Her name was Susan, I read on her stone,

a wife and a mother of three,

all orphaned in nineteen sixty six

when she stepped onto the A303.

 

My brother’s soft-top too fast, too sleek,

the Give Way sign veiled in leaves, 

so his grave lies next to Susan’s.

He shot over the A303.

 

the highway through the barrows,         

by Stonehenge, on to Glastonbury,

becomes something else, but everyone knows

it is still the A303.

 

It’s the old straight road down to the west

and it glides past the cemetery

where side by side its children rest

who died for the A303.

 

I wrote this poem earlier this century about something that happened half way through the last century, ( the same subject matter as ‘The Hardest Day’ written and posted yesterday)  but posting it today, 27th January 2016.

50 years ago today, when i was 9, my brother Hamish died in a car crash aged 23. Where does the time go? I remember the morning so clearly and the effects on my mother, the journey to Salisbury Plain, time off school and the end of being bullied when i went back again, as my status was elevated to The Girl With The Dead Brother. But of him only i have one clear memory: a couple of years before, my parents still married and me attending Avondale, a school for army children on bleak Salisbury Plain, i missed the school bus (again) and Hamish drove me to school in his open topped MG wearing just his pyjamas. So he saved me twice. I gave my son Hamish his name. RIP glamorous brother. I know a lot of people will be thinking of you today