Convoy - the tour

After the launch on Monday there appears to be no stopping Convoy now. It has taken itself off on a global tour with stops at the following blogs so far;

 Ruth Downie

 Judi Moore's Is Death Really Necessary

 Vanessa Gebbie

If you would like it to pay a visit to your blog then do get in touch.

Margaret Ann 'Greta' Davies, née Honeybill - 20th May 1933 - 5th April 1991

Today it’s the launch of Convoy in London on board HQS Wellington but I’m also remembering my Mum who would have been eighty. She grew up during the second world war and a number of the poems in the book are in her voice. She always encouraged me to write even at times when she wasn’t that keen on what I was writing about, including my first poem which was published by Faber. She was delighted about the publication but the rather teenagery poem was written from the point of view of an anorexic. I think however she would like Convoy and would probably agree that it was time we recognised the wartime contribution of merchant seaman like her father.

She left North Wales for London in the 1950s to train as a nurse, met my father and got married.

The wedding had to be delayed as her Dad’s ship was stuck the wrong side of the canal during the Suez crisis and she wanted to wait until he was home.  She lived in Norfolk and then Hampshire and worked as a primary school teacher in Salisbury. This was her ideal job as she loved small children and wasn’t bad at dealing with older ones either, even when they turned into stroppy teenagers.

Story of Mum

Today I want to give a mention to  Story of Mum a wonderful website which is the brain child of Pippa and Penny Best and many mothers. This is a place for mothers to be creative (even if you only have five minutes) and to share their stories, support each other and to have fun. It is quite unlike any other mothers’ spaces on the internet.

The website includes a poem based on the idea of a Kenning which is growing line by line. At Milton Keynes Art Gallery Project space there is currently a touring exhibition Story of Mum: mums making an exhibition of ourselves. It is a chance in real life to see all the things that mothers are capable of and this is where I joined the project. I was asked to ‘curate’ a poem based on the giant collaborative poem already on the website and to read it at the launch which was held on last Friday. 

It was a glorious evening with inspiring stories from five women followed by me reading the Kenning and also sharing a poem about my own mother. I just wish Story of Mum had been around when my own children were smaller.

The touring exhibition will move to Penzance in September and then to the Photographer’s Gallery in London and in the future to New York and at each launch there will be a new poem.

What I live for - poetry

Today I’m taking part in ‘What I Live For’, an online event organised by author Satya Robyn. People like me all over the world will be sharing what gives their lives meaning.

In Satya Robyn’s novel ‘Thaw’, Ruth gives herself three months to decide whether she can find a reason to carry on living. There’s 75% off the kindle version today (99p / $1.49) – read more here.

In my case apart from the obvious family and friends is poetry. Reading it, writing it and sharing it, so much so that a day without some poetry in it seems like a wasted opportunity. Reading poetry is a pleasantly solitary activity but giving someone else a poem you've enjoyed doubles or quadruples the enjoyment. So many people have beed put off poetry through having had to study it at school or think you have to be clever to understand poetry and it is great to show them this is not true.

I love being given poems in return and infiltrating poetry into as many places as possible. I'm in a poetry readers group on Good Reads and also Josh Lanyon's group. He writes m/m romances but is, I suspect, really a poet at heart. So the group now has a Read me a poem thread and thanks to the Scandinavian members of the group I've been introduced to poets I would not otherwise have encountered; Tor Jonson, Saima Harmaja, Eeva Kilpi, Karin Boye, Olav H Hauge and Eeva-Liisa Manner. 

Lieutenant Commander Roger Percival Hill, DSO, DSC – 22 June 1910 – 5 May 2001

I could simply suggest that in order to find out about Roger Hill you go away and read Destroyer Captain: memoirs of the war at sea 1942-45. This covers his time in command of the destroyers Ledbury, Greville and Jervis and he says in the introduction

“As far as I know, and memory can play tricks, everything in this book is true… I have tried to tell the story as it happened and as I saw and felt it at the time and without hindsight.”

Roger Hill had a tough war.  Having taken command of H.M.S.Ledbury in January 1942 the first operation was taking part in the Russian convoy PQ17. I’m not going to dwell on that particular convoy but it is evident from his book and the interviews he gave about the subsequent convoy that

“I can never forget how they [the merchant ships] cheered us as we moved out at full speed to the attack and it has haunted me ever since that we left them to be destroyed.” p58

In August 1942 the Ledbury was one of the vital ships, which took part in Operation Pedestal to relieve Malta. I use Roger Hill as the narrator for the Operation Pedestal poem in Convoy as he covers the operation in depth in Destroyer Captain. He is charmingly self deprecating “If only I were a writer instead of a naval officer writing up a journal twenty years later for his family, how I would like to be able to describe the scene [arrival of the Ohio in Grand Harbour] and my feelings.” He goes on to describe Malta as

“a wonderful place to be. The bomb damage was severe, particularly in Valletta. But it was a front-line town and morale was high. Everywhere I was saluted -  one man almost knocking himself backward he did it so hard. p`103” 

After a few days respite the Ledbury, together with the Penn and Bramham – all three ships having brought the Ohio to Malta - sailed for Gibraltar on Tuesday 18^th August. The following day there is an incident which made me sad to read and which clearly distressed Roger Hill. The three ships are sailing in V-formation against air attack and there is the inevitable Italian shadowing plane. When it comes within range the Ledbury opens fire with Squeak and Wilfred, the twin guns mounted at the stern of the ship and the plane makes off over the horizon. Then Hill is told there has been an accident (p105).

