wasn’t so crazy and mixed up, then we’d be going for walks and picnics. I want to take you
dancing – just a normal couple having fun. But everything is mixed up and crazy, Kit – and jeez, if it wasn’t I would never have met you. The thing is Kitty, what I’m trying
to say is, I’m so glad that I’ve met you. I’d like you to be my girl – if you want to? If you can wait for me?’
Kitty lifted her face to his and though she was smiling, she began to cry uncontrollably. Sammy threw his head back and laughed.
‘Oh-oh, now we’re done for – Kitty Danby crying in the rain – quick, someone build an ark!’
He pulled her to him and held her tight.
‘I love you, Kitty, and when this war is over I want to be with you all the time, I want to marry you – if you’ll have me?’
August 2006
By the time she reaches home, Bert’s words have stirred memories that Kitty has not allowed herself to have before.
He fell for you Kitty . . . he was over the moon about you.
The neighbour calls across the fence as Kitty locks her car.
‘How are you, Mrs Poll? Hot again – we could do with some rain.’
Kitty raises a hand and smiles and is thankful that her glasses have darkened in the sun and her tears are not visible. What a silly old fool I am, she thinks as she lets herself in at
the front door. After all these years. Kitty drops her keys on the hall stand and goes upstairs to the glass-fronted bookcase on the landing. She slides back the glass and takes out the
anthology of Robert Graves. She carries it into her bedroom and sits on her bed. She lets the book fall open in her hands and it still finds that page. It is all she has of Sammy’s now. She
destroyed his letters the night she had agreed to marry Roy but she had not felt the need to be secretive about the book.
The photograph is still inside, tucked between the pages. She lifts it out and stares at it. And this is the girl who became Sammy’s wife, she thinks. This is the girl he went
home and married . Kitty reads the poem on the page where Sammy left the photograph all those years ago. It is a poem about hopeless love. About their hopeless love, so she had always thought.
There was a war, there was tragedy and death and sadness, and they were young. All her adult life, Kitty has reasoned that their youth and the extreme circumstances of war threw her and Sammy
together and that it had been infatuation, not love. She had convinced herself that it would not have lasted the cold light of peacetime and was best forgotten. She believed that he had made a
promise to a girl back home and that, with the war over, he had come to his senses and kept his promise. Kitty had, she thought, come to terms with these things many years ago. But now, sixty-two
years later, she sits on her bed and is in tune once more with her sixteen-year-old self.
Suddenly, it is not Roy Poll, her husband of forty years, whom she thinks about, despite their happy marriage. Something long lost to her has been reawakened and it is Sammy Ray Bailey that she
misses. She reads the poem and the last line blurs as the tears come again. She closes the book and holds it against her. She rocks gently and allows herself to imagine how her life might have
been.
June 1944
The bus was already crowded when Kitty and Sammy squeezed past the conductor. Packed against the other passengers in the aisle, Sammy held on to an overhead strap with one hand
and Kitty with the other, resting his chin on the top of her head. A man Kitty couldn’t see was telling a joke and began laughing loudly as soon as he finished it. A few nearby passengers
joined in good-naturedly. A woman beside Kitty was recounting the latest invasion news to the elderly man beside her who nodded as he listened.
They got off the bus close to Ashford’s market and walked arm in arm towards the town centre. There was a short queue outside the photographic studio, four soldiers in uniform and two
women
Lee Duigon
Samantha Hunter
H. M. Ward, Ella Steele
Don Bassingthwaite
Desiree Dean
Cheryl Dragon
Michelle Kelly
Julian May
Dan Gutman
Mary Crawford