20110301143956Seeking an Oasis
Dennis Butts on The Oasis Trust (ed.): Return to Oasis, From Oasis into Italy, Poems of the Second World War, More Poems of the Second World War, The Schools Oasis and The Voice of War
We come to war from many different directions. My own experiences are probably similar to those of some Slightly Foxed readers: a father who survived, just, serving in the trenches in the Great War (which he never talked about); an older brother who served in North Africa and Italy in the Second World War (which he hardly ever talked about); and childhood memories of men filling sandbags, of crouching in the cellar during air-raids, of the blackout and rationing, and the night we thought Hitler had landed in our small Worcestershire town, like something out of Dad’s Army.