Dead-end job

In Competition No. 2855 you were invited to compose an elegy for an endangered profession. Estate agents, travel agents, publishers, record company executives; all have seen their livelihoods put in jeopardy by a brave new digital world. You also lamented the dwindling role of the milkman and the postman, and mourned the disappearance of the old-style pub landlord.

I admired Paul Evans’s entry but wasn’t convinced that being an England football fan qualifies as a profession. There were sparkling performances, too, from Barbara Smoker and Bill Greenwell. The winners, printed below, pocket £30 each. G.M. Davis takes £35.

Apologies to Sarah Drury, whose winning entry last week was printed without her cookery book title (The Doubtful Guest).

What made the tested proofer,
The literal-detector,
Less common than a loofah?
Who rubbed out the corector?

Who were the mad deleters?
Who wealded the erasers?
Who fried the subbing praetors
And gave their jobs to lasers?

I think were I a riter
Id be a little bitter
To have a laser blight a
Peace of mine like litter.

Bring back the galley-reader,
The trained-up text-emender,
The keen-eyed typo-weeder,
The pedant in his splendour.
G.M. Davis

The shades of night are falling for the squaddie
with the gun,
The kind who formed the Thin Red Line or
battled with the Hun,
Who faced the Minenwerfer and the high  explosive bomb
And left his bloody entrails on the mudfields of
the Somme.

The ranker fought the enemy from Khartoum to
Cadiz.
The kudos was the generals’; the sacrifice was
his.
Then when his mouth was dry with dust, back
home or in the rear,
He faced the surly taverner who wouldn’t serve
him beer.

What future does he face now, as his role is paid
off cheap —
A jail of debt and loneliness, a horror-broken
sleep? —
While air-conditioned men watch screens, play
keyboards with clean hands
And launch their bloodless death machines to
kill in distant lands.

The state that teaches men to kill has little left
to give
When troops stand down and no one asks who
dies if England live.