The Way Ahead Read Online Free PDF Page A

He’d been twice promoted since then, much to Rosie’s pleasure. Her faith in his expertise had always been total.
    ‘I’m not in favour of your going,’ she said, making a face. ‘You do know, don’t you, that you’re a husband and father, that you’ve a wife and two children?’ The children were Giles, born in May 1942, and Emily, born in August last year. Emily had been named after Rosie’s late adoptive mother, a gesture that touched everyone in the Adams and Somers families. Rosie, almost twenty-nine now, was the bright star of Matt’s little world in the heart of Dorset, her hair the colour of golden corn, and her clear expressive eyes as magnetically blue as her Aunt Susie’s. She had an extraordinarily warm and engaging personality, and a deep well of love and affection for all who were dear to her. Her natural father, Sir Charles Armitage, had been killed in action at Tobruk, and that had saddened her, although it was her adoptive father, known as Boots, who had always meant more to her. ‘Matt,’ she said firmly, ‘a man with a wife, two children, and a gammy leg can’t go off on any boat trip to China or wherever. I object. Giles and Emily object. We’ll write protest letters about it. Giles and Emily might only come up with inky blobs, but they’ll be blobs with a clear message of complaint.’
    ‘Where are our blobs?’ asked Matt, his uniform giving his sinewy frame the kind of man appeal Rosie thought sexy.
    ‘Emily’s asleep in her pram, and Giles is in the garden with Felicity,’ said Rosie. Felicity, her blind sister-in-law, had accepted an invitation to come and stay with her for a couple of months. The immediate development of a warm friendship turned the temporary stay into one that looked like lasting until the end of the war, when Felicity and her husband Tim, a Commando, would find a home of their own. Felicity fought the disability of blindness with resolution and courage, and at the moment was so taken with little Giles that she’d been wondering if she could cope with a child of her own. You could cope as well as the best of us, said Rosie, so have a private word with Tim on his next leave. Hell, said Felicity, a private word with your brother about something like that might land me with a lot more than I bargained for. Tim’s a Commando of vim, vigour and virility, she said, and all that could add up to triplets, absolute disaster for a woman who can’t see for looking. Oh, chance it, said Rosie, give it a go. ‘Matt,’ she said now, ‘I’m going to hate not having you home once a week, but as there’s nothing we can do about it, I’ll put my long face in the broom cupboard and keep it there. Come and see Emily, and you’ll know what an angel in a pram looks like. Then come and talk to Giles and Felicity.’
    ‘I’m damn glad to know you’ll still have Felicity here while I’m away,’ said Matt, whose gifted affinity with engines was responsible for his posting to Italy to set up a new repair workshop for tanks. ‘She’s a walking advertisement for guts and courage.’
    ‘Yes, darling, I know,’ said Rosie, ‘I know it a hundred times over, and so does Tim. He’ll be here later this afternoon, he’s managed to get three days leave before disappearing again on some crucifying Commando exercise.’
    ‘He told you that in so many words?’ said Matt.
    ‘In so many words,’ said Rosie, and as she and Matt bent over the pram to gaze at the soft relaxed face of the sleeping child, Matt thought that a crucifying exercise pointed to the Commandos making ready for either a special assignment in war-torn Italy or something else. What? An invasion of France? Could the long-delayed opening of the Second Front be in the air at last?
    ‘Where are we?’ asked Felicity later that day. She and her husband Tim, Boots’s son, were out in the dogcart belonging to Rosie and Matt, the nag a placid ambler only inclined to break into a trot if the driver was cussed enough