TO MARK THE OCCASION, A NEW POEM BY PAM AYRES

DOWN THE LINE

Down long-forgotten railway lines and over broken bridges Came the young men, From vanished stations with frilled eaves, past coal yards and sidings, Over points switched by signalmen unseen, They came from valleys green, From blackened cities mean, To battlefields obscene. We ruined tracks that run below, We saw them go, we saw them go, Don’t let them hear the song of the track, The clickety clack, the clackety clack, You won’t come back. Drawn like single threads to form a cable, From factories and shops, from farm and stable, Football teams and banks and streets entire, Through cuttings deep and scarred by summer fire, Through tunnels dark, embankments steep, to face the threat, To learn the ways of rifle and of bayonet Hands which held the reins and steered the plough, Must carry out more bloody service now, Make hard the heart and subjugate the will, To fire the bullet, stab and choke and kill, For men, our country must more deeply delve, Now some are fifty-six and some are twelve. You mothers on windswept platforms, crippled by the gash of fear, Go home. You aching sweetheart bent and crying for your young man, Go home. You have shared a last embrace. Hold it tenderly, remember it, safeguard and cherish it, For it must last a lifetime. And pity the straight-backed fathers, who weep alone. Over continents this was enacted, Young men from their loving homes extracted, Faces white and yellow, brown and black, Believing that, one day, they would go back. In haunted carriages I see them yet, Khaki-clad, with kitbag, cigarette, Through dim-lit panes they see me, far below, I look into their eyes and watch them go. They weren’t to know, as they travelled the lea, The hideous scenes they were going to see The flame, the gas cloud drifting, pale, In Ypres, the Somme and Passchendaele. Carved names that crumble soft away, In churches and on crosses grey, At cenotaphs where poppies fall, Embrace the life denied them all. In hamlet soft, and city loud, I still the clamour of the crowd, And mourn them from this heart of mine: The soldiers, sailors, airmen fine, The boys who travelled down the line. Pam would like to dedicate these lines to the memory of her great-uncle Alfred Ernest Ridley, who lived in Uffington, Oxfordshire. Alfred fought in the First World War and was so badly injured by a bomb in Mesopotamia, present-day Iraq, that a metal plate had to be inserted into his skull. For the rest of his life, like many thousands of others, he endured ‘shell-shock’. This poem will be included in Pam’s next collection, which will be published by Ebury Press in 2019.