“Let me know what has happened when it’s cleared up.” I said  - thinking perhaps one of the guns had jammed or a man had been hit by an ejecting cartridge case.

It was much worse: when the four guns had fired pointing almost exactly aft, the shock of the shell leaving Wilfred – the lower mounting – had caused a shell which had just come out of the muzzle of the right gun of Squeak to explode. The fuse must have been faulty. The shell had burst above Wilfred’s gun shield, and the deck and depth-charges were full of splinters.

Read, the officer candidate who had swum out to me with the rope [an earlier incident in the Arctic], was dead, killed instantly – and eight of Wilfred’s crew  were wounded – none seriously. It was a most bitter blow, after getting through everything that had been thrown at us, to lose a man this way.

I felt inexpressibly sad; I stood behind Squeak’s gun shield with my arm around the shoulders of the captain of the gun and the tears ran down the grooves in his sunburned face. We just stood there in misery together.

In the evening I put on my best uniform and read the burial service on the clanking vibrating quarter-deck and the crew and survivors stood around me as we slipped the body sewn in a hammock and weighted with shot, over the side.”

Convoy

Officially today was the day of publication for Convoy and so the book is going out into the world on a tide of good will. It and I have our supporters and cheerleaders and I’m particularly grateful to Jan Fortune of Cinnamon Press who believed in the book from its earliest stages

I am mindful too that although the poems are my work the stories that they tell are those of the men who fought for Malta. I hope that everyone who picks up Convoy and reads it will think of them; most of whom are no longer around to tell the stories themselves.

I took part in my first ever relay race today. I was one of those kids who was no good at sport at school and never picked for anything but this lunchtime at work I was part of a four person running team for my Faculty, each of us doing 1.1 miles. Convoy also feels like part of a link in a chain and I hope that everyone who reads it will remember the men in its pages and will pass their stories on.

Photograph taken by my elder son, Luke

Thomas Francis Neil, DFC*, AFC, AE

Tom Neil had already fought in the Battle of Britain when he was posted to Malta in the summer of 1941. He is well known for his books on his wartime experiences; Gun Button to Fire, Onward to Malta, Questions of Guilt (short stories), Flight into Darkness (short stories). His most recent book is Silver Spitfire published in February 2013. 

On 21^st May 1941 Neil and his fellow pilots from 249 Squadron were to fly off from H.M.S Ark Royal when they were within about five hundred miles from Malta; taking off in two batches; a flight of twelve led by ‘Butch’ Barton and the second flight of eleven led by Neil. Each group was to be escorted by a Fulmar and to fly just above the water, maintaining RT silence throughout the flight.

This may all sound straight-forward although for the pilots it was fraught with risk. Their route took them past Cape Bon on the northern tip of Africa. The Vichy French were known to be hostile and it was uncertain whether or not they might attack the Hurricanes. Then the planes had to avoid Pantelleria, Lampedusa and Linoa before locating Malta.

The first difficulty for Neil was a problem with the port wing. The gun and ammunition panels came adrift during takeoff and a piece of metal several feet in area was sticking up; effectively acting as an airbrake on the left hand side of the aircraft. In addition the paper and maps on which he’d written the courses for Malta and had tucked into the windscreen crevasse had been blown out of the plane. Faced with the choice of attempting to land back on the carrier without a hook and with two overload fuel tanks just waiting to catch fire or continuing, he decided to press on, following the Fulmar eastwards. After about half an hour of flying and once they were clear of the Cape Bon suddenly and inexplicably the Fulmar began to accelerate, pulled up steeply and disappeared into cloud.

 “One moment it was there, the next it wasn’t!… Apart from knowing that Africa was somewhere to the south and Malta approximately to the east, I could have been in Tibet.” 

He was also responsible for ten other pilots and only twenty years of age. He broke RT silence to ask if anyone else would like to lead the way to Malta and nobody volunteered. So Neil decided the only thing to do was to head back for Gibraltar. They came upon the fleet which they had left earlier and salvation in the form of a Fulmar, their Fulmar as it happened which took off from Ark Royal and waggled its wings to demonstrate that they should follow. Later they discovered the pilot had had to return to the ship after an oil pipe had burst spraying him with hot liquid and he thought his engine might seize up. By now they’d been airborne for more than two hours and had a further three and a half hours of flying to reach Malta.

“Malta, when it came, appeared with magical suddenness… in the form of cliffs… white and brown out of the mist and sea and were almost within touching distance… the island itself – ochre-coloured sandstone, glaringly bright, tiny brown stone-fringed fields the size of pocket handkerchiefs, , everything hot and lumpy and harsh to the eye…"

Luqa was being bombed as they approached but as they were running out of fuel there was no choice but to land anyway. Once on the ground a chap with a pipe climbed onto the wing to guide Neil explaining that they were in the middle of an air raid. Neil commented dryly that he had noticed and then a spark from the man’s pipe landed in his eye causing him agony. It was a brusque welcome to the island. 

Tom Neil spent seven months on the island which he wrote about in Onward to Malta. This includes an incident on 8th November 1941 involving Pilot Officer Pat Lardner-Burke which he kindly agreed I could use as the basis for two of the poems in Convoy. He wrote

"I feel honoured that you have thought fit to single me out as being rather special - which, of course I'm not!

I and readers of this blog may well disagree with that last comment.