Promises to Keep by Rachel Moore

Author:Rachel Moore
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Man-Woman Relationships, World War II, Saga, Chick-Lit, Fiction, Romance, Love Stories, Women's Fiction
ISBN: 9780749017200
Publisher: Allison & Busby
Published: 2015-03-19T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The seasons had moved on in the south-east of England. In the more mellow county of Cornwall, summer always lingered on for a good while longer than in the rest of the country. The old men of the county always said it was an overcoat warmer in Cornwall than in the south-east, and two overcoats warmer than the north. As the hospital ship prepared to deposit its latest casualties at Dover before returning to France for more, Tom Trevellyan shivered in the chill of a September morning, and wished that something magical could whisk him straight home without any more fuss.

The Yorkshireman, whom everyone simply called Yorky now, repeatedly scoffed at him, calling him a soft southerner, and that he should go ‘oop north’ to the Dales where life was tough, and you had to be a hardy bugger where he came from, if you wanted to survive the snows of winter.

‘Enough to freeze yer bollocks off and then some, if you really want to know,’ was his graphic description, said with a lewd chuckle.

‘I don’t, thanks,’ Tom replied with a grin, well used to him by now. They had been together all the while, and acquired a kind of enforced camaraderie, but there had been no more sign of the other two prone soldiers in the ambulance with them, and neither of them had felt inclined to enquire. It was often better not to know.

‘I’m sending a wire to my missus as soon as I can get some nice little nursey to do it for me,’ Yorky went on. ‘It’ll prob’ly give her a heart attack to know I’ll be called Hopalong Cassidy from now on, but I reckon she won’t mind that. She’ll have been missing a bit of the old ’ow’s yer father, so I reckon she’ll still be glad to see me,’ he added with a wink.

‘Course she will, if we ever get away from here,’ Tom said in frustration, ignoring everything else as the disembarkation seemed to be taking an endless time to get started.

‘Let’s hope to Christ we do it soon, then.’ Yorky was unusually grim. ‘They’d best move us out of the holding hospital soon as well. We don’t want to have come through all this, only to be blown to bits by one of Hitler’s effing buzz bombs.’

They had learnt more about them on the ship bringing them home, and Tom selfishly thanked God that they weren’t aimed at the far south-west of the country. Hitler would be sure to want to target the Home Counties with his evil new weapons, not a tapering extremity of land from where the next stop on the horizon was America.

Another wave of nostalgia hit him, and he wondered if he was truly going as soft as Yorky said all southerners were. But what the hell if he was? If a man couldn’t be loyal to his birthplace and long to be back there and be with everything and everyone he held dear, he wasn’t much of a man anyway.

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