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Gloucestershire Friends: Poems From a German Prison Camp cover

Gloucestershire Friends: Poems From a German Prison Camp

Chapter 34: GROWN UPS
By F. W. Harvey
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Poetry

About This Book

A collection of short poems written by a soldier in captivity reflecting on home, memory, and the experience of imprisonment. The verse moves between intimate domestic images—mother, English gardens, county landscapes—and the hardships of internment, loneliness, and comradeship, often blending pastoral detail with wartime grief and wry humor. Forms vary from ballades and sonnets to rondel and villanelle, and recurring motifs include nature, loss, longing, and reflections on duty and sacrifice. Many pieces juxtapose the small joys of remembered rural life with the starkness of prison, producing restrained lyricism that balances tenderness, anger, and quiet faith.

GROWN UPS

1. TIMMY TAYLOR AND THE RATS

It was a spell of sultry weather,
There’d been no rain for weeks together,
And little Timmy Taylor,
A mouse of a man,
Walked down the road
With a big milk-can,
Walked softly down the road at night
When the stars were thick and the moon was bright.
Hard by the road a spring came up
To glimmer in a rare bright cup
Of green-sward, burnt elsewhere quite dry.
To this he came—we won’t ask why—
Little Timmy Taylor,
The mouse of a man,
With a big milk-can.
Then, as he turned, so goes the story—
Came trooping through the moonlight glory
Hundreds and scores of—what do you think?
Rats! rats a-coming down to drink
From granary and barn and stack,
Grey and tawny, brown and black,
Tails cocked up and teeth all gleaming,
Beady eyes light-filled, and seeming
That moony-mad and hunger-fierce.
Little Timmy Taylor,
The mouse of a man,
Dropped the milk-can,
And giving a shriek—’twas fit to pierce
The ear o’ the dead—he ran away,
And the can was found in the road next day.