Poem My Longest Day

War memorial – Preston city centre, Lancashire

Poem My Longest Day

Written to commemorate the 6^th June 2024 80^th Anniversary of the Normandy Landings.

Like shells bombing down on the beaches

A deadly bombshell reaches

Across time from Forty-Four to Seventy Eight

To the anniversary of the famous Normandy landing date

A message sent me home on unexpected leave

Unaware of the tragedy that I would soon begin to grieve.

All I was told was that my Dad had been taken ill.

The class sounded silent, and time seemed to stand very still.

I got home to find he wasn’t ill, but dead

My own D-Day, when the D Word was not being said

As though breaking it to me gently would spare me some of the pain

But I said he was dead and begged the rest of the family explain

What had happened, trying to take stock

Already reeling in a state of shock.

My dad had been out alone having breakfast at his favourite café in Town

When he clutched at his chest as if shot, and instantly fell down

A blood clot bullet had slammed into his heart.

Mouth to mouth resuscitation had failed to restart

Him, so like the families of those who fell at Normandy

News of his fall struck like shellshock on me and the rest of the family.

I grew up that day. My childhood died with my Dad

I didn’t just end up feeling terribly sad

I was spiralling into full on depression and despair

Told that I was the man of the house now, and that I had to care

For everyone I just wanted to desert and run, like a coward under fire

I left school too stressed and agitated, so no employer would hire

Me, and like many returning soldiers, I was unemployed.

Books, beer and self-loathing were the only things I enjoyed.

I had no medals, no glorious heroics to my name

I felt useless and as if I’d brought my family nothing but shame.

In consequence and as a result

I retreated into a mysticism cult,

Blindly following the orders of a self-appointed messiah

Many former friends saw me as a social pariah.

My guru gave orders I followed without question

Totally brainwashed, open to suggestion

Like the Nazis who thought Hitler the source of their salvation

Until I came to my senses and achieved my own liberation.

Would Dad have hated me for joining the cult in the first place?

Instead of helping my family I was a selfish disgrace

Or would he be proud of how I broke myself free?

Writing my verse, gaining my academic degree.

My Dad was born just too late to sign up and fight in the war

He wished he had gone and read every war book he ever saw

But he remains my hero, cruelly taken away

On the thirty-fourth anniversary of D Day.

Now, eighty years on, we remember again

The many brave men who fought to obtain

Freedom and liberty, ending Fascist and Nazi tyranny.

Many fathers and sons fell to guns and mines every step of the way.

Let’s never forget to salute their bravery on 1944’s more famous D-Day.

War Memorial, Cheadle, Manchester

Photos taken by me.

Arthur Chappell

Review – Doctor Who – Boom

Spoilers for those who have not seen the episode yet.

Though flawed it was certainly a massive improvement on both RTD season openers – it was genuinely tense though it got absurdly over-sentimental in the end and the tube of dead dad seemed to change hands at one point (not the Doctor holding it).

Dalek, FAB Cafe, Manchester

The Doc and Ruby were somehow appropriately dressed without knowing what planet they were on or that there was even a war going on until the Doctor stepped on the mine.  He stood like a stork for an absurdly long time. I can’t stand on one leg for a minute without wobbling.  Ruby told to watch where she stepped seemed to stare right ahead of herself most of the time she walked to the Doctor, and everyone scrambled willy nilly round the cliff top and base regardless of the obvious mine threat. 

Lots of valid digs at capitalism, the arms race and religion, though The Doctor both dissing faith and encouraging it was inconsistent. Obi-Wan Dad went off to tell the bishop they were fighting nothing but the bishop never came back with him.  The ambulances looked like they could be pushed over.  So Ruby is over 4,000 years old and her snow trick looks likely to recur every episode. Yes, the kid running on a battlefield was stupid and wondered how the Christian Soldiers had named the unseen enemy they had not seen anywhere. 

