OCTOBER 1943
Dad came home the following weekend, walking jauntily along our road in his well pressed uniform, his sergeant"s stripes prominent. I had gone out to the front garden to pick what was left of the crab apples from the tree on the left of the garage. I saw him first. He greeted me with some surprise saying I had grown up suddenly and was a hulking great teenager and no longer a little boy. I told him I had been growing steadily for the past three years but as he was hardly ever home he wouldn"t have noticed.
My mother was at the door almost before he could reach it and she threw it open and greeted him with a fierce hug and then complained that she had been going out of her mind for the past two weeks and had felt abandoned by him. He was trying to explain that he simply hadn"
