1942 As A School Boy.

A Memory of Lower Heysham.

It is seven o’clock in the morning
and the bugler is sounding reveille
to wake the men from their bed,
the battalion are camped in Heysham head,
towards the cookhouse the soldiers do lurch
the noise is so deafening,
It will wake the dead in Saint Peter’s Church.
The peaceful gardens of paradise
are now despoiled by a long line of infantry men
all lined up and so precise.
Some of the men have gone to church to pray
and the others have gone to play football at Half Moon Bay.
Gone have the monkeys and the parrots, and in their enclosure
the miscreants are now peeling potatoes and carrots.
The penny arcades are no longer there,
No longer the man with the dancing bear.
The P.E. instructors run with their men to the beach
where the waves crash and the seagulls screech,
and on the slipway by the solitary vending machine
stands a retired merchant seaman
with a periscope captured from a German Submarine .
“For the price of a penny piece
You can see in the hotel windows half a mile to the east.”
And with these words ringing in my ears
I vow to return in later years.
Eric Brook.
, taken from memory,

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