Brief Encounter
Your Daddy's off to his training,
there's a war on, you must not cry,
they said when he left on a troop train.
Training-war-train-do-not-cry
baffled my three-year-old mind.
Three years with a few brief encounters
when he returned home on leave
shrouded in battledress khaki
apart from his boots. They were black
like Lancaster's soot-soiled stone-work,
sky split by searchlights at night,
sleep nightmared by air-raids and sirens.
On our brief encounter before D-Day
at my aunt's home near calm Windermere Lake
evening's candle and lamp-light
glowed warm in my mind.
We left Windermere station together
but my father would stay on the train
on his way to a Normandy beach.
At Lancaster we would leave him: life's colours
greyed-out in my mind.
Before then the train stopped at Carnforth
where tea-ladies sought out the soldiers.
With a smile one handed my father
a jam jar of golden brown tea.
Good luck, safe return, she wished him: dead colours
revived in my mind.
Carnforth tea-ladies long departed.
Who cares today for our soldiers?
Or their families' once living colours
greyed-out in their minds?
Your Daddy's off to his training,
there's a war on, you must not cry,
they said when he left on a troop train.
Training-war-train-do-not-cry
baffled my three-year-old mind.
Three years with a few brief encounters
when he returned home on leave
shrouded in battledress khaki
apart from his boots. They were black
like Lancaster's soot-soiled stone-work,
sky split by searchlights at night,
sleep nightmared by air-raids and sirens.
On our brief encounter before D-Day
at my aunt's home near calm Windermere Lake
evening's candle and lamp-light
glowed warm in my mind.
We left Windermere station together
but my father would stay on the train
on his way to a Normandy beach.
At Lancaster we would leave him: life's colours
greyed-out in my mind.
Before then the train stopped at Carnforth
where tea-ladies sought out the soldiers.
With a smile one handed my father
a jam jar of golden brown tea.
Good luck, safe return, she wished him: dead colours
revived in my mind.
Carnforth tea-ladies long departed.
Who cares today for our soldiers?
Or their families' once living colours
greyed-out in their minds?
The impetus for Brief Encounter was getting out of the train at Lancaster, leaving my father behind with his jam jar of tea from the famous Carnforth tea ladies on his way to occupied Europe. We had done the rounds of the family to say what could have been his last goodbyes. As a five-year-old I rated this, like all his previous homecomings on leave, as brief encounters which would dwindle to none until he was demobbed in 1946. But - Hey! He got back didn't he - changed but well enough to keep his wife and family, unlike those and their families who even now need the support of service people's charities. Carnforth Station was the setting for the 1940s film, Brief Encounter.