I longed for letters, and at first some came. The censor’s stamp—APPROVED—a reminder of how things were. Once he left the south of England, Magnus Tulloch could not say where he was, what he was doing, so he told me about cocoa and bully beef and blankets crawling with lice, and sometimes the noise of Old Fritz in the night. He said he slept with my picture in his hand, and always he wrote, It will soon be over, my Meggie.

I wrote back each time, and in between, too, and I sent him socks and gum leaves and, once, a long curl of red hair.

While I worked at the factory, Clementina took in washing and starching and ironing for Miss Brown’s private hospital, and the Sea View and Davilak hotels. She did her picking up and delivering on Magnus’s bicycle after I got home. That bicycle! Clementina had never ridden before, but she plumped herself onto the leather seat one evening and wobbled her way up and down Martha Street until she’d beaten the two-wheeler beastie. Even after many months, the sight of Clementina Ratter perched on that bicycle, her chin balancing on a stack of linens to keep them in line and herself steady, was enough to give us all the giggles—Hal and Jessie and me.

We made an effort to laugh, for the children. We looked for any excuse when they were around. But once they were tucked into their beds … ah, then our conversation fell to ash as we knitted socks for soldiers by candlelight. Sometimes Clementina would say, Read us a pome, quinie, or I’d read from the newspaper. Always the news of the war first, and we’d let it sink into the walls without stirring it with words. The war just is, Clementina always said. Talkin’ about it doesn’t change the peeriest thing.

Conscription was the Big Topic. At the factory, in the streets, in shops. But I was careful at home not to read aloud what the newspapers had to say about that, for I knew it would make Clementina teary and angry both. The arguments for, the arguments against—they raddled everything in me. I wanted every boy, every man, to be safe at home, away from the killing. But was this a betrayal of Magnus, my Magnus, who was risking his life for the world he believed in? And of all Stivvy had sacrificed? And then my thoughts would curl back on themselves, and I couldn’t set them straight. How could anyone find the right thing, the noble thing, in something so terrible as war?

~

As we waited for peace and the war dragged on endlessly, I learned some things about myself. It’s what happens when you canna control what is bearing down on you: you have to decide how to stand your ground, who you will be when it’s done.