He met his Dad for the first time when
His father came marching home,
After the war to end all wars
From London through to Rome.
He’d never seen him before he stooped
As if to pluck out a thorn,
And asked his Ma in his army suit,
‘Just when was the young one born?’
He hadn’t been home for five long years
And Jeremy then was four,
He constantly seemed to be adding up
The years that he’d been at war,
His Ma would say, ‘He’s a miracle,
Young Jeremy went full term,
I carried him for a year,’ she said,
‘It must have been wartime *****!’
Then his father growled, and his mother howled
As he placed her on his knee,
And running his hand on sacred ground
Said, ‘all this belongs to me!’
His mother cried when he said she lied
In the years of his growing up,
And treated him, apart from the rest
When he called him a ‘scoundrel’s pup.’
His father clung to his Khaki suit
It was washed and pressed each week,
‘You never know when they’ll call me up
If this treaty doesn’t keep.’
He worked back down in the coal mines where
He’d emerged to answer the call,
Black from coal like a demon’s soul
But he’d gone, to fight for them all.
But Jeremy never saw him smile,
He never could do enough,
The others would go on trips the while
But Jeremy got a cuff,
‘What have I done,’ he’d often say
As his father sat and yawned,
‘Don’t come bothering me today,’
And mutter of ‘wartime spawn.’
The years went on and the son had gone
To live on his own, nearby,
But always came to visit his folks
Each month, till the one July
He came around to the house and found
That the dust his father choked,
Was sat so deep in his lungs that he
Had suffered a massive stroke.
‘Your father’s down in the hospital,
He might not ever come out,’
His mother cried, while his brother, Clyde,
‘He’s all washed up,’ he’d shout.
The others wouldn’t go visit him
They had much too much to do,
So Jeremy took his favourite book
To visit him in Ward 2.
His father sat in a wheelchair there
And he looked up in surprise,
‘Nobody’s come to see me, lad,’
He said, with tears in his eyes.
‘Why, of all people, would you come,’
As he helped him into his cot,
‘What do you think, you silly old man,
You’re the only Dad I’ve got!’
And he read to him from his favourite book
And he sat and held his hand,
And the years of hurt that disconcert
Lay buried in No Man’s Land,
For the feeling came back in his limbs
As the father did atone,
And Jeremy came, the spawn of war,
‘Come on, I’m taking you home!’
David Lewis Paget
