roderick watson
he was teaching English. If Smith’s Scots diction seems overly strained in this early
poem,his later lyrics manage a plainer lament in poems such as ‘El Alamein’ and
‘The Mither’s Lament’:
what care I for the leagues o sand
The prisoners and the gear they’ve won?
My darlin liggs amang the dunes
Wi mony a mither’s son.^63
George Campbell Hay survived the desert, but his war came to an end in
Macedonia in 1946. By this time he was serving as a sergeant in the Education
Corps, and his unit was posted to Kavalla, a remote place where the ruling right-wing
Greek nationalists were in brutal conflict with communist guerrillas. This struggle
for power was further compounded by recent enmity and ancient feuds between
Greeks, Turks, ex-Fascist Armenians, and Bulgar warlords. It was a dangerous place
for someone with both socialist and nationalist convictions; nevertheless, and as
always, the linguist Hay mixed and talked freely with local working-class people.
The Army disapproved, but more worryingly he came to the attention of the right-
wing factions who took him for a communist agitator. It was in these particularly
tense circumstances that the poet suffered the first of several mental breakdowns,
brought on, perhaps, by a violent personal attack at the hands of Greek nationalists,
and he was invalided home in the summer of that year. Hay continued to write
after the War and produced fine poems, but he spent many years in and out of
psychiatric hospitals undergoing treatment, including insulin shock treatment for
schizophrenia, and struggling with an alcohol problem. His heart-breaking vision
of the War, as a ‘world’ war in the truest sense, remains one of the most powerful
and affecting literary testaments of the time.
Nor did it really end in 1945, for many of those who survived still had poems
to make, just as they had to live with their memories for years to come. So the
War comes back in surprising places—as in a story told in a pub to a young
American brought up in Glasgow and living and working in Scotland. A trained
marine biologist, James Hyman Singer—Burns Singer—became a freelance writer
in London in the mid-1950s and published his first collection of verse asStill and
Allin 1957. This volume contained ‘In Memoriam Keith Douglas’ dedicated to
G. S. Fraser, but is most notable for a long narrative poem, ‘The Transparent Pris-
oner’, which recounts another man’s war experiences in an act of vivid imaginative
transference. Captured in the desert war, the speaker describes his experiences as a
POW and then as a slave labourer in a German coal-mine where the most extreme
physical deprivation underground leads him to an overpoweringly spiritual vision
of ‘transparency’. The poem has a wholly conversational opening tone:
They took me somewhere sleeping in the desert
Up middle of a minefield near Benghazi;(^63) Smith, ‘The Refugees: A Complaynt’, ibid. 53.