Concert Party

There was to be a magician, two dancing girls

and a singer, and ‘A’ Company had eagerly awaited

the day to brighten up the sober Belfast November.

As duty Subaltern, it was my job to collect them

from the airfield in an armoured car, and feeling

important as we entered our world, up the Falls Road

and into a fortress of corrugated iron, the cookhouse

for a dressing room, and an improvised stage in the

dining area with plastic chairs arranged in rows

and we piled in, still operational, restless and armed

to the teeth and ready for anything. Except the girls,

who weren’t up to much, and didn’t get up to much,

and the boys didn’t hide their disappointment as I sunk

deeper into my seat on the front row as the magician

sawed one of them in half, to a tremendous cheer

(for the wrong reasons) and I realised that this wasn’t

exactly going to plan. And then the singer walked on,

guitar in hand, and the room fell silent: ‘Alright lads?’

he said in a friendly scouser accent, and the ice was broken

by one or two intermittent baboon impersonations and

for a moment my faith in the English Tommy, for whom

I would have taken a bullet without a thought,

and they for me, was shattered into a thousand shameless

shards. But the singer wasn’t phased, almost as if he

anticipated this welcome, welcomed the anticipation,

and began to strum with a knowing smile, as if playing

to an empty room and proceeded to deliver his killer punch:

‘I am sailing, I am sailing, home again, cross the sea…’

And one hundred of Her Majesty’s pumped and primed

testosterone fuelled military machines fell into a reverie,

one hundred pairs of eyes, wells of stormy waters,

bold hearts trapped in a snare of sentimentality, that seemed

to capture the pity of the place, the role and the reason

and the final chords were lost in the thunderous cheer and

thumping of rifle buts against the linoleum floor and the

helicopter was late returning to the mainland that night.

John H Davies

5th February 2011