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May 1941

By Brian Clouston

None of us could sleep that night. The quiet of the place was so unlike what we had known only a few weeks ago. Can a night be too quiet to bring sleep? One by one we got out of our beds; only our young sister Dorothy remained sleeping peacefully in her cot. I left the cottage through the back door and headed for the privy. My call of nature complete, I looked about the garden, lit by half a moon to find my brother sitting on the bench our father had made just days before. We sat together without speaking. Alan, three years my senior, sat tall leaning against the garden wall behind the seat, looking out over the newly dug vegetable patch. Mixed smells greeted us: new dug earth — a smell tinged with occasional wafts of wood smoke from a dying cottage fire.

There were sounds — night sounds of country - sounds new to us town children who knew so little yet of country and country ways, and what made our Welsh classmates tick. But we were learning. Learning how to snare and skin rabbits. How to work the pump at the well. How, in a playground fight, it was possible to win against superior odds. Battles fought back to back with Alan.

Mother came out from the cottage, three cups of cocoa in her hands. We knew she was missing Dad. It was always the same: a few days of restlessness after he caught the train back home. Dorothy still sleeping in her cot missed him too. Ian and I missed his gentle tutorage — his cleverness with his hands making and mending things, his deadly skills with a rifle, killing rabbits, hares and partridge for the pot.

The quietness of the night was disturbed by a familiar sound — deep, rhythmical and increasing. An alien noise we knew all too well, the sound responsible for our being here in a rented cottage. The sound moved over us and away like a swarm of passing bees — moving east towards Liverpool.

We sat together, looking across the garden, dug to receive seeds and plants — food to sustain us. We looked out into the half dark night towards a deep red glow beyond the horizon. Even a half moon was good enough to help a bomber on its way to drop its deadly load — to drop its bombs on the place where father was.

We finished our cocoa and went back to bed. None of us slept that night in May 1941. Nor on others when the bomber’s moon was up.

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