That's so sad
.
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| Unspoken Secrets - complete http://www.the-cbb.co.uk/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=6215 |
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| Author: | ChubbyMonkey [ 20 Jun 2009, 14:56 ] |
| Post subject: | Unspoken Secrets - complete |
Mods, I'm tentatively putting this here, because to my mind EBD does deal with these themes, but if you feel it would be better elsewhere please move. This is my personal headcanon for how Jem came to speak Afrikaans. - X - She’s been asking about my scar again. She does it every so often, when we’re lying in bed together, she’ll spring it on me like she hopes to catch me out. The stupid thing is that she knows she won’t, she knows that I won’t talk about it, but she still likes to bring it up. Of course I’ve told her something, you can’t keep a thing like this secret in marriage, but I promised never to lie to her and I can’t tell her the full truth about this. I told her what I could, though; that I got it during the war. After that I can’t say anything, she’d start asking more and more questions until she knew everything, and she mustn’t know that, not yet. I did get it during the war – of course we all went to sign up as soon as we were asked. I was young and naïve, then, foolishly looking forwards to the adventure, the heroism we were all sure was waiting just around the corner. We were all disappointed when we learnt that we weren’t going to France at all, but to a remote corner of Africa we all, afterwards, shamefully admitted to having had to look up on a map. Even worse, for me at least, was that the captain was the man I had hoped to make my father-in-law soon. I can trace that thin white line that symbolises everything I’ve tried to forget, my entire life before 1920. I hate having it, this permanent reminder of Maria, but it can’t be changed. I’ve tried to explain this to Madge, but she won’t listen, she persists in asking me, every so often. How can I tell her about it? How can I convince her that this tiny imperfection is the last living reminder of the woman I loved just as much as her? She’d be heartbroken to think that I’d loved someone else, even though she’d understand, because I never knew her back then. Back then, the only person I could think about was my darling Maria. The last time I saw her, she was stood at the harbour to wave me off, her handkerchief fluttering in the breeze. For me, the saddest irony of the war has always been that while everybody I knew was losing sons, brothers or fathers, I lost the woman I loved more than anything else in the world. People always told my mother she was lucky that she still had me; I assured them that for the men on the battlefield it was a thousand times more preferable to give your own life than to think of those still at home being taken for you. Very few people ever believed me, but even now, with Madge and the children around me and a huge, bustling Sanatorium to my name, if I could go back and give my life knowing Maria would be spared, I would do it. She deserved the opportunity to live and fall in love again far more than I ever did. It wasn’t even the war that directly killed her. A bomb fell in the town, and she went out in the rain to help. Afterwards, I was told that with everything else going on nobody had thought to make sure she changed her clothes, and was warm and dry, so she spent hours saving others even though it was at a detriment to herself. She wrote to me to tell me that she’d caught a cold, but in her letter she seemed so upbeat; ‘Of course bed is absolutely sickening, but the time goes so much quicker when I’m planning the wedding for your eventual return’. I didn’t know how bad she became until she died. The captain, her father, thought it best to censor what his own, rather more frank, letters said, though he showed them to me afterwards. She developed pneumonia, and after that it just seemed to be a matter of time. The scar is barely visible now, just like my grief over Maria. I was stuck out there in unbearable heat, convinced that I had to die because there was nothing left to live for. I’d never even been able to say goodbye to her, and then there was a fire started at our camp. Her last letters to me were destroyed, and after that time I don’t really remember much, just this sense of numbness. Apparently I took all sorts of risks, nobody can believe that I’m still alive, yet alone unscathed but for this tiny line of silver down my leg. What did it in the end was my sheer determination to get hurt. We were in a skirmish, a relatively minor, everyday occurrence, but I saw one of the men who’d signed up with me get cornered. I jumped in and managed to save him, though not before my leg, from thigh to knee, had been sliced to the bone. It didn’t matter anyway; he was killed three days later by a bullet through his head. I was luckier, they said. I got to spend months in what was jokingly referred to at the time as a hospital; a mud hut always full of flies and with the most foul smells imaginable constantly in the air, attended by overworked nurses as far away from home as we were. The war did one thing for me, though. Being there, and seeing the waste of life brought on just by poor medical conditions, convinced me that when I got back I was going to train as a doctor. The joke between the patients was that once you were in you were out of the war, because you’d either be shipped back home to be pitied or taken by some disease which would infect your wretched body and kill you slowly and painfully. There was less risk when you were in the trenches, and at least there death was comparatively quick. I did get shipped back in the end. My leg was healing, but I was banned from joining the fighting again by the slightest of limps which only disappeared at some point in the years afterwards. Almost everything about the time