I watched the sinking sun, a blood-shot ball exhausted by the long hot day. The grass tickled its million irritant blades through the thin cotton of my post-war trousers. I swear Lorna had stitched them from some salvaged tablecloth she'd rescued from the sideboard drawer.
I tossed my sandwich crusts to the ducks. Even their feathers looked frayed and singed by the war. The huge hills on the horizon that had at first felt like a well-bolstered and welcoming bed upon my return from the front, now looked guarded; almost as though they were holding the secret of when the world would once more be turned on its head and have the loose change of good living shaken violently out of its pockets.
I shielded my eyes from the bloody horizon and the hills turned black. Black with memories of bombs, screaming birds scattering, roofs quivering, hovering in the air, but resettling back into place. The birds rediscovered their nests. And I came home.
I came home to find my Lorna's hands roughened and mottled from war-work and scrubbing and turning the soil. Our servants were gone. Either dead or with new independence, working in factories where they could run a whole line of machines instead of running back and forth at our command. We were on our own now. Me in my flimsy trousers instead of my strong khaki. No men at my side. No gun in my hands. I feel like soft white blubber, awake in the deep-blue of the night with my grotesque dreams of hearts blistering out of the khaki shirts and brave men standing up in their trenches.
"Only one way to get these blighters. And that's to stand up and be counted."
That was the last cry of my mates. All called Tommy. No point remembering names now. That was their last shout before they spun round three times and fell back into their hole forever.
And Lorna in her patched frock, holding me with her hardened hands. That's what I came back to. This is our new life. The sad cries of birds with singed feathers, the flinty eyes of the brooding hills, the torn and tattered clothes and the servants' bells that aren't answered. Will never be answered again.
The sun vanishes into its slot, glad to be gone. I stand up and brush the crumbs from my trousers, from the sad, drooping fabric. I go home through the fields still thronging with prisoners of war, berry-brown and flaxen-haired and longing to go home too. We all wait together for the new dawn.
Copyright © 2008 Rob Richardson. All Rights Reserved.