The other grandfather

I've written a few times about my maternal grandfather and how I learned a lot about the countryside from him. But what about my other grandfather? 

To him I may owe some of my love of words, because he was a poet. 

Edward Grimson Colgan was, as far as I am aware, the first person in my family to feel the urge to put pen to paper. I can't be sure of this of course; while we have managed to trace the Colgans back several hundred years, scant personal writings remain. But Edward - Ted to everyone who knew him - left behind a number of notebooks full of his poetry. Plus, I have my memories of the man. 

Ted would have been the first to admit that he was no Byron or Eliot. In fact, he often compared himself to the infamous William Topaz McGonagall. But his poems had a gentle naivete to them and I remember reading them when I was younger. 

His war poems are by far the best and when he read them to us, we would listen while toying with pieces of shrapnel he'd kept as memento mori. Invariably there would be some gory story attached to each piece ('Oh, and that piece went straight through the bosun's neck!') but how true any of them were is a matter of some debate.* 

Grandad's war poems chart his Naval career pretty much from start to end. Here's an example. It's undated but was probably written around 1943: 

The Little Ships (Tally Ho!) 

There’s a deathly still on the ship tonight 

As we steam along in the waning light 

The watch below are fast asleep 

The watch on deck their vigil keep 

And as we step on Twelve Patrol 

Echoes are seen on the radar scroll 

Action stations!” There is a flash 

As star shells leave the gun with a crash 

 Lighting up the battle scene 

Germany E boats abaft the beam 

"Starboard thirty!” the captain yells 

The battle to our MTB’s fell 

Crashing past at thirty knots 

"Tally ho!” as we raise our hats 

Through the darkness guns display 

Tracers, only death to convey 

Just as quick as it began 

The raiders scatter like grains of sand 

On the news next day it was read again 

Enemy forces scattered in the shipping lane. 

 

Apart from his war poems, Grandad also wrote passionately about Cornwall, particularly his beloved home town of Looe. He bemoaned the constant denuding of the countryside for house building and business premises. He also felt great sorrow for the fishermen of the town. Looe was once a thriving port and many of the fishermen he knew were relatives or close friends and many had seen service at sea in the Navy during wartime. By the end of the war, the fishing industry was already in decline. Within 20 years it was almost non-existent. 

Here's a typical Ted Colgan lament for Looe: 

Came Disillusionment 

Motoring down to lovely Looe 

Mindful there to find 

A peaceful and enchanting scene 

A picture in my mind 

As I approached along the road 

Through miles and miles of greenery 

A sight that I shall ne’er forget 

A massacre of scenery. 

There before me stark and bare 

The height of desecration 

Those lovely woods once proud and tall 

Lay ‘round in degradation 

There across the river bank 

Also very still 

Stumps and trees from a woodman’s axe 

It was a sight to chill 

A hunter's hut so forlorn 

Tho' long since been buried 

Now bared for all the world to see 

Where once the hunter tarried 

O! nature cruel more often kind 

Lets swards grow profusely 

Hide from me this ugly scene 

That man scarred so loosely 

Motoring on with heavy heart 

Until I reach the town 

And there the view across the bay 

I quickly lost my frown.

It's perhaps no real surprise that my late father grew up with a love of poetry, art and writing of all kinds. He too became a champion of all things Cornish, often published in magazines and newspapers. And he, in turn, passed the baton on to me. 

Here's the last photo I ever took of Grandad in 1996 aged 85, a few months before he died.

He survived the war despite the sinking of one of his ships in a Norwegian fjord. He trod water for nearly an hour in freezing conditions and suffered with his health for many years as the result. 

He took part in the D-Day landings, saw many of his closest friends killed and outlived his wife Marjorie and all of his sons, my father included. But throughout his long and eventful life he never stopped writing. I fully intend to do the same. 

So far so good. 

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*I have one piece of shrapnel that Grandad would always insist was embedded in the side of my infant father's pram during the blitz on the dockyards at Plymouth (where he was stationed at the time). Extraordinarily, this most outrageous of stories turned out to be true. My dad's pram was hit by shrapnel during an air-raid and, in fear for her life, my Nan sought shelter in an underground cellar. The building later collapsed and she and others who'd had the same idea found themselves trapped for several hours. My father, who at this time was just a few months old, was not yet christened so my Nan, believing that they were possibly going to die and discovering that one of her fellow shelterers was a priest, asked that an impromptu baptism took place underground. The other people in the shelter became my dad's godparents. Isn't that an amazing story? And completely true.