Kathleen, Queen of the Desert

I walked through the Coventry Transport Museum that October

Exhibit after exhibit of what the German bombs had done those November nights in 1940;

Old newsreels of the dazed, the smashed, the burned

Firestorms having wiped out most of the city center

800 people dead, thousands injured and homeless

Different rooms had piped-in air raid sirens, people yelling, explosive concussions.

Then I walked through St. Michael’s Cathedral. Well, what was left of St. Michael’s Cathedral 

A shell of Luftwaffe destruction, a ruin, a relic, a reminder;

I heard many accents that day, but no German ones.

An old man caught my American accent

And told how his parents’ house had been vaporized

How as a little boy he’d been terrified that night

How 71 years later Coventry still hadn’t quite recovered.

Several days afterwards, when I visited my friend Norma in London,

She told me she’d been there, that very night

On a train with her RAF boyfriend Reg, heading south out of Coventry

I expected more serious, more searing, more sacred, more sad.

She put down her teacup, fingered the rim, turned her head

Looked out the window to her garden

Where her husband Reg had tended roses and wisteria, where he’d buried their dog.

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I sat, waiting for another Blitz story

More death and doom cached in a Londoner’s memory;

She placed her small spoon on the saucer.

“We didn’t really care who was bombing Coventry that night,” she whispered,

Staring out at the garden. “We were just outside of town when they stopped the train

And turned off all the lights, and it was so cold that November night

We could see the explosions and the fires from the windows

Reg had finally gotten leave, and we hadn’t seen each other for a month.

“We were young and in love, stuck together in a cold train car

Stopped in the darkness for the whole night;

We didn’t really care who was bombing Coventry that night.”

Coventry was bombed November 14^th and 15^th, 1940, by the German Luftwaffe. Other bombings occurred in 1941 and 1942. About 1,236 Coventrians were killed in all the raids combined.