Jo Walton ([info]papersky) wrote,
@ 2007-12-15 10:37:00
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Henry Ellis Hoad, "Harry", 1897-1917
[info]desperance found a family bible with a school recommendation in it, and then found out what happened to poor Harry Hoad, such a promising boy, along with most of his generation.

And I thought he'd be dead anyway, he was born a hundred and twenty years ago. He died ninety years ago. But he could have lived seventy years and left things to posterity. He might have become a great artist, or maybe not, maybe he'd have been a draughtsman in an office and a husband and a father and a grandfather. But he didn't, poor Harry. I keep thinking of his parents putting that recommendation into the bible. It was probably all they had of him. They must have been so proud. But the bible was left in the attic. Maybe the whole family died out with Harry. Our lives are so fragile, so easily lost, so quickly forgotten.

The last thing the world needs is more Great War poetry, or even songs, but there you go. Posted in the comment thread there, and now here so I can find it.

Young Harry Hoad was an excellent lad
His conduct was good and his schoolwork not bad,
He was good with his drawing since he was just small
But he's nobody's grand-dad at all.

Chorus:
He's nobody's grand-dad, no grand-dad at all
No pictures for birthdays, no kicking a ball,
No kids rushing out at his step in the hall,
He's nobody's grand-dad at all

He was somebody's pupil and somebody's son
He was well recommended, he worked and he won
They must have been proud, he was grown up and tall,
But he's nobody's grand-dad at all.

He was Corporal Hoad, he went over the top
In the war in the trenches that no-one could stop
He was brave and determined, he answered the call
But he's nobody's grand-dad at all.

Now all that remains is his headmaster's word
And a cross in a field, and the fact that we heard
What we're learning today of his life and his fall,
For he's nobody's grand-dad at all.

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[info]kightp
2007-12-15 03:52 pm UTC (link)
Oh, that's heartbreaking.

The world so often is.

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[info]tapestry01
2007-12-15 04:28 pm UTC (link)
That was beautiful.

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[info]pogodragon
2007-12-15 04:28 pm UTC (link)
Thank you for writing that. I read [info]desperance's posts on the subject and was moved. For some reason WWI always affects me more personally than WW2 (my Grandad was born in 1895 and was injured at Ypres, which has something to do with it I suspect).

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[info]athenais
2007-12-15 05:03 pm UTC (link)
It's compact and sad without being mawkish, a fitting testimonial to the death of Harry Hoad about whom we know just enough to fire our imaginations.

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[info]sovay
2007-12-15 05:09 pm UTC (link)
The last thing the world needs is more Great War poetry, or even songs, but there you go.

Exceptions will be made if they're as good as yours.

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[info]ckd
2007-12-15 06:29 pm UTC (link)
Seconded.

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[info]fledgist
2007-12-15 09:34 pm UTC (link)
Definitely.

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[info]lethargic_man
2007-12-16 10:11 am UTC (link)
The world does need the sort of reaction that gives rise to Great War poetry and songs. It's when this stops happening, when the horror of war is forgotten, that the possibility arises of it happening again. Which, I get the impression though I know little of nineteenth-century history in general, is how the First World War happened in the first place. If the lessons from the Napoleonic Wars, or possibly the Crimean War, had not been forgotten over such a long period of peace at home afterwards, who knows how differently the twentieth century might have turned out.

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[info]ffutures
2007-12-15 06:37 pm UTC (link)
My mother had three brothers she never met - they were all killed in WW1, a few years before she was born. They would have been my uncles if they'd lived.

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[info]carandol
2007-12-15 07:19 pm UTC (link)
Oh, lovely. It reminds me of Eric Bogle's WWI songs. I think a tune is in the offing.

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[info]papersky
2007-12-15 07:27 pm UTC (link)
I've just written a sort of chorus.

He's nobody's grand-dad, no grand-dad at all
No pictures for birthdays, no kicking a ball
No kids rushing out at his step in the hall,
He's nobody's grand-dad at all.

And I realised as I was doing it that I was hearing your voice singing it, and sort of thinking about your grand-dad writing funny poems, so please do write a tune. The one in my head is no use to anyone.

I feel all upset over someone who died 90 years ago and his non-existent might-have-been grandchildren. Z will laugh at me.

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[info]carandol
2007-12-15 08:42 pm UTC (link)
Well, the sound quality's not up to much, since I recorded with a Skype headset, and my voice isn't hitting the high notes as well as it should because it hasn't been getting enough exercise lately, but here's a rough version of a song as an MP3:

www.carandol.net/Cabaret/Henry Ellis Hoad.mp3

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[info]papersky
2007-12-15 10:19 pm UTC (link)
Wow, Ken, it sounds just like a real song.

Thank you.

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[info]carandol
2007-12-15 11:02 pm UTC (link)
Gosh, well, if it *sounds* like a song, I guess it must be! Thank you, too.

I now feel like, what with this, the tale of Harry's school letter, and my grandad's written piece about going over the top, I have some sort of performance piece for next November. Must talk to the Spotlight Club people.

