‘Wounds or sea-water’

Charles Causley's life was affected very profoundly by both world wars. He was born in 1917 and grew up in Launceston, an inland town in Cornwall, close to the Devon border. The family were quite poor, especially after 1924 when Charles’ father Stanley finally died from the effects of poison gas exposure in the trenches of the Great War. All the time Charles knew him, his father ‘was a dying man. His service in France had shattered him physically. He was invalided out of the army in 1918 with a disability pension’. It is hardly surprising, then, that when his own turn came to be conscripted, in 1940, he did his best to avoid the perils of army life in favour of the perils of navy life, and became a coder on HMS Glory – though the trench-war poetry of Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, both of whom he had been reading since his teens, must also have weighed heavily on his mind. It turned out to be a fortuitous decision, anyway, in terms of self-preservation: he never took part in serious military confrontation. But having suffered the devastation of war second-hand as a small child, through his father's slow demise, he now experienced it over a sustained period through the deaths of friends and peers. As we shall see, his war poems are often invigorated by tensions in wartime experience between comradeship and isolation, familiarity and strangeness, and feelings of guilt or at least anxiety about the luck of surviving.

By his own accounts, Causley did not take well to life at sea. In fact, he even seems to have viewed the sea as another sort of enemy. In 1975, when asked about what it had initially felt like to find himself in the navy, he replied: ‘I was afraid. I was seasick, and the sea was big. It was bloody big and much more frightening than the German submarines. My main concern was to stay on the thing and not fall over the side.’ He would forever profess ‘a healthy distrust of the sea: of how it has affected my own life, and also how it has very determinedly ended the lives of some of my friends’.