Flight Engineer's Lament

MHarrisonEW2204970-151002-05.jpg

Title

Flight Engineer's Lament

Description

Seven verses telling the story of a dying flight engineer.

Language

Format

One typed page

Rights

This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.

Contributor

Identifier

MHarrisonEW2204970-151002-05

Transcription

[underlined] LAMENT (F/E’s) [/underlined]

The Flight Engineer lay dying,
At the end of a summer’s day,
His comrades had gathered around him,
To carry his fragments away.

The engine was piled on his breast plate
The props were wrapped round his head,
The con rods stuck out of his ear holes,
It was plain that he soon would be dead.

He coughed up a valve and a tappet
As he turned in the sump where he lay
And then to his wondering comrades
These last parting words he did say.

Take the manifold out of my larynx
The throttle out of my neck,
Remove from my kidneys the push rods
There a lot of spare parts in this wreck.

Take the cylinder out of my stomach
Take the piston out of my brain,
Extract from my liver the crankshaft
And assemble the engine again.

I’ll be riding a cloud in the morning
with no Stirling before me to cuss,
So come now chaps get mobile
There’s another bloke wanting this bus.

So stand with your glasses ready
This world is a world full of lies,
So heres [sic] to the dead already
And a toast to the F/E that dies.

Citation

“Flight Engineer's Lament,” IBCC Digital Archive, accessed March 28, 2024, https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/document/31591.

Item Relations

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