The three poems quoted in their entirety, Wings, High Flight and An Airman’s Prayer I found in David’s diaries. Wings and High Flight were carbon copy typescript on small slips of paper, typical of wartime economy. Obviously they expressed sentiments which resonated, were shared, circulated and cherished. There was no attribution for Wings, and High Flight was simply entitled Sonnet with the author’s name misspelt. An Airman’s Prayer was on a small yellowed newspaper cutting, with the poignant details about its author.
Research has revealed that Wings was written by the well-loved English author Cecil Roberts and has appeared under several other titles, Wings of the Wind, An Air Force Pilot’s Prayer and Prayer for a Pilot.
Sonnet’s title is High Flight and its author is John Gillespie Magee, born in Shanghai in 1922 of missionary parents, American father John Gillespie Magee, and British mother Faith Backhouse Magee. John Jr was educated in Nanking and at Rugby School in England, where he won the Poetry Prize for 1939 with his poem Brave New World. He went to the USA in 1939 where he had won a scholarship to Yale University. But instead he enlisted in the Royal Canadian Air Force, gained his Wings in June 1941 and served with RAF Fighter Command in 412 Squadron as a Spitfire pilot. One of the first US war casualties, killed at the age of 19 in a midair collision on 11 December 1941 over Britain, he is buried in the war graves section of the Holy Cross Church, Scopwick, Lincolnshire. High Flight,written in September 1941, was first published in his father’s Washington parish magazine. It was included in a Library of Congress exhibition of poetry entitled ‘Faith and Freedom’ and widely re-published by American and British newspapers. Lines were quoted by US President Ronald Reagan in a tribute to the American astronauts in 1986 after the Challenger 7 space shuttle disaster. Two are also quoted on the Royal Australian Air Force Memorial, Anzac Way, Canberra. Several Friends of Lincoln Cathedral recently visited Scopwick at my request and laid a poppy from the Australian War Memorial on his grave.
An Airman’s Prayer was written by Melbourne-born Flight Sergeant Hugh Rowell Brodie, who had been both student and teacher at Melbourne High School and who enlisted in September 1940. A member of 460 Squadron, he was officially presumed killed over Germany on 3 June 1942 at the age of 30, with no known burial place. He is commemorated at the Runnymede Royal Air Force Memorial in Britain, and on Memorial Panel 107 at the Australian War Memorial, Canberra. The poem was found among his possessions with a letter to the boys of his old school.
Quotations from other poems are as follows:
Chapter 4: green and pleasant land from William Blake’s From ‘Milton’; blunt, bow-headed, whalebacked Downs from Rudyard Kipling’s Sussex; the lark at heaven’s gate from William Shakespeare’s Cymbeline.
Chapter 5: Each in his narrow cell forever laid, The rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep and leaving the world to darkness and to me from Thomas Gray’s ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’.
Chapter 8: These, wishing life, must range the falling sky, Whom an heroic moment calls to die and You shall have your revenge who flew and died, Spending your daylight hours before the day began from John Pudney’s ‘The Dead’, and Enough of death! It looms too large in words…Enjoy the sky, Possess the field of air, Cloud be your step, The west wind be your stair from Pudney’s ‘Men Alive’.
Chapter 14: If I should die, think only this of me: That there’s some corner of a foreign field That is forever England…A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware from Rupert Brooke’s ‘The Soldier’.
Chapter 15: chapter title Bold, cautious, true and my loving comrade from Walt Whitman’s ‘As Toilsome I wander’d Virginia’s Woods’; They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old; Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn. At the going down of the sun and in the morning We will remember them and They went with songs to the battle, they were young, Straight of limb, true of eye, steady and aglow, They were staunch to the end against odds uncounted from Laurence Binyon’s ‘For the Fallen’; I shall never love the snow again Since Maurice died: With corniced drift it blocked the lane, And sheeted in a desolate plain The countryside from Robert Bridges’ ‘Since Maurice died’.
Chapter 18: When day is gone, and night is come, And a’ folk bound to sleep, I think on him that’s far awa’ The lee-lang night and weep from Robert Burns’ ‘The Farewell’; It’s yet for a’ that That man to man the world o’er Shall brothers be for a’ that from Burns’ ‘For a’ that, and a’ that’; Should auld acquaintance be forgot And never brought to min’? Should auld acquaintance be forgot And days of auld lang syne? And a cup of kindness from Burns’ ‘Auld lang syne’.
Chapter 20: poured out the red Sweet wine of youth; gave up the years to be Of work and joy from Rupert Brooke’s ‘The Dead’; The flowers of the forest are a’ wede away from ‘Lament for the Battle of Flodden’ by Jane Elliot.
Epilogue: Death’s no respecter in this unjust spring, No chooser under the callous rain: but brothers, All is won when men who find a cause to die for, live. From John Pudney’s ‘Spring, 1942’.
All John Pudney poems quoted are from Dispersal Point and other Air Poems. London, John Lane the Bodley Head, 1942.