The last time Derek had boarded a train, he had been on his way to the frontlines, sandwiched between two obnoxious English soldiers. As he sat trapped for hours between the pair, he had no choice but to endure their forced laughter and false boasts about the many German scalps they had claimed in the preceding weeks. He remembered how they had even taken bets with the men around them as to who would notch up more kills in the days ahead. He was embarrassed to call them his countrymen. Both men chewed and rolled cigars in the corners of their mouths as though they were wealthy gamblers sat around a high-stakes poker table. Both revelled in telling cruel and callous jokes, slapping their legs to the tone of hollow laughs. Both stank of arrogance and bravado. And both were dead by the end of the week, their bodies bloating in the scarred veins of France’s death pits.
Derek rubbed his eyes and tried to wipe away the memory. As he stared through the window and marvelled at the sight of the African sun – an orange half-moon slipping between the stone cleavage of two distant mountains – he realised how stirring a train ride could be when it wasn’t ferrying you into the black light of a war. It also helped that the landscape they were winding through was as beautiful and as varied as anything he had ever seen. They had passed through great mountain ranges in Cape Town and woken up to the barren moonscape of the Karoo desert the next morning. Later that afternoon they were carving through lush green valleys and by the following day were passing through vast tracts of farmland that seemed to stretch and curve endlessly from one horizon to the next, a lake of corn and sunflowers. And all the while it was gloriously, magnificently warm. The sun that pushed against the carriage, coupled with the rocking of the train, was something approaching heaven. At a time when so many in Europe were sat huddled around boilers and empty kitchen stoves, slowly starving to death, Derek had just enjoyed a sumptuous steak dinner with more fresh vegetables than he had seen in six months. He had followed the meal with two glasses of fine Cape wine and a double sherry and was now basking in the glow of both the drink and the dying sun. It was early days, he knew, but southern Africa was already proving to be everything he had hoped it would. Everything his father had written about.
As he closed his eyes and rested his head against the face of the window, he was smiling as he drifted off to sleep. For once, there was no blood in his dreams. No screams. No hellfire. No dead eyes. But of all these mercies, one was greater than the rest. His recurring nightmare of the young German girl who grew old waiting for her father to return home from the war finally took a different path. Through the driving snow, a man appeared at her window and gently spread his fingers across the glass. She pushed her small hands against his and, as he smiled at her, she dissolved into tears.
‘Father,’ she whispered.