The nature and the strength of friendship...

Almost half a century ago, a great friend of the family was buried in an old graveyard in Sylhet, amidst the tea gardens whose labour force he had doctored to, for many years, following his retirement from the RAMC as a Colonel in the British Indian Army.
He had fought the Japanese, and been made their prisoner, having been captured with the fall of Singapore. During the course of his imprisonment he had endured all sorts of torture, and lost most of his sight as a result of the treatment they had meted out to him.
Throughout his imprisonment he had kept hidden in the mud floor of his hut, a large silver Hongkong Dollar. In later life he kept this permanently with him as a reminder of what he had endured. When my father retired leaving to return to Scotland after a half-century on the Subcontinent, the Colonel handed the silver Hongkong Dollar to my father, asking him to keep it as a memento of their long friendship.
Sixty-five years after having been buried in the mud floor of a Japanese Prisoner-of-War camp hut, that coin sits here on my desk, a reminder both of their enduring friendship and what the Colonel lived through.

On the Colonel’s grave, in Begum Khan cemetery are engraved the words,
“The Tumult of a Thousand Wings”.
What you may ask is the connection to John Drinkwater’s poem?
There was no clue to its origins, and his widow, who had commissioned it, was no longer there to ask. Google provided half of the answer; and his family then remembered that as a young medical student in Liverpool, where he met his future wife, they had lived in a flat overlooking the tramlines...
So when the geese fly high over my pond on their way to roost beside Findhorn Bay, and I look out of my study window to watch them, I think sometimes of my father, and his old friend, and the nature and strength of friendship...


BEYOND my window in the night
Is but a drab inglorious street,
Yet there the frost and clean starlight
As over Warwick woods are sweet.

Under the grey drift of the town
The crocus works among the mould
As eagerly as those that crown
The Warwick spring in flame and gold.

And when the tramway down the hill
Across the cobbles moans and rings,
There is about my window-sill
The tumult of a thousand wings.