At the Break of Day Read Online Free PDF

Rosie to cut the arms off and sew into blankets. They had smelt of sweat until Rosie had washed them. Norah had sold the rest to the rag and bone man and kept the money.
    Rosie shifted in her seat. Surely she had changed? They were grown up now, things were different. The seat prickled and the view of Arundel Castle on the wall above the man’s head was faded.
    Jack had unscrewed the one of Weymouth on the evacuee train carrying their school down to Somerset when war first began. He had sold it to the owner of the village pub to get them enough money to travel back at Christmas when the bombers still hadn’t come.
    His mum had sent him again though, after Rosie had gone and the bombs were falling night after night and after old Meiner’s house down the road was crushed. Rosie had liked Mr Meiner. Jack had fiddled them both a job lighting fires at his house on the Sabbath by saying they were older than they were. ‘Meiner left Germany but the buggers killed him anyway,’ Jack had written and his mum and dad had sent him back to Somerset then. But it was to a different area. Norah had gone too.
    Rosie watched the woman next to her peeling off the crust of her last sandwich, eating it piece by piece, licking her finger and stabbing up the crumbs. Then she folded up the paper and put it away again in her bag.
    Rationing was still on in England. They had debts to repay, the country to rebuild, and Rosie couldn’t take out her great slab of cheese, or the fruit, and the biscuits prepared on the ship. Instead she put her hand into her bag and pulled out a bread roll she had saved from breakfast.
    They were passing through towns now and these were damaged too. They pulled into stations; doors slammed, whistles blew, and there was never the long mournful hoot of the American trains.
    The man smoked another cigarette and this time the sulphur filled the carriage, and Rosie remembered the oast-houses and the hops, and smiled. Then there were the candles which the fumigation man lit when she and Norah had scarlet fever. How ill they had been, how the bed bugs had bitten, how they had tossed, turned, sweated, ached.
    Rosie threw the little boy a sweet and his mother smiled.
    ‘How old is he?’
    ‘Seven.’
    Their father and mother had died in the year of Rosie’s seventh birthday. She knew she was that age because her grandpa had said Martha, his daughter, her mother, ‘had seven years of sunshine with you, my little Rosie’.
    Grandpa had bought the house then, because the landlord wouldn’t improve it. How he had managed she didn’t know. He wouldn’t tell, he had only muttered that his daughter hadn’t worked herself to death in that laundry and he hadn’t worked two shifts twice a week to see it all slip through his hands. So he had bought it off the landlord and together he and Ollie, Jack’s dad, had chipped at the plaster, stripping it down, disinfecting the bricks, replastering, reflooring both houses, because Ollie had bought his too.
    Since then there had been no cockroaches to scuttle from beneath the wallpaper and no bed bugs. No tins of paraffin at the foot of each bed leg. Rosie scratched herself as the train gushed into the blackness of a tunnel.
    There had been no more bed stripping, mattress scrubbing, but there had been … what was it? Oh yes, roses. Roses whose fragrance filled the yard. She had forgotten those until this moment.
    The train slapped out into the light and Rosie put up her hand to shield her eyes. The rain had stopped. It was four p.m. and they would be in London in an hour.
    She leaned her head back, letting it roll with the train, watching the man opposite tap his knee with his newspaper. The child was asleep, his head against his mother’s arm, and she missed Nancy and felt the pain again, raw, savage, and the sky seemed darker.
    There was no one to meet her at Euston either and she gripped her case more tightly as she queued for a cab. ‘Putney, please,’ she told the driver,