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[info]mjlayman
2007-12-16 01:38 am UTC (link)
Ending the chorus in a minor is an excellent touch, and I like the way you mostly-repeated the notes line-by-line in the verses and varied them in the chorus. That's unusual.

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[info]carandol
2007-12-16 02:00 am UTC (link)
Thank you! I'd already come up with the tune for the verse (with a minor at the end) when [info]papersky sprang the chorus on me, and I realised if the verse and chorus were exactly the same, what with all those grand-dads in it, things could get pretty repetitive. So I moved the minor to the end of the chorus, and had the middle of the chorus go up in an almost angry way, while keeping the verses in a major key because they're fairly positive; except for the third verse, which dropped to almost all minor for the war itself, before returning to major when the war ended.

And I think that's the first time I've ever analysed one of my tunes to that extent; possibly because I wasn't using my own words.

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[info]wcg
2007-12-15 07:22 pm UTC (link)
Thank you Jo. There's never too much of this sort of poetry.

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[info]tekalynn
2007-12-15 08:40 pm UTC (link)
WWI seems to be almost forgotten in the US, so reminders are good for your southern neighbors. Especially in these times.

Thank you.

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[info]xiphias
2007-12-15 09:22 pm UTC (link)
This morning, when Lis and I were at the diner for breakfast, I was telling her about this, and about how we were all feeling quite affected by Harry Hoad's story, even though we'd never met him, and just knew a very few facts about him.

And she pointed out how, as we were paging through the city census records of the people who lived in our house, there was one year where only the husband was listed and the wife no longer was -- they were about seventy-five years old at the time. And we both felt a jolt, and sadness. And that was someone who had lived a full life. And we knew nothing about them besides one line per year in the city census, and yet cared about them.

And she said how comforting this was. That, perhaps, one day, a person a hundred years from now would find a very few records of us, almost nothing, and yet care about us the way we care about that husband and wife who lived in our house, and how we care about Harry Hoad.

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[info]papersky
2007-12-16 05:02 pm UTC (link)
Yes. It isn't much, but it isn't nothing either.

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[info]fledgist
2007-12-15 09:34 pm UTC (link)
Er, Jo, 1897 was 110 years ago, not 120. You had me puzzled for a moment as to what a thirty-year-old was doing going over the top in 1917. It does make perfect -- alas -- sense for a twenty-year-old.

So many men who left no inheritance but a few possessions and a name.

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[info]papersky
2007-12-16 06:20 pm UTC (link)
Arithmetic has never been my strong point!

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[info]fledgist
2007-12-16 06:44 pm UTC (link)
It happens to all of us!

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[info]bibliogirl
2007-12-15 11:29 pm UTC (link)
*applause*

My great-grandad was killed in WWI, leaving various children including my grandad who would have been... hm... two? He was a Territorial soldier. I've read [info]desperance's posts with interest.

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[info]bethzebra
2007-12-16 12:38 am UTC (link)
My own grand-dad was born in 1896 and survived the Great War, although he died long before I was born and I never knew him. "It's a Long Way to Tipperary" is a lullaby in our family because he sang it to my mother and she sang it to me and now I sing it to my children. I guess I never thought about how lucky this makes me, although of course all of us alive now are by definition descendants of those who were lucky enough to survive to have us - but surviving under those circumstances seems particularly lucky. My recent ancestors on my *father's* side were Austrian Jews who came to the USA in 1918, which seems to take the good fortune to ridiculous extremes. Who was it who said how often we fail to notice when the gods smile upon us?

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[info]kythiaranos
2007-12-16 12:58 am UTC (link)
I love that poem.

And I like the thought of all of us considering this man's life so long after his death.

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[info]goljerp
2007-12-16 01:36 am UTC (link)
Indeed. I'm sure that Mr. Hoad would far rather have come home from the Great War, but I'd like to think that he'd have been pleased at being remembered 90 years after his death.

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[info]don_fitch
2007-12-16 04:54 am UTC (link)
So sad, yes. As are many of the Familiy Records sections in the hundred-plus-years-old Bibles one sometimes sees in used-book stores -- tossed out because no-one is interested any more. Somewhere around here I have a photocopy of the records in an old Smith family Bible (via one of my great-grandmothers' maternal line, I think). So many births and deaths less than ten years apart, so many siblings buried at different places (mostly in Canada and New York/Vermont) within a decade or so on either side of 1812. Sometimes I wonder if there's an OnLine Site where such data can be posted.

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[info]mjlayman
2007-12-16 11:57 pm UTC (link)
I just read a couple of books that are about "no grand-dads at all". We read Pratchett's Only You Can Save Mankind for bookgroup yesterday and I went on and read the rest of the trilogy: Johnny and the Dead and Johnny and the Bomb. These are his only SF and they're YA; everybody in the group liked the first one, which is unusual for us. Usually there's a/r/g/u/discussion. The last two deal with WWI dead and WWI almost/maybe dead.

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[info]sion_a
2007-12-17 04:16 pm UTC (link)
Maybe the whole family died out

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