After the Mourning Read Online Free PDF

as he was when he was brought up short by the actions of a red-headed woman, who had now thrown her arms around the Gypsy girl’s neck. This woman was gaujo , one of us. Later I found out she was a neighbour of Nobby Clarke and his missus.
    ‘A vision of the Virgin!’ she screamed at all of us present. ‘This girl has had a vision of the Blessed Virgin Mary! Well, for Gawd’s sake, act humble, you lot!’
    Still no one spoke or moved.
    Lily turned her head towards the woman and began, ‘No—’
    ‘Just like at Lourdes,’ the woman continued. ‘The Virgin—’
    ‘No!’ Lily turned back to the tree. ‘No, it’s Our Lady, ours, she’s come—’
    ‘To save us from Hitler!’ I heard someone else, another gaujo , say.
    Yet again Rosie’s husband made to move towards Lily but this time a glance from the girl prevented him. He put his head down and just stood, his eyes, almost alone among that party, averted from the scene unfolding in front of us. People began moving forward, slowly at first.
    ‘What’s all this, Mr H?’ Arthur said, as suddenly the whole camp erupted into a great nightmare of Gypsies wailing, women rushing towards Lily trying to see what she was still so obviously seeing and gaujo men swearing as their beer glasses spilled over the ground, toppling under the weight of the feet of the faithful.
    If I hadn’t been in company with so many others I could have thought that what was happening was just a part of my own madness. I sometimes hear, and even see, things left over from the Great War – a death rattle, a disembodied leg, a man’s scream of agony. But this wasn’t like that. This madness was real.
    ‘It’s a sign, is what it is,’ a rough woman said. ‘A bleedin’ wotsit, you know, a miracle.’
    ‘The war’ll end now she’s come. You’ll see,’ someone else said. I heard the distinctive sound of hymns being sung by several old women.
    I looked at Lily Lee’s face over the heads of the many ‘faithful’ that had rushed towards her and thought, I don’t know what this is .
    It wasn’t real, for me it just couldn’t be, but it wasn’t not real either. Lily was seeing something. I felt that if I could only get close enough I would glimpse a reflection of it in her eyes. I could see, or rather I sensed, that her people, the Gypsies, were feeling somewhat the same. There was no joy among their number, only confusion. Like me, or so I thought, they only pay lip service to religion. The poor buggers couldn’t understand what was going on. They’d buried Rosie as an Anglican yet here was her sister coming out with all this ‘Our Lady’ Catholic stuff. Ernie Sutton, though not a Catholic, would have known what to do or at least what to say, but he’d had to go back to the East London cemetery to bury a couple of little ’uns from Upton Park. It was diphtheria, not bombs, as took them, so Ernie said.
    ‘Well, this is a bit of a bleedin’ turn-up,’ Nobby Clarke said to me, as he watched his wife go over to Lily and gently touch her hair. ‘Barmy, if you ask me, mate. But, then, that’s women for you, ain’t it?’
    ‘Yes . . .’
    I looked across into the trees and saw that the raised voices around the camp were beginning to attract attention. Men in uniform moved towards us with rapid, military steps.

Chapter Three
    I know a lot about desperation in wartime. In the first lot it mainly afflicted us soldiers. My own belief is that the human brain just isn’t capable of taking in the level of horror you find on a battlefield so it sort of switches itself over to a different channel, like changing the programme on the wireless, as we used to do before this war began. For some, that different programme is disappearing into a dream world but for others, like me, it’s running, or rather trying to run, as far away from that horror as it can. Some take refuge in their religion. I’ve fought beside blokes who could see the Virgin Mary or an angel right in front of