The last great cavalry charge was made by the 4th Australian Light Horse at Beersheba in 1917. My father was only 4 then, but the glamour and myth of the Light Horse remained between the wars and as a young man he joined the Light Horse as part of the Citizens Military Force. When WW II broke out he volunteered for the RAAF and was seconded to the RAF, where he served in 179 Squadron of the Coastal Command, firstly in Gibraltar and then in the UK.
Lament for a Light Horseman.
-for my father, Reg Creighton, 1913-1981.
How young and dashing you are.
You wear your emu-plumed Light Horseman’s hat.
Your face, in profile, is full of hope.
A little smile flickers on your lips.
Bright confidence covers your face.
You hold her by the bridle throatlatch.
Her mixture of fear and curiosity amuses you.
Her ears are forward. Her eyes stare.
What is it that you whisper?
Don’t worry, Pol, it’s only a camera.
Click! And there you are, for that moment
always young, happy and idealistic.
Perhaps you were just twenty two.
That was before your marriage,
before you left for war,
before you left behind your pregnant wife,
before, night after night,
17,000 kilometres from home
you spent the years of what remained
of your young life in the danger and cold
of a canvas-covered aircraft,
protecting Allied shipping lanes
and searching for U-boats,
first skimming low over the blue Mediterranean
and then later the great dark cold North Sea,
unwaveringly following your conscience,
surviving who knows what
to finally come home
when you were just thirty three.
I wish I could write a happy ending for you,
one like those Westerns you so loved,
have your horse, Polybon, waiting for you,
have you hero-like swing into the saddle,
lift your bride up behind you,
and whilst the credits roll
turn away from the camera and canter
towards family and contentment
in those distant blue mountains.
But that is not your story.
After eighteen happy and generous years
when your family grew and you rebuilt your life,
you became sick, your lungs shrunk,
your evenings were destroyed with coughing
and a desperate struggle for air.
You said it was chronic illness from the War.
You said it was from flying in the freezing night.
Eventually a reluctant government agreed.
You were only fifty one.
And I must write of your last seventeen years
when something dark and terrible
and utterly beyond your control
emerged to periodically overpower
who I think you wanted to be.
What caused that unhappiness?
Dormant darkness belatedly emerging from the war?
A side effect from all that medication?
Or something always in you,
a human flaw hidden by youth
and emerging with age and hard experience
to periodically flame and rage?
And when the fire passed,
did you even remember
who you had momentarily been?
If I could, I would wash away those last years,
fetch from a deep well water of such sweetness
as to soothe and heal all the mind’s wounds.
What is it that you wanted?
You were too edgy for mere contentment.
I know you desired esteem and recognition
and I have seen in that portrait
both the young man you once were
and the person you wanted to be.
The teenage me, confused and oppressed
by the ferocity of your change,
had to reject the external mania.
Now, if I could, I would tell you
that these older eyes
have searched your deep core
to seek what lay hidden behind
trauma, temper, days and weeks
of interminable conflict and rage,
mere externals the years are washing away
to reveal a complex and good man trapped
by something vastly beyond his control.
You did not live a long life.
Your heart gave out.
We gathered around you in the hospital,
your wife and four of your five children.
For more than a week you lingered,
gaining comfort from our presence.
Then you fell into unconsciousness
and the green monitor flat-lined.
He’s gone, I said.
He’s not, she said, in momentary disbelief.
Then briefly and tenderly she touched you,
forehead to forehead, before,
emotionally exhausted, we left together
in strange mixture of grief and relief.
You were not quite sixty eight.
