The Locket: A completely gripping and emotional WWII historical novel by Natalie Meg Evans

Author:Natalie Meg Evans [Evans, Natalie Meg]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781837905201
Publisher: Bookouture
Published: 2023-09-24T16:00:00+00:00

31

October that year, the fourth of the war, was fine and dry, plums and damsons fit to pick almost to the third week. Trucks offloaded mountains of them at Ratty’s, along with tons of apples. Irene had returned to work before Dr Mickleson had given formal permission. Peeling and stoning fruit was her bone-strengthening regime. As she and her colleagues laboured to cope with the influx, transport aircraft thundered overhead. They were bringing yet more American personnel to the base and their engines blotted out the foreman’s patrolling footsteps.

RAF Flixfield, now under the command of the US Eighth Air Force, was operational, its concrete runways, hangars, Nissen huts and service blocks complete. A bristling control tower changed the view across the fields. Heavy bombers began arriving in a sustained concussion that made the factory’s tin roof shudder. When they came in low, a rumour went round that they carried five-hundred-pound bombs. It scared the women working at the benches.

Midway through October, Theo’s Engineers moved on. An RAF base near Beccles was being turned over to the United States and there was digging to be done, concrete to be laid. Theo hadn’t written, nor had he shown up at their meeting place. Irene didn’t dare write to him to tell him what she’d done on his behalf: gone into Hollesford, taken out all her post-office savings and paid off the outstanding instalments on the ring and locket. Her mother would make merry hell, should she discover that Irene had spent her nest egg, but so what? Theo’s wellbeing mattered more than anything in the world.

Weary of lies and evasions, she told her mother where she was going each time she set off to St Margaret’s, to wait for him under its fractured roof.

Violet was dismayed. ‘I thought that was all over! What if you fall off your bike again and lie stranded? Or worse, get seen creeping through the dark? You’ve burned your bridges with Norman; there’ll be nobody to speak up for you, save me and your father.’

Irene assured her mother that she’d go carefully. ‘My wrist is almost good as before and there’s hardly any traffic on the road.’

Nobody could get petrol, apart from the military and a few others, like the doctor.

Realising there was no point arguing, Violet had only one request: ‘Say nothing to anyone until you’ve brought that young man home to meet us.’

‘May I?’

‘I think you’d better.’

Irene kept her nightly vigil at St Margaret’s. As the evenings darkened and the temperature dropped, she took an old paraffin stove to the abandoned church. Once there, she’d boil a tin kettle and make cocoa, wait an hour before writing the day’s date and her initials in chalk on the back of a pew. She rubbed out and rewrote the date fifteen times in a row.

The clocks went back, and arriving in dense dark on the first night of November, she shone her torch on the worm-eaten pew and saw scrawled on it:

TR was here too. Where are

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