The World is a Stage
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This time of year, one reminisces and occasionally lingers on those no longer with us.
My heart went roaming through the past remembering my brother Robert and my father, Ron Turner. What a weird family I was from! It doesn’t get any better when I added Mom and I into the mix.
Mom has always been a gentle soul, always looking for the good in people, and always forgiving. Dad was the life of the party. He could tell dirty rhymes and songs for hours, write the funniest letters, and compose the most thought provoking and profound poetry. He used to teach Rob and I very off-coloured songs at the dinner table, which had Mom up in arms and waggling him good. Then she’d turn around and try not to laugh out loud. But somehow she at least instilled in us the sense to know when we could repeat our inheritance and when to keep the more colourful songs behind closed lips.
How the two of them ever got together I will never understand, but it was a long lasting love, with Mom laughing for decades at the same jokes and crying whenever he wrote another poem to his Dreamboat.
Dad had Addison’s disease and was a guinea pig testing if cortisone would keep him alive. It did but it had many more side effects back then. Life was very difficult in the beginning, when I was a baby, but he managed to keep food on the table and Mom managed to make us understand that Dad’s erratic behaviour was because of his disease and not on purpose. Somehow it worked.
What he didn’t have was a lot energy. Trying to stay a whole day a work, if he did he was pretty much done before dinner. He had a lot of talent he could never cultivate, but he could still think and ponder and then create his poems.
Every Christmas, birthday, anniversary we may have gotten a gift, but we always got a poem and that is what we looked for first. Those poems, whether about the sword he gave my brother at Christmas or after an operation I had, or some little thing he’d give Mom, were the real present.
He occasionally asked tough questions of faith in his poems and occasionally soared on flights of fancy.
As with most of his generation, he was profoundly affected by WWII, with two brothers who served. Bruce, in the navy, survived, but Sid, a pilot, was killed. Dad had wanted to be a pilot too, however tuberculosis nipped that and many other future plans in the proverbial bud. Although he would wax poetical over Lancaster bombers and Spitfires, what he loved more were WWI planes. He even had a squadron of small plastic model kits of Sopwith Camels, Nieuports, Fokkers, and others he made, flying above his bar at home.
His father had been in WWI and lived long enough after being buried, filled with shrapnel and gassed, to start a family, before the gas finally killed him. I am sure Dad heard many stories.
I was going to write about a Tillsonburg man who died in WWI over the holidays to remind people what it was like - and still is like - for Canadians who have family serving in the forces. But while reminiscing through Dad’s poems I found one I thought I would share instead.
Sky Knights
By Ronald F. Turner - 1988
He dove on us from out the sun, he was the Boche - he was the Hun,
His blood-red Fokker sought its prey, Twin Spandau chattered on the way.
No way to dodge that vicious hail, no hope to shake him off our tail,
I saw his tracers rake our wing - The end for us, of everything.
But just before he had full aim, to send us down in smoke and flame,
A Sopwith Camel rent the air, it might have come from anywhere.
The blazing guns their target found, his plane went lurching toward the ground,
He waved but once before he died - A mother somewhere gasped and cried.
We watched his flaming coffin fall, and prayed God would forgive us all,
For he, like us, had only tried to serve his country ere he died.