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1. Pre-octu, Wrotham,

Wrotham’s a famous waste of time:
Two weeks’ driving and maintenance —
hardly enough and, anyway, infantry officers
aren’t allowed to drive.

It’s just a transit camp. These old-iron
double-declutch fifteen-hundredweights
are meant to keep us busy, and they do.
My instructor fears my driving, and he’s right.

And now our draft is picked for time in India.
I cough, and the doctor discovers there’s been
of course a cock-up: I should have been Grade Three.
Chronic bronchitis, but somehow I’m right now.

Is it the doctor, or was it that Dover air?

2. Dancing to Victor Sylvester

Off to a couple of days of Mersey fog, and then
entraining back again. Back in London,
our billet’s a convenient Baker Street hotel.

This is the big city of illustrious names,
punctured by sudden bangs. I dance
in the Nuffield Club in Leicester Square.

Across the floor, above her khaki collar,
I spot warm eyes I know can feel and think.
And now she’s in my arms. She's plump and warm,

a person through the khaki, with breasts and breath.
A year of scratchy blankets without sheets
has led me to be foxtrotting with softness.

3. Escaping Curfew

Is love a coward? Her celestial flesh
is daunting. I feel her shoulder

touching mine, as we watch Gielgud’s
dashing Hamlet in the Haymarket.

Ours is a love of blackout and big bangs, kisses
like strawberries and cream, but where to go?

In a restaurant where they serve just salads
we remember ourselves and forget our curfews.

And yet she climbs in by a regular window,
and the sentry at my hotel door has somehow gone!

I tiptoe up stone stairs in army boots,
lie on my creaking bed and breathe relief.

So is this history? We move in
clockless dimensions where miracles happen.

4. Unidentified

We ask no questions and are told no lies.
She comes from Austria, and is Jewish, I guess.

Like her, I have no past, I have no relatives,
and any future’s hypothetical.

She does have friends: a naval officer,
outside a London club, notices, I notice,

how we’re together. As for me,
I’m a prince with a white flash,

no longer an ignorant provincial boy.
My blackout's complete.

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