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previously published in Into The Empty Space. A Second Anthology of New Writing by Word for Word, London : New Gallery Books, 1999 Fragments
Memory shredded to ticker-tape. Which of us did this damage ? Did my mother do it at the time, did I do this as a child, did she do it after Alzheimer’s erased any notion of who made these photos & letters important ?
Half a photo; two and a half squaddies. Is the one in the middle my father before he was killed at El Alamein ? The building in the background could be in Cairo or Alexandria. Did his friends die in that desert ? Was there a woman in the other half ?
Perhaps these details were censored. Letters in two or three hands will not combine to make a sensible jigsaw. What I can read is routine stuff; insects, weather, insects, food, insects. If whoever wrote these letters had anything interesting or original to say about killing their fellow man, it’s not in these fragments.
There wasn’t enough of him to ship home. After the War, Mum got the real story; a wrong turn in the dark by the latrines then he stepped on a Jerry landmine. Mum said he couldn’t do anything right, always told me You're the same. Now I can see the resemblance.
Brian Docherty
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