This Song for You
Mike Spear
40 years of experience ready to help not-for-profits with their communications needs.
Welcome to 1 Week, 7 Stories: the Short Story Edition.
Chris de Burgh has been in the music business 50 years now having released his first album in 1974 and his second a year later. That 1975 release was Spanish Train And Other Stories and it is not only my favourite of his albums but one of my favourites by any artist.
He is a singer-songwriter and a storyteller, which prompted me to re-imagine in prose the songs on the 1975 album.
I have posted Spanish Train and Lonely Sky so far, and this week This Song for You gets the short story treatment.
The song is written from the point of view of a British soldier writing home to his sweetheart as he prepares for the the Battle of Passchendaele. De Burgh says that his grandfather General Sir Eric de Burgh survived the trenches in WWI and that Sir Eric’s brother, Thomas de Burgh, was one of the first officers to be killed in 1914. Beyond that, the song itself came from de Burgh’s imagination, but his interest in WWI must have remained because in 2007 he purchased a rare WWI letter at auction for 14,400 British pounds. The letter describes the Christmas Day 1914 truce between allied and German forces where the two sides played football (soccer), bury their dead, and exchanged food and cigarettes.
Every other edition of the 1 Week, 7 Stories newsletter will feature a fiction short story. ?LinkedIn subscribers will get a teaser to the latest story and a direct link to read it on Substack. Of course, you can always subscribe (free) to the Substack version and have the complete story delivered to you directly so you can enjoy it with your Saturday morning coffee.