A Gloucestershire Lad at Home and Abroad

Chapter 36: C COMPANY COOK

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About This Book

This collection gathers poems composed by a soldier at the Front that alternate between affectionate dialect songs celebrating Gloucestershire landscapes, traditions and pastimes and sober battlefield reflections on comradeship, sacrifice, and homesickness. Short formal pieces—ballades, trios, sonnets—and prose poems shift between light conviviality and stark moral questioning, often anchoring wartime anxiety in images of orchards, rivers and village life. Recurring themes include longing for home, the weight of witnessing death, gratitude, defiance, and the effort to reconcile pastoral memory with the experience of combat, producing verses that balance local humor and song with solemn meditation.

C COMPANY COOK

“Do you want j-jam on it?” he’d say,

Twirling a red moustache.

We chaffed him over rations every day,

“Say, is this tea or hash?”

“Jim, tell us, do,

Why you put sugar in the blooming stew.”

“—And there’s a heap o’ coal in this—not half!...”

To all our chaff

“Do you want j-jam on it?” he’d say.