It is only the old men who read newspapers

It is only the old men who read newspapers

In the shade, out of the sun

Over coffee and a bacon sandwich

Everybody else seems to browse a screen

Even as they talk, distractedly

Never fully committing to any one thing

Or the other

Little children eat sourdough toast

With strawberry jam spread over

Sunscreened faces

They have no tidemarks

But do have cherry bright noses

Dogs wait to pounce on scraps

Trying to beat the birds

Who are the real apex scavengers

All the patrons would have a story

If anyone took enough trouble to listen

The older ones washed up here from Europe

Fought in bloody wars

They were told would never come again,

Ran from tyranny long before the wall fell

Alex was an old soldier

A red army man, a conscript

Badly trained, his rifle never really worked

But he had obeyed every order he was given

Even when in his heart he had stopped believing

The west was a moral wasteland.

He had a copy of The Beatles the ‘White’ album

An illegal import at the time

He listened to it even now, on a retro deck.

It still had the power to move him

Back some fifty years

‘Back in the US… back in the USSR’

He still wondered what went wrong

With glasnost,

Apart from the timing,

But could tell a story or two about

The KGB if only he could believe

He would not be overheard

Some things cannot be forgotten

Would these shiny-faced children inform?

Even now his heart quickened

When the police stopped at the cafe for a break

Take-away coffees and a pain-au-Chocolat

For the sergeant.

They wear guns here

Perhaps he should have stayed in London

But they had still been wary of Russians,

Hoping they would find a 5th man

Kim Philby had a lot to answer for,

Nobody asks his name now

Or comments on his accent

They are so polite

Do they have Gulags in Australia? he mumbles,

Leafing through the classifieds,

Adverts for second-hand cars, handymen,

Apartments to buy, rent

Hoping to find a cryptic crossword

With more than a little effort required

To complete it

He had worked out the rules long ago

After all, he had been in the signals corps

And knew his way around a cypher

But he would keep that knowledge to himself,

Some things are better kept as secrets