Between the Dots and Dashes

I was born in the British trenches of 1941, to a man that put his pen to work.

The spray of bullets and crash of bombs turned to simple white noise as he poured out his heart to me. I creased with the curve of the knee on which he leant, and felt thick desperation run from his heart through to the pen nib. Four long months of separation had taken its toll, and by now he imagined how her belly would have swollen to a considerable bump. As he thought on this, I remember so clearly hearing the loud pounding of his heart through the thin fabric of his uniform.

Kicking at a dull piece of shrapnel that lay close by on the muddied floor, his fists balled. What could he possibly tell her about this life? News of the daily suffering was hardly appropriate, and he wasn’t even sure of his exact location, let alone what tomorrow held.

I willed him to write on, my bare back a blank canvas for his thoughts.

Photo by Joanna Kosinska on Unsplash

By now the sun was blocked by a heavy mixture of smoke and clouds of rain, dimming the light as if it were evening, and he was forced to use the flashes of nearby explosions to check his work. His shaking hand made little more than scrawls of black on stained white, but he knew that she would understand. She always understands.

His tears dampened my dog ears as they began to fall, setting the soot further into my soiled skin.

 “I’ll come home to you”, he wrote, knowing all too well the slim chance of this really proving true. It was more of a futile attempt to calm himself than reassure her. Yet I loyally carried that message right back to her.

My journey across the Channel was not a pleasant one. Crammed into a heavy bag filled with hundreds like me, threats buzzed overhead with every Stuka Scream* and engine whir. I often heard them talk of the dangers to the old routes, and we were instead carried for 6 weeks along somewhere new, still faced with equal risk with the increased exposure. Hand to hand, I was passed and sorted, the acrid smell of smoke and fear following at every turn.

All through the journey I kept his words safe, that precious folded cargo meant for her eyes only.

***

And finally, I have reached her. She tears me open with an eager ease after I slide through the letter box and crash land on the bristles of the doormat.
She reads his words and tucks me away inside the breast pocket of her blouse, blissful in her ignorance.

For he who gave me life has all too soon lost his.

*Famous sound made by the German dive-bomb plane:

Junkers JU 87 or Stuka (from Sturzkampfflugzeug, "dive bomber")