For obvious reasons, the celebrations for the 75th anniversary of VE day were a rather muted affair. It was a bit sad that the Red Arrows flypast became an event for television, rather than for real-life spectators.
One small gem did go ahead, though, the broadcast last night on Radio 3 of the play Unicorns, Almost by the poet Owen Sheers. It is a one-man piece about the second world war poet, Keith Douglas, played by Dan Krikler.
All the major poems, such as “How to Kill” and “Vergissmeinnicht” were included. If my memory is correct, the main biographical source was Douglas’s wartime memoir Alamein to Zem-Zem, with the words transposed to the present tense.
This had the effect of bringing Keith Douglas vividly to life, on the battlefield and in Alexandria, rather than leaving him as a figure dead on the pages of a history book.
The device of having Douglas speak after his death was very effective. It enabled Sheers to include the anecdote about Douglas’ mother finding all six copies of his Collected Poems unsold and unopened in her local bookshop, ten years after it had been published.
His reputation has risen slowly and steadily since then. References to his work crop up now and again. Alan Judd used a quote from Keith Douglas as the title for his novel A Breed of Heroes, and he appears as a character in Iain Gale’s novel Alamein.
Keith Douglas survived the battle of Alamein but was killed in action three days after D-Day. He was twenty-four years old.
The following poem was written in England before D-Day and published after his death.
On A Return From Egypt
To stand here in the wings of Europe
disheartened, I have come away
from the sick land where in the sun lay
the gentle sloe-eyed murderers
of themselves, exquisites under a curse;
here to exercise my depleted fury.
For the heart is a coal, growing colder
when jewelled cerulean seas change
into grey rocks, grey water-fringe,
sea and sky altering like a cloth
till colour and sheen are gone both:
cold is an opiate of the soldier.
And all my endeavours are unlucky explorers
come back, abandoning the expedition;
the specimens, the lilies of ambition
still spring in their climate, still unpicked:
but time, time is all I lacked
to find them, as the great collectors before me.
The next month, then, there is a window
and with a crash I’ll split the glass.
Behind it stands one I must kiss,
person of love or death
a person or a wraith,
I fear what I shall find.
The Good Reader 