Clementina was inside, in the dark, staring at the unlit stove, and nothing—not shaking her shoulders, not the keening of her little girl—could rouse her.

I turned to Magnus, a heap at the table, and he lifted his head and pushed a piece of paper at me.

A telegram. Too dark to read it, but I didn’t need to.

~

Our sweet Stivvy, hardworking, optimistic fisherman-farmer-soldier. He died on a ridge above a faraway beach a few days after the 11th Battalion landed there. The army told Clementina he was killed shielding a wounded man. That he was a hero. That he sacrificed his own life for a fellow soldier, for his country. That he’d been buried high on a hill overlooking the sea.

That’s no good to me, is it? Clementina wept. How does knowin’ any of that help? He’s gone. My Stivvy. Just … gone.

Clementina was angry for a long time, at the army, at the war, but mostly at Stivvy for not comin’ back like he promised, the great daftie loon. But when the anger passed into sadness, the shape of her grief changed. She became anxious.

He’s lyin’ there, she said, her voice cracking about the edges, sharp and clacking like knitting needles. Just lyin’ in some nowhere place. NO where he were born, NO where he lived, NO where his family must live without him. How can that be right, to leave a man in a place where no-one knows him?

When I asked Mrs Laskon did she know the place, she brought over to us a big leather atlas. Keep it, my dear, and God bless, she said, her hands around Clementina’s, gripping them harder with each word.

The two of us pored over the page headed ‘Turkey’, and Clementina found what she was looking for on a narrow finger of land between the Aegean and the Sea of Marmara.

See? she said. Just a dot on a map.

It was the tiniest label: Gallipoli. How much more that name had become to widows and wives, mothers and fathers, children, friends, the faraway bereaved.

But it isn’t a nowhere place, I told Clementina. That’s not true at all. This place called Gallipoli is a somewhere place to you an’ to us, to all with men an’ boys they love. The place Stivvy died, that’s Somewhere.

But they canna even tell me about his grave; I don’t even know if he has a cross with his name on it.