Free Winter Roses by Amy Myers

tactlessness restored Caroline’s good humour. ‘What do you want to do if you don’t go toEast Grinstead? They can’t press-gang you. There’s no conscription for women.’
    ‘Don’t joke. It’s not funny. I want to come home, but I can’t while that awful woman is there.’
    ‘Grandmother?’
    ‘No, Lizzie Dibble, the trollop,’ Isabel said viciously.
    ‘She’s a nice girl. I like her. Rough and ready, but—’
    ‘I can’t stand her and I won’t live in the same house with her.’
    ‘Then don’t come.’ Caroline’s patience snapped. It was beginning to be obvious she had been right about Isabel and Frank Eliot. And Robert wasn’t slow-witted either.
    ‘I’m not being turned out of my home by Lizzie Dibble,’ Isabel shouted.
    ‘What do you want then? For heaven’s sake, make your mind up.’
    ‘Oh, Caroline.’ Isabel’s famous piteous look appeared. ‘I just want everything to be all right again.’
    This time Caroline failed to sympathise. Didn’t she herself long for everything to be all right again? If only it could be, if only you could crawl back through time to safety. Well, you couldn’t. You had to fight your way through to the next safety point. If you were Isabel though, she conceded, it was hard.
    ‘Robert would let you come back to the Rectory,’ she soothed, ‘and Lizzie will be gone soon. You’ll see.’
    Isabel shook her head miserably. ‘He won’t. I’ve already asked him.’
    ‘Why is Robert being so stubborn? Anyway, although it would upset him, he couldn’t prevent it.’
    ‘Yes, he could. He says he’ll stop my allowance.’
    Caroline bit back a laugh. ‘Yes, I see that would be a problem,’ she tried to say seriously. ‘I suppose you’re not having a baby, by any chance? That would be reason enough for you to come home.’
    ‘A baby? In this war? No, thank you. He did say,’ this came out a trifle unwillingly, ‘that if I were working seriously for the war effort like you and Phoebe, that would be different. But he knows I’m not strong enough to work on the land, even if I wanted to.’
    Isabel was as strong as a horse, in Caroline’s view, for all her fragile fair looks. ‘It seems vindictive, even for our William, to walk away from Ashden quite so offhandedly,’ she commented. ‘Good agricultural land going to waste; cinema closing because it hasn’t got a manager, dragging you away. I suppose,’ Caroline added fairly, ‘he can’t feel all that well disposed towards the village, what with Aunt Tilly humiliating him and then Father getting the better of him – what’s the matter?’ She suddenly realised Isabel was looking distinctly more cheerful.
    ‘Nothing. I’ve just had an idea, that’s all. Now, what were you saying?’
    ‘Don’t bother,’ Caroline said resignedly. ‘I doubt if it was important.’
    ‘Good,’ said Isabel absent-mindedly.
     
    Ashden Station meant home and Caroline felt a rush of affection for the old red-brick building, although like the Rectory, its beauty was in the eye of the beholder.
    As she strolled down Station Road, autumn was sharply evident, after the damp weather. The hedgerows were full of blackberries, and the air of the smells of September. She loved this month, she loved the mellow colour of its sun, and the sense of peace about the countryside before it settled down to winter. Winter had already come to the war. Absent now were the first brave words about the success of the Great Somme Offensive, there was nothing but news of reverses and ever longer casualty lists, which could not be hidden by stories of the bravery of its warriors. Everyone knew how brave they were but it didn’t stop them getting slaughtered by the German machine guns, and it didn’t stop them dying in their thousands, driven on route marches like those by their Arab captors after the Siege of Kut, without food, boots or sanitation.
    Sometimes, Father had said in his sermon last Sunday after the Zep had been shot down, it