Shadows in a Photograph by David McMichael

Author:David McMichael
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: eBookPartnership.com
Published: 2014-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

To any casual passer-by, this particular afternoon, the scene around him or her might have had all the attributes of an idyllic pastoral one. Bright sunlight glinted on parched grass which from time to time was ruffled almost imperceptibly by a slight breeze; and lush dark foliage, promising shade, hung gracefully on distant trees. The young men at the outer edge of that very large field, who sprawled singly or in groups on the dry ground, or lounged indolently in easy chairs outside nearby wooden huts, would, from afar, have looked like any other youngsters enjoying an idle moment on yet another perfect day in this long hot summer. Only as that mythological walker drew nearer, mysteriously unaware of the circumstances of this place and time, would they have seen that these young men were strangely garbed in thick uniforms of a darker colour than the deep summer sky, wore bulky calf-high boots, and that some were further encumbered by outer vests of bright yellow - all peculiarly unsuitable to the heat of this day. And they would have noticed that although they laughed and joked from time to time, for the most part they were remarkably silent. On closer inspection the reason for this silence would have become apparent. For they would have seen that although some were quietly reading, and others asleep, many of their young faces were taut with tension and made older than their years by lines of fatigue. Yet, as they continued to study them they might have begun to detect that beneath that weariness there still existed a gleam of determination, as well as the glint of desperation. It was as if the primal anxiety of a nation was crystallised in them - the product of an intuitive awareness that it was at this juncture, in the weeks that had come and the weeks that perhaps were still to come, that the day would be carried or would be lost.

For Peter, sitting on the grass listening to the young Pilot Officer chatting to him, the afternoon felt equally unreal. In spite of all the deaths he’d been professionally exposed to over the years, he still couldn’t come to terms with the fact that Connie Saunders had died that morning (and he was conscious that, in now thinking of her by name instead of as his ‘WAAF driver’, he was sentimentally personalising their relationship). His wanting to deny her death was, he knew, partly due to the difficulty of accepting that he’d been unable to do anything, had simply had to look on helplessly as she died; partly due to an irrational feeling of ‘guilt’ that, in the lottery of life, it had been she who had caught the bullets and not him; and partly to the knowledge that, of all the ironies, hers had been the only death in the attack on the airfield that morning. Then, too, it had been some time before he’d been able to report his own incident, and

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