End Of A Rat Poem by David Lewis Paget

He walked the length of the village street
With a board - ‘The End is Nigh! '
In a dirty army overcoat,
He looked like a nice old guy,
But kids would jeer as he drank his beer
From a bottle outside the pub,
In winter, fend off the snowballs
That they threw - aye, there's the rub!

For he had served with the Desert Rats
When the Aussie's held Tobruk,
Had gone out under a blazing sun
Where an egg on the sand would cook,
He'd taken three light German tanks
With his mates from the Aussie bush,
On a night patrol where they had to crawl
Then fight like the Sydney Push.

After the war, he'd met a girl
In Alexandria,
One of the W.A.A.C.'s that served out there,
Her name was Angela,
He followed her back to England where
She turned her badges in,
And married the girl in Leicestershire,
But never went home again.

They settled down in a village there
Though he yearned for sand and sun,
She said she'd never leave England while
Her life had time to run,
He found some work on a local farm
Though he often became depressed,
And thought of the beach at Bondi and
The wheat fields of the west.

They lived and loved for forty years
Though he felt quite beaten down,
The locals never accepted him
As a native of the town,
His wife took sick to her bed one day
And said, ‘the time has come,
You'd better go back to Australia now
That my life is nearly done.'

She died as the sun was coming up
On the bleak, flat Leicester plain,
He buried her there in a cemetery
With an Anglo-Saxon name,
He thought to leave but her spirit stirred
And he couldn't leave her grave,
But went to the age-old Norman church,
Knelt in the nave, and prayed.

For years he studied the Bible there
Considering all he'd done,
The bones of the soldiers left out there
In the terrible Libyan sun,
The emptiness of his life took hold
And he walked with a weary sigh,
Placing a board around his neck
That said - ‘The End is Nigh! '

He walked with his head bowed down and low
And forgot to turn around,
They found him frozen, covered in snow
Just a mile outside the town,
A photograph of his wife was tucked
In the band of his old slouch hat,
And on his lapel, a medal cast
In the shape of a Desert Rat!

17 December 2012