The wine of mellowing ages

That wet your lips in youth,

The whiteness of pored pages

Where once you searched for truth,

Deep music silenced, leaves that fell,

The midnight chime and chance-heard bell—

All life’s dead undergrowth:

Seen stubble-swoop of plovers,

Speed-flash of polished spokes,

Remembered touch of lovers,

High storm in forest oaks—

All things that rose and sank again

You think of when you see your plane

Crouched where the sundown smokes.

You stump towards the hangar

Blocked in the fire-foam sky,

Not touched by hate or anger

Or fear that you may die,

But seeing small things round the drome

Which like an old man leaving home

You bid, in case, good-bye.

There under elders leaflorn

A thistle flowering late—

Oh, while one's left unbreathed on

You still can educate

Your driftfain soul! Spend steady hours

Just gazing in the eyes of flowers:

Those other things can wait.

Slit throats in city barrows,

In café’s bought to wilt;

Brush fertilizing marrows,

Sea-campions born of silt,

The dew-bald flesh of fungus heads,

Long tulip-gasjets lit in beds

And heather in a kilt—

Have you not seen them, passed them

Beckoning with their eyes?

When have your hands plucked and cast them

Away with no lover’s sighs?

Why then should just this weed remain—

Why aren’t there orchids round your plane

Or frail fritillaries?

If kissing were less pleasant

This race of men would die.

Yet flowers in bloom procreant

Make joy for hand and eye,

Nostril and palate, bee-sweet food—

Unselfish beauty such as could

Never in our love lie.

Once born, should we regret it

With every indrawn breath

Or close our eyes, forget it,

Kiss, laugh our way to death?

Kissing that dazzles dark with light,

Laughter that lingers in the night—

But then what the wind saith . . .

You! —stumping to the hangar

In deep-fleeced flying-boots—

That misanthropic anger

That shook you to the roots

When war first came, is that still there?

Does self-protection in the air

Not squeeze out all your doubts?

Are you that great impatient

Dark introvert again

When all these martyred nations

Are fighting to keep sane?

You may have played at hermits once

But a hermit flying makes a dunce.

There crouching waits your plane!

Some ground crew hot from soccer

Run panting by to change . . .

You open your tall locker—

That flying-suit looks strange!

Rats! —Well of course with chewing gum

Left in the pockets, they’re bound to come

And give the darn thing mange.

It smells of furs that moulder—

You draw the collar round

Like a kitten on your shoulder

Or a girl’s hair lightly wound

About your neck. But bitterness

Scatters all thoughts of tenderness

Like hares chased by a hound.

You take your ’chute and helmet.

A face you’d fain forget

Shines clear. You overwhelm it

And light a cigarette.

Then mingling with the other men

Discussing all the latest gen

You smoke and wait and sweat.

This is what makes a hero—

Discomfort and delay

Till the craved hour called zero

Flings chance into the fray.

The tumbril waits outside the door;

You say “so long” to pals once more,

Climb in and drive away.

There grows a sense of smallness

Under the plane’s huge snout

Just as there’s mental tallness

In throwing her about.

This span of metal tons—that this

On paper clouds seemed just a kiss

Pencilled, can you but doubt?

Slow props turn past compression:

Sudden the engines roar.

You make one last concession

To nature, gaze once more

On sunset and blown grasses bent,

Then through the toothless shark-mouth vent

Climb up and close the door.

Once settled in the cockpit

Your hands assume control-

Oxygen plug in socket

And intercom in hole-

Try talking to the other chaps,

Run up the engines, test the flaps-

All handwork: where’s your soul?

Faculties taut as wires,

Sweating from scalp to socks,

You set the trimming bias

And check the petrol cocks,

Adjust your seat, glance down the wing

At the pitot head—check everything,

Then wave away the chocks.

As when a whip-wave lashes

Fierce up some shingling beach,

Or a great engine passes

With steam-plumed valves ascreech,

So hisses pressure from the brakes

At last released; the plane awakes

To speed as well as speech.

You heave back on the bridle,

The stick against your chest.

The Merlins merely idle—

A mighty voice repressed

Of giants who forever rave

Being tortured in a mountain cave

And passionate for rest.

Into a smoke-screen sunset

You taxi down the drome

Beneath cloud-capes and inlets

That merge from grey to chrome

With here and there a wash of sky

Where cirrus whitewaves lifeless lie

In wastes of frozen foam.

