Free We've Come to Take You Home by Susan Gandar Page B

the girl would still have walked out in front of his car and he would still be hooked up to machines in the intensive care unit. Nothing would be altered. Nothing would be changed.
    She crept out of the bedroom, closing the door behind her. She crept back along the corridor, down the stairs and into the kitchen. She picked up the bottle of wine and emptied its contents, every single last drop, into her glass and opened a second bottle.

EIGHTEEN
    May 1917
    T HE INSIDE OF THE compartment crashed to black. She screamed. And then it was daylight again. The train was still thundering on and the young soldier sitting next to her was smiling.
    â€˜Have to get used to ‘em, love, tunnels, there’s lots of ‘em between here and London.’
    Jess and her mother had always stopped to wave at the trains thundering past on the other side of the river, north to London and south to the coast. But she had never been on one, not until that morning.
    She pushed her way into the carriage, along the corridor, into a compartment and down onto a seat. Outside, villages, fields and valleys were soon replaced by houses, chimneys and factories. And the colour of the countryside, the blue of the sky, the green of the fields, the pink of the blossom on the trees, was replaced by a dirty grey. The sky was grey. The houses were grey. Even the people were grey.
    But Clapham Junction station wasn’t grey: it was black. The air was full of soot and it smelt so bad it hurt to breathe. There were people everywhere, scurrying around like ants, going upstairs and downstairs, into tunnels and out of tunnels. The platforms went on and on, stretching off forever into the distance.
    Jess stood there, holding tight onto her suitcase, doing exactly what her mother had told her to do; get off, stand on the platform, don’t move, not to worry, the Major would soonfind her. That had been half an hour ago. The train on which she had arrived had pulled out. A second one had pulled in and was already pulling out. And still there was no sign of the Major.
    Jess took the letter her mother had given her out of her pocket. It was from the Major and his wife and printed on it, at the top, was an address: Eaton Villa, Glebe Road, London SW11. Her mother insisted that she should have it ‘just in case’. Was ‘just in case’ waiting for half an hour on a platform with no sign of the Major? Had they forgotten her?
    Her suitcase was getting heavy. Her mother had told her not to put it down; it would only get stolen. She put the case down and sat on it. If someone wanted to steal her case they would have to steal her too.
    â€˜Jessica? Jessica Brown?’
    A big man, completely bald, arms swinging, was marching down the platform towards her.
    â€˜Explosion last night at a munitions factory in east London. Seventy-three dead, hundreds injured. They’re still digging them out…’
    The Major picked up her case and marched off. She ran behind him, along the platform, down a flight of steps and into a tunnel. More steps, another tunnel, and they were outside the station.
    A car, if one came into the village, had been regarded as something to be kept well away from; you couldn’t trust them not to explode. But now, right in front of where she was standing, there they were, hundreds of them crawling up and down the road like a mass of giant beetles.
    She’d never seen anything like it. Cars and horses pulling carts, and strange-looking things which looked like very tall cars, with people sitting both inside and on top, were all jostling for space along a narrow stretch of road. And she’d never heard so much noise. At home, any travel or transporthad always been done by horse and cart. The carts, like the ones here, had big iron-shod wheels but they’d made hardly a sound clip-clopping through muddy farmyards and down country lanes. But in London, those same iron-shod wheels going over stone cobbles made enough noise