When we landed at Hanover I still had only the vaguest idea how this would work. But as we drove up the autobahn, and saw the remains of the old pine forest of northern thicken around us, I began to think this was going to be an even more intense time than I’d anticipated. For one thing, I realised we were following almost exactly in the steps my father took when his regiment came this way in the spring of 1945. For another, as we came onto the camp itself and felt the peculiar power of all enclosed communities begin to assert itself, I knew I was about to come face to face with extreme emotional states of one kind or another.
Extreme states that were very well-controlled, of course – the army is very good at that – but probably all the more remarkable for being so well-drilled and rigorously reserved. Relief. Pride. Sadness. Excitement. A very strong and strangely-mixed brew, which existed at an equally strange distance from the world I usually inhabit.
In the course of our time there we talked to about ten people – junior and senior – as well as two medics and a padre (and, when we got back home, to the mother of a soldier who had been killed in Helmand in 2009). Each in their own way had very powerful things to say, but by and large the soldiers were very reluctant or actually unable to speak with much candour about the bad things they had seen. Comradeship, yes; the beauty of the landscape yes; pleasure at being home (and also the frustrations of civilian life) yes. But not death and destruction. Yet in each conversation I felt the pressure of these un-said things very strongly. Every voice seemed to be haunted by difficult memories.
When I got back to England and began reading through the transcripts of these talks, my first instinct was to look for a linguistic richness that conveyed these ideas. Then I realised I was looking for the wrong thing. The expressions that most interested me were in-between the sentences I had heard spoken. They were implications, not bold utterances. The pity was in the pauses, the silences, the suppressions; the poetry, if there was to be any, had to catch these things, and not hunt for eloquence.
With this in mind, I then set about editing, rearranging, adding to, tweaking, ventilating, and shaping the things I had heard. It was an extraordinary experience. In fact I can’t when I last spent a more enthralling few working days. Everyone I spoke to had been profoundly changed by things they had seen and done in Afghanistan. Listening to them, I felt that I had been changed a bit too.
The Gardener
Dr Margaret Evison
In Memory of Lieutenant Mark Evison
We spent
many hours kneeling together in the garden
so many hours
Mark was
he liked lending a hand
watching Gardener’s World
building compost heaps
or the brick path with the cherry tree
that grows over it now the white cherry
where I thought I mustn’t cry
I must behave
as if he’s coming back
*
It was just after Easter
with everything in leaf
he is so sweet really
though worldly
before his time
I kissed him and said
See you
in six months and he turned round
he turned round and said
*
I opened the garden for the first time
the National Gardens Scheme
you know
what gardens are like in May
and this man was hovering
outside the front
as we walked down the side age
he said
I’m a Major
I said
O my son he’s in the army
sort of brightly
*
Then no one was there
so I went
and I gardened all day
how slow how satisfying
I felt next morning
he was struggling for his life
*
He would be home
with three transfers
in three different planes
and if he died they would ring me
and they would go back
and they would not keep coming
my daughter Elizabeth and I drove to Birmingham
my mobile there on the dashboard
we had worked out the times of the last plane
and we arrived
and they still hadn’t called me
and he was still
*
He was lying he was
with this
Mark
with this big plastic hole
sort of
a bandage over a hole
just like
asleep
*
The reindeer the wild reindeer
giving birth in the snow
with the rest of the herd scarpering
they have seen the eagle above them
but the mother stands still
what am I going to do what
a bit restless and everything
but starting to lick her baby
with the eagle watching
*
Quietened that is the best word
to describe it I felt quietened
seeing the hills below
as we came into Kabul
I was thinking
Mark lived in a very green place
and here everything is purple
orange Turner colours I call them
In my imagination he is never dead
bandaged lost never dead
with my love
circling
nowhere to go
I was thinking
thousands of lives
in an instant
and the molecules starting again
and the mountains never changing
how was I
quietened
how
but for a moment
I was
then losing height
with the brown earth rushing to meet me.
Poet, Andrew Motion presents Coming Home on BBC Radio 4
Listen to Coming Home