Up there this night or higher

Your destiny shall be—

A scarce-heard speck of fire

Above the cold North Sea;

Yet sitting in this same arm-chair

Closed in by these same windows there

You might be having tea!

Now through grey vapour-hover

Scuttle the planes to take

Their place, like crayfish over

The bottom of a lake.

You, first off, on the runway stand,

One eye on that slow second-hand,

One thumb upon the brake.

A final check: all's ready;

Eager the engines thrum.

The second-hand ticks steady;

You have an itching thumb.

Ten seconds—(meanwhile men have died)—

At last! brakes off and throttles wide—

Heil Hitler, here we come!

Nucleus of double thunder,

Towards those clouds dark grey

Above and russet under

Gently you lift away

Nursed by still-sliding air; the earth,

Hedge, fields backrushing swift beneath

Merge with the dying day.

With new grace upward swimming,

No bump nor pitch nor roll,

Through golden water brimming

Deep in the earth’s broad bowl

You climb to where the sun is seen

Down beyond its western screen

Intense as flaming coal.

What winds have swept since morning

Above these blue-wreathed realms

Where you with monarch’s scorning—

With mastery that whelms

All fear and leaves a happy brain

Uncomplicate—to test your plane

Flew high beyond the elms.

Then mountain tarns flashed clearer

As if old giant men

Had shattered some huge mirror

O’er peak and moor and glen.

Then streams seemed snail-tracks glistening by:

What winds have swept across the sky,

What winds, what clouds since then!

In shoals of mist ungleaming

Beneath your owlish flight

You glimpse York Minster dreaming

With stone towers dimly bright;

And while the murmuring people pray

You turn from this last light of day

And steer towards the night.

So once Columbus started

Seeking an unknown world.

His crew in hope high-hearted

Beneath wide sails unfurled

At sunset scanned the tilting west

Beyond their ship’s downheaving breast

Out where the pink waves curled.

You take the other heading

To pull an old world down,

To blast the rot that’s spreading

Through countryside and town.

Dark gloom ahead, no shining grail;

Only the gunner in the tail

Sees England’s red-gold crown.

Her coastline passes under

Brown-wrinkled like a stain

On some old chart. No wonder

He sings that Scots refrain,

The red-haired navigator there—

He’s dead on track; adjusts his chair

And sets to work again.

Climbing you get the feeling,

The cloud-base lowering nigh,

Of a fly beneath a ceiling

That’s whitewashed sloppily;

And as it mists against your screen

The distant sea no more is seen:

By instruments you fly

On, up, with draughts awhistle

Through crafty Stygian gloom

Where ghostly bodies jostle

As if you’d crashed their room—

Blind groping upward airy things

Whose sudden punches rock your wings

And threaten some fell doom;

Until through thinning vapour

The green-eyed stars grow bright

Like pinpricks in dark paper

Held up against the light.

They vanish, wink, at last shine clear;

You see a vast new realm appear,

A fairy dream of night:

One level drome of whiteness

From which you take off slow

Until its prairie brightness

Makes winter lands below;

And through it far in front arise

Huge anvils in the starry skies,

Rolled alps of mist and snow.

Through thinner air and colder

Onward the great plane soars

While backward o’er each shoulder

A mane of blue flame roars

From each exhaust, a streaming jet.

Two hundred more fly with you; yet

This upper world seems yours.

Two hundred planes all flying

On this same course to-night;

Two thousand eyes outspying

Yet not a plane in sight.

After that world of bustling crowds

How vast this void above the clouds,

How clean and infinite!

The highspeed blowers waking

Scream as the gear-cogs kiss.

An indicator shaking

As pressure-bottles hiss—

The dusty-scented oxygen

Sends warmth through all your limbs again

And ends your breathlessness.

A tiny something nettles

The nerves below your eye.

You flick it off. It settles

To watch the boost—a fly!

No oxygen mask? Who would have thought

A passenger with breath so short

Would come so far to die?

And who would think that striding

Those nearing shores is death—

Death stark and out of hiding!

Why reck an insect’s breath

When you have watched its kind succumb

To torture slow of clinging gum

While people fed beneath?

Now on the far horizon

A hundred sparklets burst—

Flung jewels to bedizen

The plane that’s made it first.

See that? Why don’t you scram, you fool!

And such a shy child too at school

With sensitiveness cursed.

