long migrations, the changing sounds of birdsong, dew on the grass in the morning, the yellowing of the leaves. They all felt like endings. Only this year she was facing a very personal ending, a big, terrifyingly full stop to what had been driving her, her reason for living, her passion for the past ten years.
After a while it grew cold and they went inside. ‘Whatever am I going to do with myself now, Mum?’ Jess said, cuddling up on the sofa with Milly, who wasn’t usually allowed to sit there.
‘Have you got any ideas?’
‘Not a clue,’ she admitted.
‘What about something to do with animals?’ Susan said. ‘You’ve always loved them, and when you were a very little girl – before you joined the St John Ambulance – you used to say you wanted to be a vet.’
‘It’s a six year training. Anyway you have to be super-bright. I’d never have got in with my two Bs and a C.’
They chatted for a while and then, out of the blue, her mother said, ‘You know what you told me about the leg of lamb today?’
‘Uh huh.’
‘It reminded me of something I’d read somewhere and it was really annoying me because I couldn’t remember where.’
‘And have you remembered now?’
‘I have. Something rather like that happened to your great-grandfather Alfred, too.’
‘Like what?’
‘He was in the First World War and came back injured – lost a leg. Afterwards he tried working as a butcher, but he couldn’t take it because the raw flesh reminded him of something he’d experienced in the war.’
‘That’s strange. How do you know all this, anyway?’
Her mother disappeared upstairs and returned a few minutes later with a small cardboard box. ‘It’s all in here,’ she said. ‘Your great-grandmother’s diaries.’
As Jess opened the box, a comforting, musty smell of old paper wafted out into the room. Inside were stacked six dog-eared notebooks, the old-fashioned kind once issued by schools, yellowing pages of cheap lined paper stapled between soft buff-coloured covers. On the front of each one was written, in a neat rounded hand in fading blue ink, ‘Rose Barker. PRIVATE’.
‘Oh my goodness, look at this. They were written by your grandmother? My great-grandmother?’
Susan nodded. ‘Everyone knew her as Rose but her full name was Jessica Rose. You are named after her. She died when I was only five so I barely knew her, but she was a tough cookie by all accounts.’
‘This is amazing. Why haven’t I seen these before?’
‘We only discovered them after granny died last year.’ Jess had been given leave to return home for the funeral but had to fly back immediately afterwards. She’d been sad not to be able to stay longer, to help her mother with the gloomy task of sorting out her grandmother’s belongings.
‘Have you read them yet?’ Jess said, starting to rifle through the notebooks.
‘Not completely. I got up to the bit about poor old Alfie but then I got too busy to carry on.’
‘Did you know about them before?’
‘Mum never mentioned them, but then her memory was pretty dodgy and I suspect she just forgot they were there, locked way in the attic all those years.’
‘Shall we look at them together, now?’ Jess asked
Susan looked at her watch and yawned. ‘Not tonight, love, it’s gone midnight,’ she said, stroking Jess’s hair. ‘Are you coming up?’
‘In a while,’ Jess said. ‘I’m not sleepy yet. I’m going to have a bit of a read, if you don’t mind. I’m really curious to find out about Alfie.’
‘Are you feeling better?’
Jess nodded. ‘Thanks for being so understanding, Mum.’
‘No drinking now?’ She gave her daughter a stern look.
‘I’ll do my best,’ Jess said. ‘See you in the morning.’
After her mother had gone, Jess made herself a cup of coffee with a whisky chaser, and placed the cardboard box beside her on the sofa. Milly came to join her, snuggling her furry face onto Jess’s knee.
She lifted out the top notebook and flicked through the pages filled with the same careful handwriting, interspersed with stuck-in cuttings and letters. Then she checked the dates on the other notebooks to make sure they were in the right order, and began to read.
BOOK ONE
Rose Barker – PRIVATE
Monday 11 November 1918.
RED LETTER DAY!
Even now I have to pinch myself!
I have sorely neglected my writing since starting at the munitions factory, having felt so exhausted and dispirited each evening, and my entries so dull. I found these notebooks on a charity stall a few weeks ago and they are begging to be filled. And now there is so much to tell I barely know where to begin.
Today started out as another gloomy winter Monday with us all bent over our benches carefully filling shells with ‘devil’s porridge’ and then, at 11 o’clock this morning, the siren wailed. We jumped out of our skins, of course, we always do. Explosion warning? An air raid? Everyone stood stock still, looking at each other over our respirators like yellow-faced frogs. And then we twigged. We’d heard rumours and read plenty of reports in the newspapers, but no-one really believed them. There’ve been so many false promises. Could it really happen this time?
Then the boss came over the tannoy and told us it was official: fighting had been suspended on the Western Front. A moment later all the church bells of East London started clanging with a deafening din – such a surprising sound that we hadn’t heard for four years – and we were cheering and laughing so loud that we couldn’t hear the rest of what he said. But the word got round soon enough: not that we’d have gone on working, in any case, but they were closing the factory for the day.
We threw off our overalls, grabbed our coats and tumbled out into the street like a pack of puppies, where there was already such a great crush of excited people singing and cheering, running and dancing, hugging and kissing, that we could barely make our way through the streets. Being so short, Freda was virtually carried along, and I had to hold her tight so as we wouldn’t get separated. A group of young lads adopted us: ‘Come on canaries,’ they yelled, ‘we’ll look after you, show you a good time.’
On a normal day we wouldn’t have given them a second glance, but the world had suddenly been painted in bright colours and even spotty boys looked handsome. It may have been grey and a bit drizzly, but it felt as though the sun had come out, beaming down on us lot all lit up with happiness.
We had a notion to get ourselves to the West End and somewhere near Buckingham Palace cos word
