to my surprise, was successful at my very first attempt. Nervously opening the oven door, I fully expected to behold a doughy mass. Instead, the pudding had risen to the full height of the dish, a lovely rich golden brown. This unexpected triumph must have gone to my head, for the next time I was careless over the mixing and I think I forgot to add the eggs. Nobody ever saw that pudding for it left quite suddenly by the back door and went sizzling over the snow to be eagerly snapped up the ever hungry Husky dogs. On Sunday morning it was every man for himself. There was plenty to choose from – seal meat steaks, penguin livers in season and also their delicious eggs. Penguin eggs, oddly enough, will not stand boiling as the white does not coagulate but for omelettes they cannot be beaten. During the spring before the ice melts, there is depot-laying with the dogs and sledge which involves checking the summer depots ready for when the summer parties come to carry out their scientific work. It seems very strange that while travelling, even though the air temperature was minus 20 degrees Celsius, it felt very hot. With the sun beating down all day and night, the flat white surface all round made a very effective reflector which meant you could get your knees brown in the Antarctic too. 67

Contributors Mary Aherne writes short fiction and poetry and has had poetry and stories published in magazines and anthologies. She has edited and contributed to a number of Humber Writers’ collaborations: Hide, Postcards from Hull, Under Travelling Skies, Slipway and Sketches, Dispatches, Hull Tales and Ballads. She teaches Creative Writing at the University of Hull. Cliff Forshaw’s latest collection is Vandemonian (Arc, 2013). He has held residencies in Romania, Tasmania, California and France; has twice been a Hawthornden Writing Fellow, and won the Welsh Academi John Tripp Award. Cliff is a founder member of the Humber Writers and the only one to have contributed to all of their collaborations. He has also made three films for previous Humber Writers’ projects: Drift, Under Travelling Skies and Slipway. His paintings and drawings have appeared in exhibitions in the UK and USA. He teaches at the University of Hull. Ray French is the author of The Red Jag & other stories and a co-author of Four Fathers. His two novels, All This Is Mine and Going Under have been translated into several European languages. His story “Migration” was published in Best European Fiction 2013. He has just completed his third novel and teaches at the University of Hull. Kath McKay published Telling the Bees (Smiths Knoll) in 2014. A further full collection is forthcoming from Wrecking Ball Press. Her first poetry collection Anyone Left Standing won the Poetry Business competition. Her stories have been anthologised, published in magazines and broadcast, and have gained Arts Council and competition awards. She has also published a novel, and has written articles on short story writers Tim Winton, Flannery O’Connor and Ron Rash. She teaches Creative Writing at the University of Hull.

Maurice Rutherford, born in Hull, spent his working life in the ship-repairing industry on both banks of the Humber. And Saturday is Christmas: New and Selected Poems was published in 2011 by Shoestring Press. His pamphlet, A Flip Side to Philip Larkin, was published in 2012, also by Shoestring Press. Malcolm Watson is an artist living in Hull. He was encouraged to continue writing poetry by Philip Larkin while reading for his first degree in English at the University of Hull. He has been widely anthologized and has won prizes in many competitions including in the National Poetry Competition of 2006 and 2008. He won first prize in the Basil Bunting Awards 2010, first prize in the Stafford Poetry Competition 2011 and first prize in the Cardiff International Poetry Competition in 2011. In 2012, Malcolm won first prize in the Larkin and East Riding Poetry Competition and in 2013, won first prize in the Wigtown Poetry Competition.

Acknowledgements A number of Cliff Forshawâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s poems have been published in Acumen, The Common (online, Amherst, USA), Horizon Review and Poetry Wales. Artwork on the cover and opening pages, and on pages 29, 43, 49, 53, 68, 69 and 72 is by Cliff Forshaw. Artwork before the Contents page and on pages 8, 11, 13, 16, 17 and 18 is by Malcolm Watson. Designed by Graham Scott at Human Design, Hull. Printed by Wyke Printers, Hull.

INCOMING This anthology features work by Mary Aherne, Cliff Forshaw, Ray French, Kath McKay, Maurice Rutherford and Malcolm Watson. With contributions from members of the Normandy Veterans Association, Hull.