After the War

I remember her… even now. It was the end of the summer back in the days not long after the war, I forget which month. I was learning to walk again. The wound had kept me in hospital all through those long months of that winter, then the spring and early summer, after the war ended. Now, here I was down on the coast. An old friend, from those long-ago days before the war, had this cottage down on the coast. He let me borrow it ‘…for as long as you need’.

The cottage hadn’t been used since before the war, but I didn’t mind the neglect and dilapidation. In fact, I thought it made the cottage and me seem almost as though we belonged together. I’d had my far share of neglect and dilapidation too during the war.

I was learning to walk again by taking ever-lengthening strolls down along the deserted beach. The beach too, seemed to be another case of dilapidation and neglect. The coastal defence emplacements along this part of the shore were already falling into disrepair with the wild plants taking over the concrete emplacements and defensive positions, while the sea battered and rusted the metal effigies that rose out of the sand like skeletal hands begging for mercy, much like the flame-seared hands that reached for me out of the endless battles of my nightmares, that would wake me either screaming or sweating and crying every night, even after all the months since I’d been in the war.

She was up there, by one of the concrete pillboxes one morning; the wind blew her hat tumbling towards me. I caught it with the end of my walking stick; pinning it down as the petulant wind tried to pull it free.

I tried to bend down to pick it up, but I’d already reached my limit for that day and my knees would not bend. She ran up to me, thanked me and knelt down in front of me to pick up her hat.

Then, when she looked up at me from her kneeling position and from under those long eyelashes, I knew that neither of us would be alone ever again.