is a blank to me – those days I was conscious I just moped around, reliving every moment with Maria over and over again. The first thing I remember of England is arriving at the same harbour she’d come to say goodbye to me, and stupidly expecting her to still be stood there, waving her white handkerchief for me. The first time I cried was when my mother hugged me. The next memory I have of England is an odd one. I was on a train, so it must have been some time after I arrived and my leg had healed. Only that slight limp remained, and I’d even learnt how to hide that fairly well. A young woman entered our carriage, carrying her basket of white feathers I’d become so accustomed to seeing in the street. She was the first person to try and give me one, though, when I stood up to offer her my seat. When she handed it to me, having refused to sit down, I thanked her. The whole carriage was watching us by now, despite it being such a commonplace sight. I didn’t care. She looked at me in astonishment; something in me snapped, suddenly I had to tell this complete stranger, who had looked down on me so much when she first saw me, everything. I explained that the white feathers reminded me of angel’s wings, an image I cling to desperately even now. I told her about Maria, and how she had been taken from me, but how thinking of her at peace was so comforting. Really, I told her, I should be handing the feather back, because I was no coward, not in the sense she meant. I wouldn’t, though, I would keep it, if she didn’t mind, as a way to remember the half-heavenly creature I probably would have been married to now had she lived. I was a coward, because I ran away from my grief and my terror at being alone, but I didn’t tell her that. Instead I explained that I’d been fighting in Africa when she died, I hadn’t seen her for a year since the war began. For a reason I couldn’t explain even now, I told the carriage about saving my friend and ending up in hospital, and about wanting so badly to go back to fighting because when I was thinking of that I wasn’t thinking of her, but how instead I’d been shipped home. How I'd just started to make enquiries about training as a doctor. She sat down when I finished, without a word. Slowly the men went back to their newspapers and the women to their gossip, all but one man who stood up and shook my hand. ‘Thankyou,’ he whispered. ‘Thankyou for everything you’ve given to save us.’ He gave me his seat so that my leg wouldn’t start aching again before I got home. I can’t tell Madge this, though. It would be too painful to talk about to her, and I couldn’t betray Maria like that. Madge would never understand that sometimes, when I hug Sybil or help David with his homework, I’m actually wondering what my children with Maria would have been like. I often think about whether or not Maria would have liked Madge; she would be happy, I think, that I’ve found love again. I like to think they would have been friends. When I first met Madge, with my own parents dead it somehow seemed natural that I should write to my old captain instead. He replied with a picture of Maria that I knew they cherished, it was taken just before we left for the front, and a small letter with his blessing. Maybe one day I’ll show it to Madge, and try and explain just what she meant to me. But if I ever did, I wouldn’t start at the beginning. I’d start by saying that if I was told I could go back, right now, and keep Maria forever, but it would mean never meeting her, I wouldn’t do it. I’d choose Madge every time. |
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| Author: | abbeybufo [ 20 Jun 2009, 15:36 ] |
| Post subject: | Re: Unspoken Secrets - complete |
That was lovely Ariel. A very convincing reason for Jem being able to speak Afrikaans - and a very poignant tale of lost love. |
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| Author: | Alison H [ 20 Jun 2009, 15:41 ] |
| Post subject: | Re: Unspoken Secrets - complete |
That's so sad .
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| Author: | Fiona Mc [ 20 Jun 2009, 16:38 ] |
| Post subject: | Re: Unspoken Secrets - complete |
That is so sad and so beautiful. Poor Jem
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| Author: | Lesley [ 20 Jun 2009, 16:41 ] |
| Post subject: | Re: Unspoken Secrets - complete |
Very sad - and i do hope that woman with the white feathers was suitably embarrassed too. Thanks |
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| Author: | jmc [ 20 Jun 2009, 23:29 ] |
| Post subject: | Re: Unspoken Secrets - complete |
That was lovely. Thank you |
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| Author: | Kathy_S [ 21 Jun 2009, 21:57 ] |
| Post subject: | Re: Unspoken Secrets - complete |
Poor Jem. It also helps explain his attitude to chills.... |
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| Author: | hac61 [ 22 Jun 2009, 11:32 ] |
| Post subject: | Re: Unspoken Secrets - complete |
I woke up this morning having dreamt the white feather incident and thought to myself 'Now which of my world war novels is that in?' Then I remembered, it's not in a novel - yet. Well written, Chubbymonkey. hac |
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| Author: | Cath V-P [ 24 Jun 2009, 04:26 ] |
| Post subject: | Re: Unspoken Secrets - complete |
Fascinating, and very plausible. Thank you. |
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| Author: | leahbelle [ 25 Jun 2009, 13:11 ] |
| Post subject: | Re: Unspoken Secrets - complete |
That was so sad. Beautifully written. Thanks, Ariel. |
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| Author: | Lisa [ 26 Jun 2009, 22:02 ] |
| Post subject: | Re: Unspoken Secrets - complete |
*takes a deep sigh* Poor Jem Fabulous, thank you. (is pleased Ariel's exams are over and she can justify energies going into brilliant drabbles!) 
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