Boxing Day Seventy Years on

I'm thinking of my Taid today, my grandfather, Jim Honeybill who, seventy years ago, will have spent the day getting ready to leave Malta with MV Ajax, in the company of the Sydney Star, Cty of Calcutta and Clan Ferguson, accompanied by Force K and heading for Egypt.

I expect he will have been relieved to get back to sea. They been on Malta since the end of September and had been bombed for most of the time. The Ajax was hit by a bomb on Christmas Eve and sailed with a hole in her stern.

And on board the Sydney Star was Tom Neil of 249 squadron who was very happy to be on his way. He writes in Onward to Malta


Everywhere was a hive of industry, there was a vibrant air of tension and preparation, a new experience for me, as, although I had been to Valetta many times before, I had never been in the centre in the Naval dockyard and so close to the business end of Grand Harbour. All the vessels looked worn and tiredly travel stained with peeling paintwork and rust streaks everywhere, their guns starkly in evidence and already elevated skywards like a thicket of grey sticks…..
We learned that four merchantmen, one of which would be our home for the immediate future [the Sydney Star], were refrigerator ships normally employed on the London-New Zealand run. There would form the nucleus of a convoy and, accompanied by at least the bulk if Force ‘K’ would be making a swift and desperate dash for Egypt….
Within minutes, several of the destroyers [Arrow, Lance, Lively, Gurkha, Foxhound and Nestor] alongside us began to glide slowly towards the entrance of Grand Harbour and tremors beneath the deck indicated that we were abut to follow. We were off. After seven months in Malta. Of my route and what lay ahead of me, I had not the slightest idea, nor did I care very much. I was going home… Nothing else mattered.

Stateside - Jehanne Dubrow

Stateside

This was one of my finds of 2011. I can’t quite remember how I came across the book, not in a bookshop that’s for sure. It was undoubtedly somewhere on one of my rambles round the internet. I often castigate myself for spending time browsing, hopping from link to link, then realising how much valuable writing time I’ve lost. In this instance it as well worth it.

Stateside is by an American poet, Jehanne Dubrow and is her third collection. Her husband is in the US Navy and these poems deal with her experience of those of other wives who are left on shore when the men go to sea. The second part of the book is thirteen poems of Penelope waiting for Odysseus including the poem Instructions to Other Penelopes

spin what you can from his absence a shroud
a crotched throw in indigo and red.

The third and final part of the book takes a long hard look at what happens when they do come back and how difficult that can be too.

These are poems to read over and over again, to savour. I would hope they have been and will be picked up by people who would not normally read poetry. They certainly deserve a wider audience as well as those of us who don’t let a day go by without some poetry.

I came to them when I had just fully embarked on my Malta poems and was writing about the father (my Taid) away at sea during the war and the little girl (my mother) waiting at home in North Wales. I would go back to Stateside for inspiration when I was fretting about whether to go on, whether it was worth it.

My favourite poem in the collection is Secure for Sea the first one I found on-line. It also opens the collection and here is part of it.

SECURE FOR SEA

maritime terminology

It means the moveable stays tied.
Lockers hold shut. The waves don't slide
a metal box across the decks,
or scatter screws like jacks, the sea
like a rebellious child that wrecks
all tools which aren't fastened tightly
or fixed.