I need to explain something about Kathy’s Grandad. He was one of those men, maybe you know them, who served in the second world war but never spoke about it. She knew he had fought in Burma, which was a particularly savage theatre of conflict. Kathy had asked him questions but he made an art of evading them, or subtly practiced selective hearing. She only found out his full role in the war after she snuck into his house and looked through his old papers.

She found two documents: a transcript of an interview, and an old letter. The first had been done by a Dr. Abilash Mukherjee of Aberystwyth University. Dr. Mukherjee was studying racial cohesion in the second world war. He wanted to speak to her Grandfather because he was a captain in the army – a much higher rank than her family had guessed. He was in charge of a mortar squadron. Dropping shell after shell after shell on the same Japanese position. Her Grandfather had deliberately avoided the parts of the questionnaire which dealt with violence. He must have felt responsible.

The second was a letter written to his old friend, who he appeared not to have spoken to in years. The detail she remembered most vividly from that letter was the description of a marker on a military map. Point 451. The point just before Rangoon that they never reached, because their squadron was recalled just before the Indian army broke through. Her Grandfather, in compact and neat handwriting, expressed his disappointment at never having reached it.

So that’s Kathy’s Grandad. Just to fill you in.

in the clearing ahead she sees him
sitting with his squadron
of Muslims and Sikhs

the army captain
the forest ranger
the failing father
of her Dad
rendered narcoleptic
by his years
sleeping head on shoulder
of a turbaned man
who locks eyes with her
keeping watch

he’s watching for the slightest
movement in the trees
man or beast
he cannot tell the difference anymore

she leaves the path
and walks towards this
warrior cast in muslin
he fears no Japanese
for he has defended sleeping
British men from tigers
in the night before

and he knows his captain
will assume command once more
come morning light
he will calibrate the mortar
and they’ll shell the hill again
all day until the only sound
heard in the forest’s crackling wood
and human screams

she sits beside her Grandfather
who rests before the next daily horror
takes the young man’s hand
he shifts his weight to her
and to the moonlit canopy
mouths in sleep the words of a song
he never sung to her

the song of
point 4 -5 -1
the point he never reached
before the Japanese surrendered
to the bomb

I’d like to sing that song for you now.