Untitled

‘death’s proletariat’ 

for unit wall newspapers, service magazines and poetry. The creative bug was born.
Thewriting skill developed.’^12
Some of Fraser’s most effective poems from North Africa chose the convention
of writing home. ‘Christmas Letter Home’, addressed to his sister in Aberdeen,
allows the poet to remember his youthful awkwardness in the presence of girls
called Bunny and Sheila and Rosemary (who also featured in an earlier poem called
‘Social Pleasures’: ‘I smile, I say, ‘‘May I?’’ She smiles faintly,|We move off stiffly’).
From the perspective of desert war and news of slaughter in Russia, however, such
memories are ‘Drifting and innocent and sad like snow’. Yet there may be strength
here too:

And Bunny and Sheila and Joyce and Rosemary

Chattering on sofas or preparing tea,

With their delicate voices and their small white hands

This is the sorrow everyone understands.

More than Rostov’s artillery, more than the planes

Skirting the cyclonic islands, this remains,

The little, lovely taste of youth we had:

The guns and not our silliness were mad,

All the unloved and ugly seeking power

Were mad, and not our trivial evening hour

Of swirling taffetas and muslin girls.^13

In poems such as ‘Exile’s Letter’ and ‘A Winter Letter’ (again to his sister), Fraser
reflects on how the separations of war ‘with its swoop and its terror|That pounces
on Europe and lifts up life like a leaf’ may be no more than a rehearsal for the ‘exile’
of life itself—born of the perpetual unattainability of desire and the impossibility
of ever returning to ‘home’ as we remember it; tainted, too, with the bittersweet
taste of nostalgia:

And last night I dreamt I returned and therefore I write,

Last night my train had drawn up at a black London station,

And there you were waiting to welcome me, strange but the same,

And I shook your gloved hands, kissed your light-powdered cheek, and was waiting

To see your new flat, and your books, and your hats, and your friends,

When I suddenly woke with a lost lonesome head on my pillow,

And black Africa turning beneath me towards her own dawn,

And my heart was so sore that this dream should be snapped at the prologue

That I send you my soreness, dear heart, for the sake of this dream.^14

In ‘Exile’s Letter’ he reflects that ‘exiled from ourselves we live|And yet can learn to
forgive|Thepastthatpromisedussomuch|And ends, alas, my dear, in such,|Such

(^12) Selwyn, ‘Introduction’, inidem(ed.),The Voice of War, p. xxiii.
(^13) Fraser, ‘Christmas Letter Home’, inPoemsofG.S.Fraser, 56.
(^14) Fraser, ‘A Winter Letter’, ibid. 83.