TARDIS, FAB Cafe, Manchester

The stop fighting and be nice to one another moral was simplistic and given the title was Boom, we got no boom.  Cue Marvin the Martian…… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9wmWZbr_wQ

The Doctor has convinced this handful of squaddies and precocious ten year old acting like she’s about five that they were fighting nothing. (That may be the worst child actor performance in anything). That needs to extend to the rest of the army as presumably the war is planetary and not localized.  The small cluster saved risk being done for disobeying orders, desertion and heresy if no one takes their emperor’s new clothes claim that they are fighting nothing seriously.    Also, The Doctor knows the arms traders have interfered with human activity over 200  years. Shouldn’t he be making a TARDIS call right to the heart of their operation? 

NB – He has actually taken down the arms traders off-screen as he refers to their destruction in a chat with Jack Harkness in The Doctor Dances. 

The dead dad is carefully packed in his transparent Pringles pack by the ambulance Susan Twist, but then just dumped on the ground rather than returned to his loved ones.   Instructed by the Doctor to find a rock Ruby climbs the cliff, but it looks like the whole landscape is rock and rubble and compacted sand.

“Everywhere’s a beach in the end’.  Looking forward to the tide coming in on the Moon. 

Was I alone in guessing there was no enemy five minutes in? 

A lot of good stuff too. The Doctor standing still for most of the episode after running round like a demented gazelle for the previous three appearances. It drew the action in, created claustrophobia and emotion for some very intense acting.  The companion not following his instructions to stay back is used brilliantly here with Ruby defiantly risking her life to hand him the counterweight rather than throwing it.  Ruby’s reaction to the alien sky, and later the squaddies being mesmerized by it too, as they finally see the beauty of the place after seeing only the smoke and flames of battle before. 

So the Doctor exploding would  take out half a planet.  So far his regenerations have been after deaths that have left him intact – the idea of Time Lords as walking atom bombs is fun.  Hang on, how many did The War Doctor/Daleks blow up at close quarter in the Time War footage we saw?  They didn’t take Galifrey out with them.

The mines migrate is the explanation of why the blind guy steps on one in a previously safe area.  The whole thing with laying a minefield is that your own side has to know the safe paths round or through it or be nowhere near it once it is in place – making and buying mines that can turn up randomly anywhere is a game of Russian Roulette.  Even the ruthless sellers should realise that dead buyers don’t come back to buy more – does no one ask for stats or reviews of success rates for armies using the weapons bought?

This was not the first episode in which the Doctor has stood on a landmine. He did it in Genesis Of The Daleks (Tom Baker) and again in The Tsuranga Conundrum where one detonates and renders the doctor and her (Jodie Whittaker’s)  companions unconscious without killing or maiming any of them. 

Photos taken by me.

Arthur Chappell

Film Review – Where Eagles Dare

Film Review – Where Eagles Doh!

I watched this at the cinema as a child an I loved it – this Xmas (2023) was my first full re-viewing and though still highly enjoyable it is also utter bollocks.

Why is Clint Eastwood’s US army ranger even needed on the mission? He has no specific task or skill they need. He certainly shoots a lot of Germans, and never once reloads his revolver.  Burton’s Broadsword gets most of the action, and the love of both of the leading women. Clearly they needed a US A-List actor to sell the film to the American market. 

Pub sign – The Footage, Manchester – Former Grosvenor Picture House cinema

The parachute landing in broad daylight, and making zero effort to hide the chutes, footprints, a dead body or other stuff on an assumption that no Germans travel the half mile from their castle, and that the snow will bury everything even though it isn’t snowing (all the snow and ice on the ground is already there – no fresh snow lands during the film).

The war time Mission Impossible team make lots of noise and fire guns all over the place. No one notices or investigates. 

They go to a crowded German bar, talking freely of their plans in earshot of everyone with zero effort to talk German or hide their obvious allied accents – no one suspects anything.   Is this an episode of Allo Allo?

Pub Sign – The Majestic (Ex-cinema), Macclesfield

Finally caught, Burton and Eastwood are sent off to be shot in the woods but kill the death squad and go back to the castle. No one notices them or that the men sent out to kill them are missing.

