Sleeping Embers of an Ordinary Mind by Anne Charnock

Author:Anne Charnock [Charnock, Anne]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, mobi
ISBN: 9781503950436
Published: 2015-12-01T00:00:00+00:00

Why is it that some people have twinkly eyes? What exactly makes them twinkle? Are their eyes more watery than other people’s? Or is it something about the way they smile?

Toni decides, looking with her dad and Natalie at the sepia photograph of Great-Great-Uncle Arthur, that his twinkly eyes and his kind but slightly lopsided smile go well together. It’s a studio photograph. He’s in his trim army uniform against a backdrop—a painted backdrop, probably—of cloudy skies. A dreamy background for a dreamy face, an almost heavenly scene, as though the photograph is preparing Arthur’s mother for the inevitable bad news. A premonition.

This thought suddenly throws her back in time. She once asked her mum why she hadn’t put any of her school photos in picture frames. Her friends had their school photos on display at home, but hers were all kept in a photo album. Her mum said she didn’t like school photos because they were the photos the police publicized when a child went missing or was killed in an accident. They had a . . . Toni tries to remember. A morbid something? A morbid aura. And now, Toni sees the same morbidness in this photo of smiling Arthur.

“So have you visited his grave?” she asks Natalie.

“I’m not sure anyone has,” says Natalie.

“What? Seriously?”

“I know. It sounds bad, doesn’t it?”

“Back then, people didn’t travel to France,” says her dad.

“Unless they were fighting,” says Toni.

“Exactly. No one in the family had the wherewithal,” says Natalie.

“What do you mean? Where with . . . what?”

“They didn’t have the means to travel. Basically, I doubt they knew how to get there. No one in our family had a car back then. When you think about it, coach travel to the continent didn’t start till much later. People simply didn’t travel . . . unless they were rich. To be perfectly honest,” Natalie says, hesitating, “it probably didn’t occur to anyone to visit the grave.” Evidently, she herself is taken aback.

“My parents bought their first car in the 1960s—an old Lea-Francis,” says her dad. “I don’t remember it, but I’ve seen a photo. They wouldn’t have felt confident enough to drive all the way to Dover, take the ferry crossing to France, and then find a small cemetery in the middle of nowhere. Cars were always breaking down. I don’t know about you, Nat, but we never took holidays abroad. I went to Paris on a school trip. That’s all.”

“The same.” Natalie is squirming. “You know, I’ve never heard anyone in my family express any desire to visit Arthur’s grave.”

“So he died for his country and was buried there, out in France somewhere, and no one has ever, ever been to visit him?” says Toni.

“I think the family simply accepted it wasn’t going to happen,” says Natalie. “It’s like your dad says . . . Arthur died in 1918, and it was another fifty years before people started taking coach tours around Europe.”

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