No Talking after Lights Read Online Free PDF

a passion that surely God must hear:
O Lord of these hills and horizons, fasten Thy gaze from beyond on to this my brother and keep him safe
. But in case God should take no notice of the prayers of a selfish child, she had broadened her request to include all soldiers and all officers, yes, and the Germans as well, all those in danger and pain.
    The late afternoon had turned a sullen bronze and grey as they walked. The snow was receding from the tops of the hills. Jamie had stared at the crags and clouds with an intensity that transferred itself to her,driving the chilly landscape into her memory for ever.
    That night, after praying again on her knees on the cold floor of the nursery -
Let him come back home and I will be a blessed soul and sing Thy praises eternally
- she had climbed into bed exhausted by emotion. When she slept, she dreamed of Jamie’s death, saw his fire-encircled figure sprint through a nightmare landscape of broken trees and desolation. She had woken in terror, and been unable to speak of it to anyone. It was her first experience of utter loneliness.
    The servants gathered in the hall next day to see Jamie leave. He was bright-eyed, impatient and proud, his thoughts leaping ahead to the comradeship of the trenches. She felt as though she were hallucinating, entering into his mind, seeing what he saw, knowing what she knew. ‘We have already said our farewells, Jamie,’ she told him calmly when he stepped forward for a parting embrace. Her mother had been shocked and thought her cold. Jamie had climbed into the back of the motor-carriage and settled himself between his parents to be driven to the local railway station. As they all clustered on the sweep of gravel to watch him go, she had been the only one not to wave or smile bravely (half the housemaids were sobbing), or shout, ‘Good Luck!’ or, ‘Give the Boche one for me!’ The shiny, square car made its way along the drive towards the stone gateposts by the lodge, and her keen young eyes could just make out the figure of the lodge-keeper as he swung open the heavy gates to let it pass. She remembered their protesting creak and, as though the moment had been photographed, saw her lanky, fifteen-year-old self in a dress that reached to her calves, with black stockings and shoulder-length hair held by a tartan ribbon: rigid, apart, charged with her premonitory secret.
    These girls knew nothing of death. Even those whose fathers had been killed in the Second World War had been too small to remember them. One or two widowed mothers, struggling to find the school fees on a service pension, came alone to Parents’ Weekends or Speech Day - plucky little women coping without a man. Their daughters had pictures of both parents on their lockers, but the father was just a young man in uniform: an image, an absence, not a subject for grief.
    Divorce, however, was different. When the school had opened there had been no divorced parents. Already, six years later, there were at least half-a-dozen, the product of hasty wartime marriages that could not survive the years apart. Fluffy Mrs Reynolds had turned up at one Parents’ Weekend last term with a man who was not her husband and not an uncle either, and had simpered archly as she introduced him, proud of her unsuitable friend. Roly or Ricky or Dicky, she’d called him. No, not Roly; Roly was someone else. They had whisked Charmian off to lunch at the Three Feathers and Charmian, presumably, had noticed nothing. Perhaps she should have a word with Charmian’s best friend, Sheila, who was a kind, conscientious child.
    Fathers were seldom close to their daughters. It was the mother’s responsibility to provide a safe haven for children. Lord knows, thought Henrietta Birmingham with sudden irritation, they did little enough else. Hair-dos and manicures were the mileposts which measured out their lives. Their finger-nails were burnished to a soft glow by hours of buffing