To You Johnny

‘CLASS: NEW ENTRANTS. 1939.’
That’s us Johnny.
The cheeky-looking ones on the end.
Caste into a cruel world at five.
‘The cuts’ supplied by Miss Dureau.
No play-way those days. Eh?

Look at us. We’d made it. We were big.
Standard Six, of course, were MASSIVE.
And yet as time propelled us up.
They shrank in both authority and size.
And, reaching the heights,
We found them to be us.
Those were the formative years Johnny.
Huge chunks of you were welded into me.

I never saw you jousting
In your chevy-powered steed.
My family’d moved away by then.
No-one told us of the crash.
I’d have come.
You died so young, Johnny.
Twenty-one! Hardly out of the pits.

Now, many decades on,
And still enjoying life,
I wish you could have had your share.