Read Online The Sea Change by Joanna Rossiter - Free Book Online Page A

return it.
    ‘What about us?’ Mama waved
towards Freda and me.
    ‘I’ll be going to protect you –
protect what we have here.’
    ‘They’ll take you as a chaplain,
Jack. You know that. How much help can you really be when they won’t permit you to
fire a gun?’
    ‘It’s my being there that
counts.’
    ‘You’re not going anywhere.
There’s no need.’
    Need or no need, he made himself known to
the War Office and received his call-up within the week. The war had come to him so he
might as well go to it. By then the army had arrived in the village – a scattering of
Tommies occupied a deserted labourer’s cottage, and three evacuees were sent to
the Court to live with the Major and his wife. When I was certain the Major was out on
his rounds, I would peer over the wall at the back of the house to look at the disused
tennis lawn where Freda and I had wiled away so many hours. The net sank in the middle,
sullen under a coat of ivy, and a troop of dandelions marched across the baseline.
Nobody had time for tennis any more. It was the start of an unseen invasion, which crept
so silently over the house and village and church that we barely noticed its presence
until the war was in full bloom.
    The military training on Salisbury Plain
became more regular, and the explosions felt closer too, as if they were being detonated
in the soil beneath us. Mama ran out to check the vegetables one night so convinced was
she that a shell had landed in the garden. I joined her in my nightgown and we watched
the sky stutter, like a frantic camera, between coal black and bleached white. The Downs
were taut with mortars, each as prone to echoes as the skin of a drum.
    Soon after the arrival of the evacuees, the
real incendiaries started to fall. Before the war, we could come and go as we pleased,
puffing up the chalk on the tracks at any time of day or night, even burning candles in
the windows to guide the farmers home. But by the time Father decided to enlist, our
shepherds were forced to navigate the fields unaided and nobody was to drive with
headlights at night. The Plain became bathed in an unbroken darkness – and we feared
that more than we feared the bombs. Mr Batch’s lad Fred was the first to be lost;
it was a death marked by its silence. The snow came down thick and fastin November, blanketing the entire Plain in the space of an evening. He had stayed up
with the sheep to make sure none were lost but, with no light to help him, he could not
find his way back to the village. The snow on Salisbury Plain had a way of cloaking the
air in front of you so that north, south, east and west were obliterated; the only mercy
it afforded you on nights like that was a glimpse of the space directly in front of your
feet. Poor Fred must have found that no sooner had he laid a footprint in the snow than
it was deleted. They discovered him two days later in a ditch, half a mile away from the
door of his home.
    It was hard to know which was preferable in
those days – snow and fog masking the village, making farming impossible, or a night
free of clouds in which we became a sitting target for the Gerries. When we heard German
engines across the sky, we could do nothing but stow ourselves in the cellar and pray
that there were no lights left on upstairs.
    I hold myself responsible for the first
raid. I was worried about Father, who had been kept out late visiting a colleague in
Chitterne, so I left a single candle burning in the upstairs window to help bring him
home across the tracks. I lit it out of habit without a thought for the blackout. Imber
was distant from any town and folded away in a valley – the bombers wouldn’t give
it a second look. But I forgot about the light, leaving it burning long after Father
arrived home. I was in my room when I heard the mechanical cackle of an approaching
aeroplane. My mother came running upstairs with him to fetch me while Freda fumbled with
the trap-door down to the cellar. There was no