The Ballad of Lancelot Percival Williamson
The Ballad of Lancelot Percival Williamson
(Eaton Farm Sedgeford, 1920-1945)
Brave Unselfish Loving
His pilot shot dead - and though still just a fitter,
He safely landed a crew and crocked plane
On the sands of time; and in heaven’s
Elysian fields, he wrote his name.
Flight Sergeant Pilot Lancelot
Percival Williamson
Percy and Ann nee Docking’s
Youngest surviving son.
Like the green corn that ripens to gold
In a heatwave of early July,
On his home farm in Sedgeford he rooted
The wings that would touch the sky.
Like the green corn that ripens to tinder
In the blaze of a quickened July,
On the wheatfields of Eaton he rooted
But in air he would live and die.
Learned his Fahrenheit, furlongs and farthings
His fathoms and phrases at Fring,
Stepping west to the church choir at Heacham,
Learned his key notes and how to sing.
“It’s in the air!” …. “young Percy’s caught it!
In his all-rounder’s safe pair of hands!”
“He bowls like a bomber’s propellor;
“When he bats, it’s tin hats in the stands.”
“I saw him play last week for Sedgeford,
The last game he ever played.
First his short but explosive innings
Then his full flighted balls, like grenades.”
Norfolk-quiet, reserved, Norfolk quick,
Joined the Raff in ’39;
To serve in the bomb-heat of Malta
Through the fiercest two years of that time.
Got his wings out in Africa, Rhodesia,
On the Empire Air Training scheme;
He flew for four years over strange lands
To defend the clipped wings of a dream;
Got his angel-wings comprehending darkness
Where bats out of bunker-hell stream
The most subhuman fundament of culture,
A vampire State’s blood-oiled machine.
Bullets strafe the fuselage,
Shrapnel shatters the cockpit,
Rat a tat tat, 6 men in a coffin,
A gone-south wild winter goose rocket.
Two Libyan campaigns, town and desert:
Two mentions in despatches;
That real culture war when ‘take back control’
Meant - not Breck’s Isle bats - but worldwide watches.
His pilot shot dead - and though still just a fitter,
He safely landed a crew and crocked plane
In the desert of time; and against Eden’s
Wildernessed fields, he set his name.
Flight Sergeant Pilot Lancelot
Percival Williamson
Percy and Ann nee Docking’s
Second surviving son.
From on high in a red and black mass
Of hell cross upside down fire
On the wings of the gathering world-storm's
Backward swastika ceaseless gun ire.
Bullets strafe the fuselage,
Shrapnel shatters the cockpit,
Rat a tat tat, 6 men in a coffin,
A gone-south wild winter goose rocket.
Came home for ten weeks in ’44
Then served a fifth year, out of India,
In that other end-of-Empire war
Up the rising sunsets over Burma.
Came home for good, April ’45
All his war work fully, derring done,
Sweet and 20 survived, 5 year death defied -
But a full world war from where he’d come.
One last, lost, home leave, one ruth breath
In the corn of his parents’ place
Then: Advanced Flying Unit Training Command
At Wheaton Aston Military Base
Over Little Eaton, just north of Derby,
His reported ‘Unauthorised Low Flying
On A Training Flight Into A Tree’ (ct, thick-hedged
25, off a no-ball) finds a daft way of dying.
After such gallantry, such Wing It splendour,
Over Malta and Libya, on the Burma air front,
A local-exercise aerodrome in England
On Friday 13 July 1945, was his exeunt.
RIP Lancelot Percival. You lived up to your impossibly
Arthurian names that don’t touch the ground -
Like summer lightning silvering thunderous clouds;
How did your generation ever get down?
The country boyhood vale shielded from the world,
The man-kindly mastery of knightly combat,
The fidelity to Logres to the end of its bitterest hour’s
Mortal glimpse of a grail it couldn’t quite grasp;
The war-bereaved mother country wishing
Her child of the Twenties a world without knights’
Dazzling airborne armour taken for angels
Until death’s Blanchefleur-grail puts that vision right?
While a self-buried goose-stepping corpse hate-saluted, you flew
For this quiet, reserved land we love, in a crocked plane.
I salute you. BRAVE. UNSELFISH. LOVING. In heaven’s
Elysian fields, you wrote your name.
Flight Sergeant Pilot Lancelot
Percival Williamson
Percy and Ann nee Docking’s
Almost surviving son.
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