I didn’t think we’d know while the war continued, maybe even after that, and it plagued Clementina, this idea of Stivvy without a proper grave, as if it made him lost, unremembered. So we made our own. A memorial on a ridge above the dunes a distance from South Beach, away from where the swimmers went. A slab of limestone, it was, soft—an offcut with rough edges that no-one would miss from a building block not far from the factory. We trundled it there in Mrs Laskon’s wheelbarrow, dug it into the white sand, and took turns scratching the stone with a pointed chisel from Magnus’s box of tools. All night we’d been, deciding. I read out loud verses from Clementina’s mother’s Bible, from my precious Robert Louis Stevenson, from the Forget-Me-Not Annual and the poems I’d copied in the back, and she listened to them all. It had to be right, for Stivvy.

We sat on some sugar bags, Clementina, Magnus, the children and I, and toasted the sea and the sky and Stivvy’s beautiful life with warm tea from a flask. Hal and Jessie dug for little crabs, and tipped buckets of sand over our legs, and strewed their hair and ours with dried seaweed. But we were silent, thinking of that place across the other side of the world, and hoping the words Clementina had chosen and we had carved so clumsily would keep his spirit with us:

Home is the sailor, home from the sea

And the hunter home from the hill.

June 1974

June 1974

You never know when you’re at the beginning of the end, lambsie. If you did, well. You’d never go on, would you?

8

War aged Magnus. First Stivvy’s death. Then the stares and silent questions, the why-are-you-still-here? looks given to men who seemed able-bodied enough for war but remained in their jobs at home. Shirkers. And it was worse for someone like Magnus—a man not a father. A married man whose wife worked.

Ye canna walk around with excuses pinned to your chest, I told him.

If only. It would have been easier for him if he could.

I felt the eyes on me also. No more was I the only married woman in the factory. Many girls who’d worked at Mills & Ware when single had returned to fill in during the war, taking up places let go by enlisted men. These new ones, and even the girls who had been on my team for years, I knew what they were thinking. Why should you be spared? Why should you return home at night to your husband when our husbands, our brothers, fathers, sons, are away fighting for the freedom of us all?