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The Homecoming
By Cyril Frederick Perkins

The cross channel ferry rolled and bucked like a wild stallion resisting the saddle for the first time.
The sergeant sat in indifferent detachment on a pile of kitbags stacked on an open deck whilst all around a milling throng, some leaning over the side disgorging some recently devoured repast.
He had his own thoughts. He was coming home but who was coming home?
Not the fresh faced kid who left home shores a million nightmares ago —
Why had be been spared?
Why was he not dust on some forgotten field like so many better men than he?
The shooting war may be over but the dreams lingered on and that coiled spring in the pit of his stomach he knew would be slow to unwind.

A chorus of muffled cheers broke his reverie as out of the swirling mist of that November morning those white sentinels that had guarded English shores since time began slowly emerged.
The train journey to London passed in a blur but a kindly conductor helped him onto a number nine bus at Hammersmith Broadway and off again at the Mortlake Bus Depot. He shook the Sergeants hand and wished him well.

The sergeant staggered the last few steps up to the house on North Worple Way where his wife had lived with her mother since her own demobilisation. He had conjured many times what he would say to here when they met again after all those months apart, all those letters, all those promises. How could he make her see that he meant them, every one.

He climbed the freshly whitened steps and knocked tentatively on the front door. It seemed ages waiting for a response, then slowly the door opened and she was standing there. Words froze in the sergeants throat — it was his wife who spoke first.
‘oh hello, what do you want?
As they held each other close they both knew they held in their arms all they had ever wanted or would ever want again.

Adjustment to a civilian life would be much harder than the Sergeant ever imagined. For all the expertise of the veteran soldier acquired over six and a half years of conflict, he would have to start again like a rookie recruit learning to earn a living in a civilian world.

They were the lucky ones. They had survived. Their youth was gone and with it much naivety and many of their illusions, but they had each other and together they would make a new beginning.

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