It was one of the few things about England that reminded him of home. Because otherwise, there were reminders all around him that he was far from it. The accents. The automobiles driving on the opposite side of the road. The village of Chilton Foliat was peculiar to him as an American with its thatched roofs and stone fences. In fact, he wasn’t even sure if the word village was correct. He’d also heard parish, estate, and hamlet. They seemed interchangeable to him, but the locals understood the minutiae of difference in all of them and he had not yet cracked that code.

Only two streets ran through the village, perpendicular to each other and lined with sagging redbrick houses. St. Mary’s Church sat at the westernmost point and was a common gathering spot for the community. It was surrounded by farmland—wheat, barley, and root vegetables—and nearly every household sat on a small plot of land on which they sowed and harvested. The Browns were partial to parsnips, along with the trout, and Tom, William, and John had been treated to all sorts of variations of the humble root.

They didn’t know why the Browns hadn’t had children, but they appreciated how the elderly couple doted on them.

Mr. Brown was bald save for scattered patches of thin white hair, and he was perpetually bent over at a twenty-degree angle. Mrs. Brown was the healthy kind of plump, with a wide face and fewer wrinkles than Tom might have expected for her age.

Though “the boys”—as the couple called the trio—offered on many occasions to help with the cooking, cleaning, and parsnip picking, the Browns were adamant in their refusal.

“You boys have to keep your strength up for fighting Hitler,” they would say in the perfect unison of two people who’d spent decade upon decade in each other’s company. Tom knew that they were getting off lucky—others in their platoon were made to feel that the lodging was provided for the purpose of having extra hands to help with farm chores. Never mind that the Browns had a point—the majority of their days in the 101st Airborne Division were spent training, parachuting, shooting, and marching, with few daylight hours to spare.

Tom looked out at the river from the upstairs bedroom that he shared with William and John, and ran his hands through the hair that he’d kept a bit longer than the buzz cuts that his friends preferred.

John’s snoring was keeping him awake and it drowned out most of the sounds of crickets that populated the nighttime hours. Would John’s fiancée mind this particular disruption after they’d married? By all accounts, Dottie was an angel, and she would probably put up with it.