This isn’t courage surely

When there’s no grip of fear?

More like you float demurely

Through some strange dream up here

Where beauty dwells not lone in bloom

But everywhere in gleam and gloom

Cloudcap and starlight clear.

See now, to port it lightens,

Sky waning as for dawn;

A sheaf of rays outwhitens

From cloud-smoke subtly drawn

Up to the zenith far deployed

Like searchlights filtered to the void

Beyond our visual bourn.

Intenser now and broader

The wavering columns slant

Like Jacob’s dreamed-of ladder

Where angels came and went.

Then suddenly its brilliance goes,

Switched off; and leaving mists of rose

The Northern Lights are spent.

Instead there melts a hailstorm

Of meteorites above.

And quickened to a maelstrom

Your mind begins to move

In trance of spirals beauty-blown

Swirling up silt of all things known

That you have learned to love.

Childjoys no lapse erases

In memory rooted deep,

Some radiant, some like daisies

Folded from dusk in sleep;

With choice delights and studied lore

The æsthete and the epicure

Strive all their lives to keep:

Old rhymes and scraps of singing

That surely had their birth

Not in man’s brain but ringing

From some nesh grot of earth;

And churchlight hymns of evening late

With the dear vicar bald of pate

Intoning from his girth;

Breathtake of speed, fast riding,

The dive to tackle low,

Ice-risp of skates, and sliding

And squeak of trodden snow;

Warm kitchen-scents of seasoned food,

Old leathern volumes, polished wood,

Deep-mirrored candle-glow;

All quietness, and gardens,

Curled baby-fists of ferns,

March-time when earth unhardens

Till autumn when it burns;

And seafruit brown on brinepocked walls

Where England’s tide forever falls

And evermore returns;

Welsh mist on mountain-passes,

Showers on a distant weald,

Soft furry-pollened grasses

To bare shins in a field;

Young loves that cost ideals to lose—

Wet bubbles swum with prism-hues—

By kissing unannealed;

And song of larks, and laughter

Of stone-chocked mountain becks—

Shall all of these hereafter

Become dishonoured cheques

Because five airmen, rated sane,

Three miles up in a well-built plane

Turned back to save their necks?

New models now with beauty

Unclothing as you climb

Ordain æsthetic duty

For you, whate’er the time—

P’raps wistful twilights after tea,

Morn’s work, or midnight suddenly—

To cast their limbs in rhyme.

Yet more than limbs, as Rembrandt

Drawing ruggedness or grace

Mixed in that palette-semblant

The spirit of a face;

So these cold images that roam

Dead space, with your breath shall become

A living speaking race—

If fate permits; for sudden

The dark is bloomed with fire.

You bank and kick the rudder

And try to climb up higher.

Your mind, detached, now gets it straight—

There is no destiny nor fate,

Just chance and man’s desire.

Life’s course is our volitions,

A cable, strands and stress,

That’s fouled by chance collisions—

Crosstracks in wilderness.

Here’s your volition, there’s the Hun’s—

Predictors, fuses, ’lights and guns;

Cross them, and what a mess!

Above these angry islands

And flakships off the coast

Your heart grows more defiant,

Lips curl as if to boast

Till touched once more by beauty. Soon

From cloudy grave you spy the moon

Upstealing like a ghost,

First just a drowned man’s forehead

And then a broken face

Smiling a bit, yet worried

As one without a place

Ever to pause in and call home

But still with sateless soul must roam

And never slacken pace.

And so the cloud-clumps whiten

Like broccoli aglow,

While some like lanterns brighten

With searchlights from below.

Frost-imps sparkle the glass in dance;

Steel sickles round the airscrews glance

And shimmer to and fro.

Now three miles down in Denmark

The burgher wakes and harks

To the double thump of engines

And dreams of Viking barques;

While angry order-snapping Huns

Hurry to load the longsnout guns

That yap like little dachs.

Meantime the cloud decreases

With gaps through which you see

A dark-spread land, some pieces

Glimmering unevenly,

Steelwire of streams and molten lakes,

Till in one flood the moonlight breaks

Over the Baltic Sea,

Whose level not unbroken

By whitening wash of spray

And shades of cloud that darken

Like islands black on grey,

Extends far east to Sweden’s shore

While many a deckled coastline more

Frets northwards and away.

Reflector moon at midnight,

Engines without a hitch,

Lights on the earth and starlight—

Bank wings, and which is which?

