I remember him
as a small old man
quiet and happy
in his bedside chair
A repat patient
from World War I, watching,
never a trouble
to anyone
with his light
brown beret each Tuesday
when I did my
morning rounds in the late Seventies
of long-stay
patients, usually with TB,
in the upstairs
ward at Rankin Park.
Our meetings
were always brief -
few words, the
stethoscopic ritual,
the laying on of
hands -
then I was on my
way.
But he did not
have TB
and no-one could
be sure
what he had, or
indeed whether
he had any
illness at all.
The folk who ran
Rankin Park
thought this place
as good as any
for this man to live.
The ward opened
to a verandah that faced north
so in winter he
would sit
in a rocker
outside.
One Tuesday I
saw he was in decline.
Nothing to be
found
and nothing
done.
Next week he was
in bed:
he had something
special for me to hear.
I bent close.
"They shot them all," he said.
I pictured a
fatal moment
in the trench.
"They shot them all,"
he said again
for emphasis.
"The bloody
British shot them all.
The horses. Our
horses.
The horses we
brought back
to Britain at
war's end."
Now as I drive
along the M4
past Wallgrove,
where the horses trained
I see the plumes
of emu feather replicas
worn in the hats
of the Brigade
atop the
regiments of poles red
with blood and
poppies
on the mile of
median strip
at the Light
Horse Interchange.
I recall my
conversations at Rankin Park,
with the man,
with his economy of words, his beret
and not much
else.
I think of his
love for the horses
a love that
sustained and troubled him for six decades.
and I feel
bereft and impotent.
