I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat. Churchill

Alf, it was the model spitfire in your front room window
that identified you, separated you from that tribe
we call ‘the old’.

I saw you sometimes at the shops, your movements slow, deliberate,
arthritic, I thought, I was wrong.
You carried a woven basket, the old-fashioned clumpy kind
and you were always glancing behind you. I thought it was the traffic
you feared, but it was the Messerschmit ME 262 that still had you in its sights.

Alfred, you were too tough with the kids who gathered
smoking, talking, laughing, outside your front door of an evening.
They were young, only young. Though I expect
you had forgotten the squadron mess and all that false machismo-bonhomie
we shared before a raid.

At your funeral, I sat at the back, you had few family,
no friends left alive. I think of your skin
safe inside the coffin
now no longer agony to move around in.
You told me once it took you two hours to get dressed.

Transfixed by
the image of the naked Vietnamese girl fleeing napalm
mingling with your burning descent through the air above
the South Downs, I whisper my thanks, old friend.

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