Clifford Dyment (1914-1971) was only four years old when he lost his father in the First World War. This quietly effective piece commemorates him and all the others like him. It reminds us how great a rip war tears in the fabric of lives, not just of the soldiers themselves, but of those left behind. My own father was luckier than most: he was called up in the Second World War but was rated too short-sighted and flat-footed for active service, so was despatched to Minehead (‘guarding the western approaches’, as he wryly put it) where, to judge from a scrappy diary he kept that I found after his death, he seems to have spent the war weeding the officers’ gardens, playing cards, desperately missing his wife and two young daughters and being thoroughly bored. He came home unscathed, at least physically, but my mother once confided to me in her widowhood that things had never been quite the same between them after he returned: she had grown used to her independence and had realized that she could manage the household finances far better than my father ever had, and she was resentful when on return he demanded to take back control and promptly plunged the family into genteel poverty again. But at least, unlike Clifford Dyment’s father, he did come back.

The Son (1937)

I found the letter in a cardboard box,
Unfamous history. I read the words.
The ink was frail and brown, the paper dry
After so many years of being kept.
The letter was a soldier’s, from the Front—
Conveyed his love, and disappointed hope
Of getting leave. ‘It’s cancelled now,’ he wrote.
‘My luck is at the bottom of the sea.’

Outside, the sun was hot; the world looked bright;
I heard a radio, and someone laughed.
I did not sing, or laugh, or love the sun.
Within the quiet room I thought of him,
My father killed, and all the other men
Whose luck was at the bottom of the sea.

Clifford Dyment