Flowers in the desert, wartime

Having dipped into these wartime letters* from my father to his girlfriend/fiancée/my mother, put them in order (finding there were about 420, less than I at one point imagined), finding interesting things ( – like the telegram my mother received asking her to marry him! and the  British/Welsh end spelled his name wrongly!), I have now started to see how it goes reading through, and typing out whole or parts sometimes.

Born in 1917, he was 22 when first in the army, and newly out from an academic university course, but  fit and athletic and practical to turn his hand to hard work and innovation.

It is so interesting to ‘meet’ him at such an age. He died suddenly when he was 51 and I was 19.

The early letters show the frustration of hanging about in Britain and hard work being changed and movements and orders without understanding, and having to accept. Things were probably in some turmoil, but it was obviously providing good training for a young man, and his correspondence with my mother seems to have been stimulating; she was a faithful correspondent, and a good ‘sounding board’ when he felt angry at injustice of poor discipline handlers.

The regularity seems to become a bit less when first overseas, in Egypt. I think work, driving long distances supplying, made things difficult. Towards the end of the war when he was in Burma and India there are far more. Maybe the postal service was better by then (many are on airgraphs, which are very small print and claearly photgraphs from being put on microfilm for transport), and also they were engaged by then!

I would like to share two little excerpts I have so enjoyed finding which reveal delight in beauty found in the midst of hard times and evil and destruction.

(18/2/42)… am writing this while sitting in the cab of a lorry in the middle of the desert.

I see a lot of the desert these days. But just here, the desert is vastly different from that which I have been used to.  True, it is unoccupied & devoid of crops, but it is covered with myriads of little yellow & light purpled flowers. It looks just like an English meadow in late spring. I can lie on my back in it and almost imagine I hear the sound of leather ball on willow bat. But, even more impressive than the sight of these flowers, is the wonderful scent they give forth, reminiscent of a rich field of clover  At evening the scent is almost overpowering. Yesterday I laid my blankets out to the sun, atop these very flowers, and last night I could not get to sleep because of the all-penetrating cloying odour of the blooms which hung about my bed.

Not far distant is the sea. The Mediterranean pounding on the shore. At night I hear its roar and can almost imagine myself in Aber (they had both been in university at Aberystwyth), listening to the Irish Sea battering against the prom. …

Nitght in Matruh    May 1942

Half the moon shines down on Egypt
Only half to touch the sands
making them a silver carpet
magic road to longed-for lands.
Just one half, but that sufficient
To turn to heaven this filthy hell,
To take away the stench and crudeness.
The moon, night’s water from the well
Fed my hunger, slaked my dryness
Gave the sand a silver mask.
Hid day’s foulness neath night’s beauty
And brought awhile the peace I ask.
Half the moon shines down on Egypt
Linking us though far apart,
One half here upon my body,
The other shines upon my heart.
There in Wales my dear where you are
Half the moon shines on my heart.  
                                 S. Ll. Awbery (Stanley Llewellyn Awbery, I'm not sure why his parents put the                                                             double 'l' in the middle of his name, it only sounds as a single'l'!)

*https://www.abctales.com/story/rhiannonw/delightful-momentous-task,
https://www.abctales.com/story/rhiannonw/starting-read-and-sort