I came out here a boy, just a village boy who worked the soil and sang in church, a boy that rang the parish bells, enjoyed Sunday walks and one who would tease the girls of Morden. Just a Cambridgeshire boy that drank from the village pump and rode upon the harvest carts, a boy that watched cricket on the green, swung his scythe, stacked the hay and sat warming by yuletide log telling tales of Christmas past to his baby sisters. A boy I was, one who gleaned the hedgerows for summer fruits, collected bird’s eggs and enjoyed the village dance and in winter raw I would shovel snow and used a snare to fill the pot.
Now, well now I'm a man, a man who wears the King's colours and fights the King's war, a man who looks out upon miles of mud, blood tinted cold ice-covered mud, a man who longs to hear the blackbird sing, who has worn the scent of another’s blood and has seen what no man should see. I’m just a man who dreads that whistle that signals the slow walk to death, a man who cries each evening while many a Tommy does sleep, one who trembles when the big guns roar and who eats from a tin held in mitten wrapped hands white with cold. Yes, I’m now a man who has witnessed gassed men choke and the mud-caked rats that share our beds while we dream of peace. A man who longs for news of home where the ground is rich with grass and no man lives in a hole littered with the rotting limbs of Tommy and Fritz, but most of all, I’m a man who wishes with all his heart he was still that boy.
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