Rose's words of wartime burdens

A unique collection of Black Country poems has come to light. Peter Rhodes discovers Auntie Rose's rhymes.

She always carried a pencil and a writing pad. That is one of Peter Clarke's abiding memories of Rosanne Clarson, the woman he knew as Auntie Rose.

"She was a wonderful person," he recalls. "She was always noticing little things and straight away she'd write it down."

They were lifelong friends, living close to each other in Bloxwich before the Second World War.

In her final years, Rose was cared for by Peter and his wife Margaret. After she died in 1989, the couple took care of her brother, Bill.

And when Bill died 15 years ago, he left Rose's poetry - a yellowing collection of 40 scribbled and typewritten poems - to Peter.

He has now presented them for safe-keeping to the Express & Star."I'm 70 now and I wanted a good home for them," he explains.

And no wonder.

For here is an extraordinary testimony to one woman's experience of war and peace.

Rose worked as an ambulance driver during the wartime Blitz. Her brothers, Bill and Owen, served in the Royal Navy.

Owen's ship was sunk and he spent four years in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp.

The pride in her brothers, the anguish of separation and the agony of not knowing what had happened to the missing Owen are captured in verse.

Rose Clarson was no great literary figure. Her poems, as Simon and Garfunkel put it, are "words that tear and strain to rhyme".

And yet, behind the sometimes clumsy lines and sentimentality, is an eye for detail and an honesty which is deeply moving.

Rose was born in 1909 into an age of Empire. Much of her poetry reflects the imperial pride and simple Christianity that her generation took for granted.

On Armistice Day she sees a vision of the Glorious Dead and writes:

"Over this silent multitude the Flag you fought for stands,

The badge of freedom's fortitude, the Flag of freedom's land."

At the 1945 victory parade in London after the war, Rose fancies she encounters an angel, the soul of The Man Who Didn't Come Back. Together, angel and mortal watch the parade:

"When at my side a stranger. I only saw his face,

Yet it was strong and manly, full of heavenly grace.

He said, 'Look, they're coming. Watch how they march along.

In their steps is victory, on their lips a song'."

It is not all about war.

With deep tenderness, Rose reflects on the untimely death of her mother, the 1965 Aberfan disaster, the wonder of the first Christmas and the harrowing wait until her brother Owen, missing at sea, was confirmed a PoW. From that moment she had a special relationship with God, directing her prayers to:

"That God who, when a man, the angry waters heard,

Looked down from in his Heaven above, looked down and you were spared."

When her own death approached, Rosanne Clarson wanted no tears:

"Oh, mourn me not. Let not my passing be the cause of sorrow.

Dry those tears, smile awhile till the glad tomorrow

Think of me when morning gilds a darkened sky.

Hear me in the songs of birds when they fly on high."

Nearly 20 years after his beloved Auntie Rose died, Peter Clarke says he has no favourites and loves all her poems.

But he admits he is still moved to tears by this wartime poem when Rose tells of an elderly neighbour who amid the terror of the Blitz strove to save others.

To Mary, a Wartime Friend

by Rosanne Clarson

Mary, the sirens have sounded, can you hear the shrill loud blast?

Get in the shelter, Mary, stay till all danger's past.

"I can't go yet," said Mary. "Till I get the kids next door,

"Mother died two weeks ago, father's away at war."

I walked up the path with Mary, to see she dimmed the light,

Then went to drive my ambulance. It was a busy night.

Walking home next morning, with tired and aching feet,

I heard a direct hit was scored upon that tiny street.

Why do I remember Mary? Thousands died in the war.

I remember the courage of Mary because Mary was eighty-four.