A Postcard from Italy. Alex Brown

       My truelove is never coming home! I swear my heart shattered into a thousand tiny pieces as my knees buckled and I grasped the back of an armchair on hearing the news. Mother and Father travelled all the way here on the train to Tindledale especially to tell me themselves. Killed in a training exercise is what Father explained, with his head bowed and black fedora hat pressed to his chest as he imparted the terribly sad news in the middle of Aunt Maud’s sitting room. Mother put a steadying hand on my arm as she passed her best embroidered hanky towards me. I managed to control my emotions, though, and didn’t cry until I was alone upstairs in the bedroom.

       Hitler has a lot to answer for!

       This world is so cruel.

       Poor Jimmy will never see the baby that is kicking its tiny feet as it grows within me, and this darling soul will never feel the love of the marvellous father that I know Jimmy would have been. The father that poor Jimmy could and should have had the chance to be if he hadn’t gone off to learn how to fight in Hitler’s phoney war! Not even a proper war.

       Mother says adoption is the only option now, especially as I’m unmarried and will not be in any fit state to deal with the grief as well as look after a new baby all on my own. Because that is what I shall be: alone! An unwed mother. Not even my best friend, Kitty, knows of my predicament. There was no time for me to even get a message to her before I was sent away, and Mother says she saw her at the station going off to join the Land Army in Oxfordshire, so I can’t burden her with my troubles when she needs to concentrate on doing her bit for the war effort. Mother also says it won’t be long now until baby arrives. But how can I bear to be parted from Jimmy’s child when it is all I have left in the world? And this poor mite doesn’t deserve to be abandoned to strangers who never even knew Jimmy. How will they ever be able to tell our child what a marvellous man he was?

      In the lounge below her mother’s bedroom, with her laptop on her knees, having transferred the pictures of Connie’s paperwork from her mobile, Grace felt a solitary tear trickle down the side of her nose as she wished she could reach into poor Connie’s diary and sweep her up into an enormous hug. Although Jimmy had died a lifetime ago, Grace knew the sense of loss for a life you thought you were going to have never really goes away, and she wondered if Connie still felt it after all these years … if it turned out that she was still alive. And Grace was even more hopeful now that her instinct was wrong and Connie was still here.