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Austin Underwood was born in 1918 in Amesbury. He was educated at Bishop Wordsworth’s School (BWS) and went on to qualify as a teacher at King Alfred’s College, Winchester. He served in WW2 and then went back to BWS to teach.
We have a photograph of him in later life with his WW2 medals.
In the Austin Underwood image collection, we also have photographs of a poem he wrote:
Eve of D-Day
Around our tents the evening air hangs pregnantly
Laughter is stilled
Our lives are nothingness
Until the morrow.
When winged death will soar above our heads
Slicing the cold night air with long lean wings
And khaki-coloured lines will float into the dawn
To warm the greyness of the dawning with their blood.
Down from the Hampshire hills the evening breeze is cool
Yet cannot clear the apprehensive air so charged with untold force
That fills this English village, set by Roman hands
Amid the splendour of the Southern downs
That road leads up to Winchester
Too late to take it now
Before the lottery of life and death begins
For that road leads to Winchester
Only through cold grey seas where steel meshed shores
Will tear apart and mutilate the living, drunk with death
Before fevered with desire to reach the field of glistening corn
Too late to climb once more that downland hill
Where youth was spent in sunny carefree hours
Lying with faces pressed into the scent of thyme
Or gazing out to dreamlands far beyond these shores.
Remember then that white chalk road
That winds across the downland turf to Petersfield
Tomorrow’s deeds will blind and maim and kill
But tracks will still lead down to Petersfield.
When through the cordite-laden air and choking blast
Sleek muzzles swing in heavy arcs
From Arromanches sand dunes in the dawning light
When sweating fear-crazed men
Tilt field-grey caps and feeling death so close
Once more predict with trembling hands the range
That speeds destruction on its way
To claw the air apart with screaming steel
And bore with burning splinters into men and ships
To spew men dead and dying into boiling foam
To crash them on to rusting shore defences
Casting them oil drenched upon the shore
When armoured bulwarks crush upon the sand
And sweating swearing men break loose to kill
When rattling tracks churn through the sea
And crushing mangled corpses in the beach
Break through the holocaust to waving fields of ripening corn
Shall I remember still
That quietude of early morning sun
Kissing the dew-soaked grass upon the downland track
That winds across the hills down into Petersfield?
Austin Underwood BEM
Foreman of Signals