THE TRAIL BENEATH THE YEARS
(Farewell to Africa)
It was when the grind and grumble,
Of those wagons passed this way,
The colour-sergeant’s bark was never meek,
The sighing strain of steel,
That was bound fast to the wheel,
Was melody to rumble and to squeak.
The British Merchant Navy freighter Fiscus, 4,815 tonnes and built by W. H. Seager & Co. loaded a cargo of steel ingots, lumber and a deck cargo of crated aircraft parts in Canada and sailed from Three Rivers to Sydney, Cape Breton in Nova Scotia. There she joined up with the 35 ships making up Convoy SC-7, which left Sydney, Canada on October 5, 1940.
Death and Transfiguration is neither poem nor soliloquy. The hour of midnight had long struck when my thoughts asked the question, what is it like to die? I was alone, the background to my whimsical notions was Richard Strauss’s musical-poem, “Death and Transfiguration”.
Culture and art in the German Third Reich achieved an unprecedented and incomparable level of perfection. Porcelain of the Third Reich includes ceramics inspired and created by craftsmen of a standard that are unlikely to be experienced ever again.
Traditions, records and extraordinary ‘valentines.’
The oldest valentine in the world.
There is a legend that the very first Valentine card in the world was written by Saint Valentine before his execution. But the officially registered love note, dated February 14, 1415, belongs to the Charles, Duke of Orléans, who wrote love letters to his wife while he was in the Tower of London. This Valentine is now kept in the British Museum.
Helen Duncan was a Scottish medium who held spiritual séances during World War Two. During one of her November 1941 séances, she spoke to a sailor’s spirit.
FIRST HAND ACCOUNT: As a serving British seaman in the Merchant Marine, neither I nor my shipmates were flippant of ghosts on ships and ghostly vessels or strange supernatural happenings.
Each year, Michael Walsh, the people’s poet, receives thousands of tributes from romantics and he has thousands of social media admirers. You feel as though Michael through her verse embraces you. When you finally place your book down on the bedside table you glow from the effect of his sentiments being in perfect harmony with yours.
As an eleven-year old schoolboy I often travelled on the Overhead Railway (the Dockers Umbrella). From the windows of the rickety train’s carriages windows one (or in our case several schoolboys) enjoyed an unfolding panorama of docks and ships loading and loading in the many docks.
We have come a long way since 1960 when the censor’s dead hand was lifted off the D. H. Lawrence novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover. I am not surprised that distinguished English author first considered calling his literary book Tenderness. The lovemaking between Lady Chatterley and her gamekeeper lover Oliver Mellors was sensitively portrayed. The language used was typically rustic without intending to shock.
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