Almanac Poetry: ‘Retrospect’ – T J Le Cheminant

Michael Pardy, Paul Noonan, Robyn Black, Jen Worthington, and Haiku Bob (Rob Scott) at the Poets’ Lunch

 

During the Footy Almanac Poets’ Lunch, the conversation at our table on Friday turned to the power of family stories – I think it was Robyn Black who was speaking about the knowledge and stories that are lost when someone dies. I mentioned that my mother wrote her autobiography after she retired after a career as a teacher. It was a personal project, but also a gift to her five sons. It’s a wonderful repository of family history. The reason it seemed apposite on Friday, as I mentioned at our table, was that Mum wrote about her uncle Tom, who she was very close to.  In her book she published two of Uncle Tom’s poems, which only survive because she captured them there. One of them was an elegy for a fallen comrade, killed in northern France in 2017.

 

My great-uncle, Thomas Le Cheminant, was born in 1893 at Lyon Mill, a hamlet near Sawyers Valley in the hills east of Perth. His family was poor, and he didn’t get to school until he was eight. Somehow the Christian Brothers order was alerted to the fact that he was a bright student and he was given a scholarship to CBC Fremantle. He achieved the highest mark for Western Australia and South Australia in the leaving certificate in Greek and Latin and eventually graduated from the University of Western Australia with degrees in maths and science.

 

In WW1 Uncle Tom served in the 11^th Battalion of the Australian Infantry Forces near Lille in northern France together with his best friend, Stan Piper. On 5 May 1917, Stan was killed in action. Uncle Tom wrote this poem in memory of his friend.

 

In 2017, one hundred year’s after his death, my brother Tim and I located and visited Stan Piper’s grave in the Commonwealth Cemetery at Queant Road Cemetery, Buissy, Nord Pas de Calais, France. I read this poem aloud at the grave side.

 

Uncle Tom lived in Attadale in later life. He was deeply religious: he and his wife Vida were staunch Catholics. They had no children but were surrogate grandparents to my four brothers and me. He rarely spoke about his war experiences. Our mother published this poem and another of Tom’s in her autobiography.

 

My staunch opposition to the Vietnam war and conscription during my teens and twenties came between me and a proper appreciation of Uncle Tom’s war service. This is a matter of regret. I’ve never been able to find out much about Stan Piper.

 

My band-mate Dave Warner asked me to recite this at a Dave Warner’s From The Suburbs Gig in North Fremantle on Anzac Eve 2024.

 

 

RETROSPECT

(By T.J. LE CHEMINANT)

 

Across the vast hiatus of the years,

The intervening gulf of hopes and fears,

Of fond remembrance and, I must confess,

Of barren spaces of forgetfulness,

My spirit leaps triumphant to that night,

In time-and-space-annihilating flight:

That night, when we two trudged the sunken road,

Groaning beneath the burden of the load;

And, when you staggered, I said, “Water, Stan?”

And you accepted, saying “Thanks, old man”.

And then we parted. When the morning came,

I chanced to hear another say your name.

I turned. He saw the question in my glance:

I read the answer in his countenance.

That night I did the little I could do,

Then marked the spot, and said a last adieu.

 

*********

 

The moon her orbit many times had spanned

When peace descended on the ravished land.

The years in passing had assuaged my loss,

And I came back to plant an oaken cross

To mark the hallowed place wherein was laid

The staunchest comrade God has ever made.

I thought to find the once familiar scene

But all was changed: a carpet rich and green

Hid all that field, with poppies grac’d

Where all was brown before and barren waste.

The trench, the dugout near where you were laid

Had disappeared. A railway newly made

That sacred precinct seemed to desecrate –

By love made holy: sanctified by hate:

Where foemen mingled their departing breath

In life divided but at one in death.

The long-portended rain began to fall

My spirit fell in unison, for all

That I so long had planned and hoped and dreamed

Had ended in futility, it seemed.

When suddenly the thought flashed through my head:

“Why should I straitly circumscribe his bed?

Though I can never hope the spot to trace

I’ll think the hill his final resting place.”

And at the summit, neath a weeping sky,

I fixed the cross to face the way you lie,

Your feet advanced, your back upon the sod,

And thus I left you in the arms of God.

 

 

More from Paul Noonan Here

 

More poetry from Almanac Poetry can be read HERE

 

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