Free Lost in the Flames by Chris Jory Page A

the one and you never will be.’
    ‘Yes, Rose. You were honest with me. I know.’
    Within a month, Webster was gone.
    ‘What will you do?’ Norman had asked him.
    ‘I’m joining the Army.’
    ‘What the bloody hell for?’
    ‘It’ll keep me out of trouble, and there’ll be plenty to do. There’s going to be a war again soon, isn’t there? It’s obvious, he’s not going to stop is he, that Hitler bloke?’
    ‘For God’s sake, Webster, you don’t have to do that. It’s because of Rose, isn’t it?’
    ‘That’s a part of it.’
    ‘That’s all of it.’
    ‘Don’t blame her, Norman, it’s not her fault. She’s a good girl, really. Really she is.’
    By Easter, Brailes had gone too, retired to a new semi-detached house along the Burford Road where he spent his days watching the sparrows clustering in the forsythia at the end of his small garden and wondering where the last fifty years had gone.
    Norman and Vera moved into the farmhouse and Norman recruited a pair of keen young farmhands to help around the place and they occupied cottages numbers one and two, and Jacob came down regularly to spend time with Norman, and spring turned to summer and summer turned to autumn, life slipping by on rails just like it had before.

SEPTEMBER 1939
    The brakes gripped the wheels, the train lurched and stopped, the doors crashed open as dark thunderclouds rumbled overhead, and the hum of several hundred voices floated over the station roof and the up the hill to where Alfred Arbuckle was munching swiftly through an apple he had plucked from a tree in his orchard.
    ‘They’ve arrived,’ he yelled through the open door, and Elizabeth stuck her head out of the dormer window high above.
    ‘Gosh, it’s the longest train I’ve ever seen,’ she said. ‘There must be a whole army of them.’
    ‘Yes, more than yesterday, more than a thousand they say,’ replied Alfred.
    ‘Poor little blighters. I wonder what ours will be like.’
    ‘He’ll be fine. He’ll love it out here in the countryside, away from that filthy city.’ Alfred had been to London only once and had hastened back, swearing never to return. ‘I bet he’s never even seen a pig before.’
    Down at the station, in the shadow of the tweed mill, children squabbled about on the platform, others stood in tight solemn little sibling groups, and the Red Cross nurses moved among them like big-bosomed galleons in a restless sea. The evacuees were led up the hill into town clutching their gas masks in small cardboard boxes, and at the cinema they were passed through the bureaucratic machine that sent them away in little groups behind a nurse with a bar of chocolate in their pocket and a bundle of food under their arm. Billy Bampton hurried along in the wake of his brother and sisters as they were led out of town along West Street.
    ‘Come on Billy, you little tosser!’ called his brother Bobby. ‘Catch up, will you?’
    ‘Sod off Bobby!’ yelled Billy and he thrust his hands in his pockets and scowled at the passersby.
    ‘Yes, sod off Bobby,’ said their older sister, Helen. ‘You’re always picking on him.’
    Their other sister, Sarah, hurried back, grabbed Billy by the arm and pulled him along as he glowered at her.
    ‘I’m only trying to help you, you little bleeder,’ she muttered under her breath as they caught up with the others.
    Alfred and Elizabeth heard the little group of evacuees before they saw them, squabbling and bickering their way down the dirt track towards the house.
    ‘Morning, Mr Arbuckle, Mrs Arbuckle,’ said the nurse.
    ‘Morning Mary,’ said Elizabeth. ‘Which one of these little darlings is ours?’
    ‘Which one ?’ said the nurse.
    ‘Yes, we put ourselves down for one. A boy, we said.’
    ‘I’m sorry,’ said the nurse. ‘There must have been a misunderstanding. These ones come as a job-lot, four for the price of one.’
    She scratched her brow and made a pained sooner-you-than-me expression.
    ‘Well we