Some 1.5 million Indian and Gurkha soldiers fought with the British forces in World War 1. Brighton Pavilion and neighbouring buildings were turned into a hospital specifically for these soldiers.
A strange trade under the banyan tree,
in the pavilion’s music room,
beneath the painted leaves and organ pipes
and where the copper dragon spreads webbed wings
and spits his fire through murderous teeth
over the lotus chandelier
to marvel diners at the royal banquets.
There comes George Henry Bull of County Cork,
renowned in Poona for his way with horses,
bringing his charges
from the Peshawar Valley
and sun-baked Afridi Hills
to Doctor Brighton,
via the Somme.
One hundred and twenty thousand postcards
record them standing to attention
or sitting tidily on their iron beds in serried ranks,
some seven hundred dazzling turbans on display.
The town that thought it knew it all
since the prince Regent built his folly
has never seen the like;
they leave the beach to gawp.
The stupendous kitchen, where double rows
of copper vessels once turned out thirty course meals,
is now the stage for other knife skills:
here Monta Singh had both his legs removed.
He saved the life of Colonel Henderson,
wheeling him in a barrow from the front line
but caught the fire himself.
His grandson Jamal Singh would shake the hand
of Ian Henderson, the colonel’s grandson
where the funeral pyre had been
out on the downs.
Meanwhile, by the pavilion,
the grateful Maharaja unlocked the gate of India’s Gift,
a Gujarat dome on pillars, so strange an edifice
that amid the exotic confusion,
it blended wonderfully:
the golden key a perfect fit.
This poem is reprinted from Kathryn Southworth’s collection Someone was here (Indigo Dreams, Beaworthy 2018) by kind permission of the author and publisher.