There Copenhagen’s streetlights glow

Miles off, yet seeming just below

Like glimworms in a ditch,

And there above, the Dipper

Serves gods imagined stew

While you, nocturnal tripper,

Have only gum to chew

Or frozen barley-sugar drops

That taste like ice flung off the props

And chip like brittle glue.

So you call up the others—

Switch on your microphone

And like five lifelong brothers

All chaff and swear and moan,

Make light of things lest courage fail

Or lest the gunner in the tail

Should feel too much alone.

Banking, you turn for Prussia.

Now all the stars have swung

And the moon above White Russia

Plays Hamlet in among

High cloudy tombs, white without heat,

Thin as the barley-sugar sweet

That’s melting on your tongue.

Moon in your mouth dissolving—

So soon must all be black?

And shall the earth’s revolving

Not bring the daylight back

To these tired eyes, warm kissing lips;

Must death be one long-drawn eclipse,

Eternal dive through flak?

This lap above the target

Most dangerous of all,

No devil-mask to mark it,

No searchlight yet, no shell,

Just moonlit stillness, would disarm

Suspicion, as the golden calm

Before a thunder-squall.

But ere that mood can settle

Five bombs splash flame ahead

As if earth’s dull grey metal

Were scum on molten lead.

And at this signal suddenly

Their barrage smashes up the sky

To justify their dead.

Their dead? To think, those splashes

Meant bricks and bodies burst

Asunder . . . Barking flashes

Much nearer than at first—

You weave and slacken speed in climb

Frowning and thinking all the time

How distance rubs the worst

Off this destructive melée—

You who would loathe to plunge

A bayonet in a belly

With puncturing grinding lunge,

Yet drop He’s on human-kind,

Kill hundreds and still keep a mind

Soft as a soapy sponge.

And so with prices soaring

Save one commodity

Man’s life . . . No sense ignoring

Your own—stupidity

To cogitate at the controls—

Chuck it before you’re full of holes

Leaking senility.

Watch for the guns below you,

Turn off, once flashes seen,

And bursting shells will show you

Just where you would have been.

That makes you laugh, to fox them so.

In front a tracer shell mounts slow,

Sparkling electric green—

An age dead slow it rises,

Seems to accelerate—

You throttle back, it misses

And bursts ten yards too late.

The quivering plane disturbs that fly

Almost forgotten; one last try

To mould its own small fate—

So taking off it dashes

Towards the cockpit light

But stalls and spins and crashes

In darkness out of sight

Somewhere under the rudder-bar.

What slaves of circumstance they are

Who yield without a fight!

Here was a little hero

Who gallantly defied

Nigh forty below zero

And heights where his inside

Was made a vacuum; yet knelt

Not down but, hit below the belt,

Took his last count and died.

A housefly born in England,

English! And visions rise

Of summer woods in England,

Of warmth and sunny skies,

A rambling farmhouse by a stream,

The dairy-kitchen bright with cream

And musical with flies.

A sudden strong emotion

Puts feathers down your back;

And you who had the notion

Of sifting white from black,

Because the Jerries killed your fly

Now face the target angrily

And run up in the flak.

Let them burst close—you care not.

Fear is a vanity;

And he who cries “I dare not”

Obscures reality

In panic blur of images.

Imagination sees what is

Not just what seems to be.

“Left, left!” You shove the rudder

While white-hot shrapnel whines,

And the plane jumps and judders

As the navigator lines

The target in his graticule.

An English fly—you silly fool!

And the moon so calmly shines . . .

Oh concentrate—“Right, steady.”

Turn without bank, quite flat—

Hold it! Was that just heady

Girl-sentiment, all that

About old England, or more worth—

Pride in the land that gave you birth

And her enduring fate?

Hold steady! Rein her rearing

From shells, the frenzied colt!

These seconds’ perfect steering,

Then let her buck and jolt.

There go black smoke-puffs whiffing by,

Smell them? The plane leaps suddenly—

“Bombs gone.” Now let her bolt,

Now turn and dive and sideslip,

Go berserk in the sky

While the Germans cringe in hiding

And hear increasingly

The downward massive rush of bombs,

Knowing that now the moment comes

For England’s grim reply

To gauntlets flung on London,

On Coventry and Hull,

On Newcastle and Swansea,

Plymouth and Liverpool.