The final escape – the heroes set trip wire grenades on the road to drop trees on the pursuing German convoy. After the first car hits a wire, the Germans just drive on, falling for the same trick several more times.

The film pre-empted On Her Majesty’s Secret Service with its action scenes centred round an alpine cable car as OHMSS came out a year later. 

Still a fun and thrilling film though. 

Photos taken by me.

Arthur Chappell.

Book Review – Javier Cercas – Soldiers Of Salamis 2001 Bloomsbury Press.

Translated by Anne McClean

Spoiler alerts .

Book Cover for Soldiers Of Salamis, taken by me

Fiction that runs remarkably close to truth and plays very much with the idea. Many of the named historic characters are real and Cercas the author presents the central narrator as Javier Cercas too. 

Cercas in the novel, if not in life, is a struggling Spanish novelist, working in journalism reluctantly because his book career hasn’t taken off.  Given an assignment relating to the Spanish Civil War, he stumbles on the remarkable story of Sanchez Mazas, a writer himself, and a founding father of Franco’s fascist regime.  Mazas was captured by the Communists, and in the closing days of the conflict they had already virtually lost, they put Mazas in front of an execution squad, but they missed him, and he escaped into the nearby forests.  He was spotted by one of the search party, but the mysterious stranger who could have shot him on the spot or summoned other Fascist supporters, let him go, and told the others the area where Mazas was hiding was clear. 

Cercas sets out with some increasing obsession to learn the truth of what happened and why, realizing that many regarded the events as too old to matter any more (the book is set 60 years after the war), and others don’t want old wounds reopening.  Cercas is torn between tracking down survivors to interview and simply fictionalizing the gaps in his scant knowledge. 

This is as much about the writing craft as it is war story and warning against the attractions of right wing extremism. Both Cercas and Mazas are struggling authors. Mazas had some success but then fell into decline before setting out many manifesto ideas for Franco’s regime.  Cercas finds himself given hope of some literary success in rejecting his dreams of being a novelist for penning non-fiction.  

Ultimately, he meets Miralles, who may or may not be the man who let Masaz go alive, (a claim Miralles denies though evidence that he met Mazas at that time is strongly indicated by both men sharing a fixation on a particular Pasos Dobles song, Sighing For Spain).  Miralles has no desire to be seen as a living hero. He believes the only heroes in war are those who die on the battlefields. 

Much here is reminiscent of Sartre’s French classic Nausea. Both books are about how we don’t record objective history but subjectively create it.  The truth remains elusive, while the book makes it clear that Cercas (the novel’s author) is very much opposed to the fascists. In the middle section of the novel, Mazas is treated with some sympathy as we see his rise and fall within Franco’s power circle. I was reminded in many ways of Christopher Isherwood’s Mr Norris Changes Trains, about a despicable monster with charm and appeal. The closing portion of the book restores balance as we get a true sense of the struggle through the high likable Zorba-esque mischievous Miralles, who flirts outrageously with the nuns who tend to him in the retirement home and has Cercas smuggling cigarettes in for him while reflecting that the real heroes are those forgotten men (and women) no one remembers or writes about. 

A strong look at the creative process, and the effect not getting work recognized can have on a writer.  Mazas seems to have been driven to extremism from bitterness at his sense of his own genius not being as recognized as he wished.  Cercas adapts and changes what he writes and how he writes it, staying tenacious in his often seemingly doomed quest to uncover the truth. As a writer myself it is this side of the multi-faceted work that stands out. 

The cover art is a straight-forward photo of a serious-looking soldier in the Spanish Civil War.  The novel has been filmed, though the film apparently changes the gender of the narrator.  

Though they are currently in some Hiatus due to Covid, this book was kindly loaned to me by the University Of Central Lancashire (UCLAN) Language & Literature Department Worldwise Learning Centre Book Club group, for which I am very grateful. https://www.uclan.ac.uk/faculties/worldwise 

Arthur Chappell