Born a son of the soil
A westcountryman,
An artisan.
Not especially well educated
In all ways, unremarkable.
Asking for little
And receiving less.
No soldier, but a baker.
Now, just a random number
And a name on a gravestone.
Sorry about that. I'm currently working on poems by Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen with some of the children in work, and whenever I do this, I can't help thinking about my great grandfather, a man called Edgar Bennett. He was my father's mother's father, and was killed on the first day of the Battle of Passchendaele. I always knew he had been killed in the First World War. but it was only a few years ago that I managed to find out when and where. I'm fairly sure that when I visited his grave in 2016, I was the first member of the family ever to do so.
