Читать книгу It Started With A Note - Victoria Cooke - Страница 13

My eyes begin to burn a little and a ball forms in my throat. This is a letter to my great-grandmother from my great-grandfather. I remember my mum telling me the story of how her grandfather volunteered to fight in the First World War. He’d been killed in Belgium I think. Her mother, my grandmother, was five years old at the time and hadn’t really remembered him, something I could always relate to. Naturally, my mother didn’t know too much about him other than that he was twenty-four when he died.

Kieran bursts into my mind. He’s not much different in age to what my great-grandfather had been. I try to imagine him going out to war. The thought of it twists and knots my insides, and I can’t fathom how the mothers of the WWI soldiers felt, waving their sons off to war.

Of course, Kieran wouldn’t have survived the boot-polishing stage, never mind the trench-digging and gunfire. I love him to bits, but he’s a bone-idle little so-and-so, a trait that must be from his father’s side. I couldn’t imagine why a twenty-four-year-old man with a wife and daughter and his whole life ahead of him would want to go to the front line for the king’s shilling. It was so brutal and horrific, but I suppose back then people did it for their country.

I read the letter again; the part about him wanting to take my grandmother and great-grandmother to France stands out. My grandma never even had a passport, never mind visiting France. That makes me feel sad – that one of the only surviving pieces of communication from her father said that he wanted her to see France, and she never went. Granted, there was another war soon after the first, but my grandmother lived until the late Eighties and still never made the trip.

I take out the next letter, which is addressed directly to my grandmother. The date is too faded to read but I can just about make out the intricate penmanship.