Remember these at each great flash—

Your conscience will be through the wash

All ironed, aired and cool.

Yet not in retribution

Alone lies moral calm;

More, knowing the solution

Is not to shrink, disarm,

But, giving inquisition back

A taste of its own grisly rack,

Blast out the roots of harm.

Once it seemed fine to juggle

With creeds and blow hot air;

But life is one long struggle;

Fighting—enacted prayer.

In action your philosophy

Soon simplifies and easily

Balances care with dare.

For risk is back. No longer

Is earth a sheltered nook

To fuss for a cut finger

Or drowse with pipe and book.

Now life is radiator-cooled

And blood the water you were schooled

Was precious. Yes, and look

At you the hunter hunted

By baying packs below,

Laughing yourself undaunted

As you weave to and fro,

And tasting fox’s joy, for you

Unlike the poor apes who pursue

Can choose just where you’ll go.

So back across the Baltic.

Petrol? That makes you think.

If yon gauge isn’t faulty

You’ll land up in the drink.

“Gauge must be duff,” the others vote,

“And we’d rather float in a rubber boat

Than rot in Jerry’s clink!”

So on and over Denmark

Where now the sky’s blown clear;

And the burghers down in Denmark

Wake up again to hear

The double thump of English planes

And think once more of Viking Danes

Whose vengeance now they fear.

Cold searchlight fingers groping

Blue with no knuckles, thin,

Too frail to knock yet hoping

To find somebody in.

One picks you up; scores turn on full,

Till the plane becomes a silver gull,

The airscrews discs of tin.

They dazzle past believing.

No flak? You wonder why.

This web is spider’s weaving

And you are just the fly.

A cone of beams that stick like glue,

Each slowly hypnotizing you

With brilliant blinding eye.

Evasive turns grow wider;

You wait to hear the worst.

At last, here comes the spider—

The gunner sees him first

Attacking on the starboard beam;

A quick steep turn, you see him gleam

Across—one vicious burst

From flame-tongued guns as swerving

He whistles out of sight,

The errant tracers curving

Downward like meteorites.

He’s missed you! But he'll come again,

He’s bound to see you plain as plain

Amid this blaze of lights.

(A ring of ropes, a bell tolled,

Two floodlit, crowds to cheer;

One soon will need a knell tolled,

The other pints of beer.)

These lights! You're naked to the brain.

Look out, he’s coming in again,

Attacking from the rear.

Hold steady, so the gunner

Can pull a steady bead.

(There’s beer, beer for the winner,

Gallons of Saxon mead!)

“Oi got ’im, skip!” the gunner cries—

(Beer dripping from the punctured skies)—

A flame zooms overhead

Like a tarry torch flung outward

From the window of a tower,

Then spins and tumbles downward

Blazing—hour after hour

Like Lucifer from heaven’s heights

It seems to fall, seven days and nights,

Then bursts into a shower

Of dropping petals, autumn

The searchlights follow down.

“Thanks, Number Six!” . . . “Oi caught’n

Just where Oi wanted’n;

But don’t thank me, thank y’ lucky stars!”

There reddish overhead sits Mars

One foot upon the moon.

So back across the ocean

Above the clouds again

With gentle downward motion

Steady you steer the plane,

One of so many flocking home

Like ghosts that all the night-time roam

Till stars begin to wane.

Now in the half-light dawning

Suddenly tiredness comes.

You have a bout of yawning

And lick your salty gums

And eat the icicles off your chin

Wishing you had an aspirin

Or a couple of double rums.

The gunner starts to weaken—

Sees fighters everywhere,

Thinks Jupiter a beacon

And Betelgeuse a flare.

So each man gets his thermos flask,

Chocolate, biscuits—who would ask

For more elaborate fare?

And like old gods of Vikings

Above the clouds you sit

And feast each to his liking;

Then long for a cigarette

To keep your sense erect, not drop

Asleep. But still the wireless op.

Is trying in a sweat

To get a last loop-bearing.

If you keep changing course

He’ll chuck it and start swearing

In savage bursts of Morse.

So swerving not you fly unbowed

Between high bergs of curdled cloud

Which from its hidden source

Dawn tints with rose and coral

As in what pucker prudes

Would call “those scarcely moral

French paintings of fat nudes” —

Warm flesh-curves, purple-hollowed thighs,

Half-limbs that wrestle in the skies,

Amorphous interludes.

