Family.

I have set myself to commemorate the life and death of Wing Commander Billy Filson-Young, and - more broadly - his family. My father Paul North, Billy's half-brother, in 1990 gathered new material about his brothers and here is an eye-witness account written around then. Read more...

Vera Bax, poet and painter, lost two sons in WW2. Both were RAF pilots. She wrote a sequence of four poems on losing them. Some of the poems have been in various anthologies ever since. Read more...

I want to commemorate the 70^th anniversary of the death in action of my half-uncle Billy Filson-Young in Burma on 15 May, 1945, aged 25. His mother was the poet and painter Vera Bax (it’s complicated) and she wrote a series of poems about the deaths of her youngest son Richard (a pilot killed in action in 1942, aged 21) and Billy himself. They are of course grief-stricken poems. But they embolden me, too. Read more...