MANY former students of English Literature at Glasgow University will remember the charismatic Jack Rillie.
Like so many of his generation he was caught up as a young man in the Second World War. His newly published diary of wartime experiences in Sierra Leone, In the Shadow of the Cotton Tree (edited by his grandson Alasdair Soussi, Mansion Field), includes various poems. Here is the final one, charting the difficulty and loneliness of adjusting to post-war life.
NOW IT IS OVER
Now it is over, I remember
Tuneless things, a fractured sentence,
Words a tide has strewn, the song
Winds make in the hollow bone.
I think of the night barrage
And the buffet of saffron flame,
The crucial jest when the air
Was pungent with fear.
And the single anonymous voice
Of the dying.
Now as I walk the long streets of peace
Where the old no longer welcomes
And the familiar is ghostly and the trodden way
Unwontedly galls the feet
I think of men who yielded compassion
In full measure, now all dispersed, or dead.
And men of my generation in cities
Wandering alone, learning to walk again,
To use glib counterfeits for love and kindliness
And many would be glad enough to be,
With friends, afraid again.
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