Honest Tom’s ghost was on the loose

From 1862 until 1936. It  left him in a fix.

The ghostly Punch and Judy set, 

His boyhood used to know, created

This living ghost's taste for the ghostly pale

Words writ in Water; as a prologue to slaughter.

Tall figures habited in white, with unnaturally

Long and narrow heads played dead beneath

The barrage of the western front translated into 

The starched white bandages and dismal broken visage

Of a-nodding and a-shaking soldier-lad at  Craiglockart hospital.

His nightmares became shell shocked  into life

And all the false strife of life beneath the ivory towers

Came home to roost. A step backwards in evolution.

It is so easy to ban what you don't understand.

Radclyffe Hall’s 1928 novel, The Well of Loneliness.

Love between two women serving at the front as ambulance drivers is murdered by bigotry.

"I would rather give a healthy boy or a healthy girl a phial of prussic acid than this novel." 

Catch the heart off guard my lad, and blow it open.