THE EVACUEES
FOUR years ago
They came to this little town Carrying their bundles—women who did not know Where the sky would lie when their babies were born, mothers With children, children with sisters and brothers, Children with schoolmates, and frightened children alone.
They Saw the strangers at the station, the sea-mist on the hill, In the windless waiting days when the walls of Poland fell.
Winter came And the wind did not rise ; the sky Withheld its threat of thunderbolt or bomb.
The women were lonely. Thoughts began to bend To Northumbrian voices high as a seagull's cry, To the smell of the North Sea in the streets, the foggy air, The fish-shops and the neighbours. The tide of fear Flowed back, leaving weary empty sand.
The women returned To the Tyneside husbands and the Tyneside coal, And most of the children followed. Others stayed and learned The Cumberland vowels, took strangers for their friends, Went home for holidays at first, then not at all, Accepted in the aisle the bishop's hands, Won scholarships and badges, and were known One with the indigenous children of the town.
Four years ago They came, and in four childhood years The memory shrivels and the muscles grow. The little girl who wept on the platform then Now feels her body blossom like the trees, Discovers tennis, poetry and flowers, And under the dripping larches in the rain Knows the first experiment of a kiss.
Will they rest, Will they be contented, these Fledglings of a cuckoo's egg reared in a stranger's nest?
Born of one people, with another bred, Will they return to their parents again, or choose The foster-home, or seek the unrented road?
Grant that in the future they may find A rock on which to build a house for heart and mind.
NORMAN NICHOLSON.
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