Streaked cirrus high above you—

Ceiling reflecting fire

In colours that might move you

If the petrol gauge were higher;

But now, resigned, you all inflate

Mae Wests, put rations by, and wait

For the engines to expire.

Click on a switch; one instant,

Soothe down the valves that scream,

And sweet as birds comes distant

The cheeping of the beam,

Friendly and small as a window-light

To wanderers in a stormy night

Stumbling towards its gleam.

The English coast is nearing;

You throttle back and glide.

Cloud-surf like waves appearing—

A frozen ocean-tide

Of fleecy stillness—suddenly

Assuming speed whips foaming by

Your sinking ship that slides

Into a turbulent dimness

Where cockpit lights seem bright

Once more, and red-hot glimness

Burns either side the kite,

Which now gets tossed and heaved and flung

As in a blanket for some young

Sadistic gods’ delight.

St. Elmo lights the muzzles

Of guns, blue fire on steel;

Wraith-bright each airscrew whizzles

A monstrous Catherine-wheel.

The windscreen thickens in a trice,

You can’t see through; and lumps of ice

Off the propellers peel—

Machine-gun glass and metal

Three inches from your head,

While myriad droplets settle

On the wings and weigh like lead.

Spite of hot air the engines cough,

Props windmill. That gauge wasn’t duff:

The petrol must have bled

From a wounded tank. You’ve had it.

At the last round of the match—

And to think you might have made it

Without a single scratch!

Very lights, food, each quickly packs.

The second pilot takes the axe

And chops away the hatch.

The wireless op. is sending

An SOS to base.

Two thousand feet, descending

Still through this cloud of ice.

But wait—auxiliary tanks! A knack

They have of sucking petrol back

And getting filled up twice.

Ask then. No harm in trying.

They’re fools who slip downhill

To death without defying

Cross-circumstance with will.

The wireless op. makes his report:

“The starboard’s empty, but the port

Has forty gallons still.”

There then it skulks in hiding,

Enough for half an hour!

Switch on, and check this gliding;

Let’s feel some driving power!

But still the props just windmill round.

You drop from cloud without a sound—

A space of mist and shower

And then the sea, grey, angry,

Wallowing under rain.

Those petrol pipes are empty,

The pumps suck air in vain.

Nose down and turn—yes, vertical bank

Till the splashing fuel in the tank

Runs through the pipes again.

The engines catch and splutter,

Hesitate, roar away—

Just lift you from a gutter

Between two banks of spray,

And blowing back the salty spume

Heave upward through the dismal gloom

That folks down here call day.

In front the coast of England

Stands brown and beckoning;

And down the coast of England

You see beneath your wing

A convoy like a fleet of toys,

And scan the shore for giant boys

Who sail them on a string.

As if you were a partridge

Their warning gunfire booms.

You fire a Very cartridge—

Its flaming message zooms

Far out, two stars of green and red

That like shot jungle-parrots shed

A trail of brilliant plumes.

Safe through the rain-grey daylight,

Cloudbase downsifting steam,

You strike the singing twilight,

The twilight of the beam;

Then changing course, the drome in sight,

You wonder if that nightmare night

Was after all a dream.

But now, so tired that scowling

To banish useless thought

You just watch on the cowling

How drops of oil get caught

And dragged along by the slipstream’s power

In greasy trails—hour after hour

Of endless pointless sport—

You lower the undercarriage

And concentrate anew;

Bad landing would disparage

The whole triumphant crew.

The hedge whips under—now your eye

Makes out the grass-blades flashing by—

Hold off, off, off—you’ll do!

A whistle of propellers

After the engines die,

Then silence. “Nice work, fellers!”

But look—a little fly

Hungry for breakfast loops about

Your nose! Write, “Duty carried out

Without a casualty.”

Pilot, P/O. George Eades, 431 Squadron, Wellington X HE503 SE-S. Crashed, with the loss of all the crew 26/27th March 1943. Submitted to Aircrew Remembered by his relatives, in July 2012.

Aircrew Remembered, having gained permission from relatives, hope to reproduce this book, with details of his final operation. Another relative will also be producing this book in its original format. All profits from our version will be going to the Bomber Command Memorial Fund. 

Permission must be sought before reproducing/copying any of the poems in this article from the family of the late George Eades (nephew), (Sisters Janet and Brenda, widow and daughters) Please respect this!