BURRANGONG, SEPTEMBER 1978
She lay on the damp ground, trying to ignore the tussock pressing into her back, and remembered.
Had it really been worth it? Or was that just what she thought she should tell the boy? Young people needed courage and hope to face the future. Had she told him the truth?
She felt she had crammed a hundred lifetimes into half a year in France. It had been tortuous and terrible and yet some of her richest memories were from those months.
Her last glimpse of William’s face, smiling at her from the stretcher, because he was going to be able to see again, and was going back to join his friends. Her first sight of Alan in that room of planks and mud and hessian, finding out that he’d survived and knowing, in that instant, that he was the person she wanted to spend her whole life with, even if that life would only last a few days, as seemed likely then.
Even in the shell hole she was happy, because they’d repaired the cable and the message had (probably) got through. She could see Alan’s face under his helmet and he smiled at her as she tapped out the message and listened for the reply. The engineer and the telegraph girl. They may not talk about those times, but that is who they’ve always been . . .
It had been worth it.
She let sleep come.