In brown and grey demob suits, stoked up well with Woodbines, the three of them, from the same regiment, were thrown up cheek-by-hip on the platform: Tim, Spence, the younger David. They were packed into a wooden-slat-seat train and Spence, a chunky pugilist of a man, the veteran of bar room scraps, now weathering twenty-six, knew, like the other two, that hostilities were over, that the lights were out at last on the theatres of war.
The theatre was part of home for lanky Tim. For five, six years pre-war, he’d done amdram. He had the wavy hair, indeed the coaxing smile of a film star, so in the local Little Theatre, he could charm the ladies, court the audiences, bask in the warm reviews. But for six years nearly (Tim was thirty-two in a fortnight’s time), he had found, in conflict and in barrack room, you got to see the truth of fellow men, naked and in the raw. He was thinking rather differently now, of men and audiences and acting and affection. Post-war things would be difficult for him and only finally, decades on, would he reach a personal peace.
Spencer had married back in ’41, and yes, he was looking forward to going back to Lily. There was the physical part, of course, the regularity, and in the years that followed he would settle, despite the criss-cross and the alleyways of love, for what was more or less OK. He’d think of her, always, as ‘the Missus’, just as he’d think of ‘the boy’ and ‘the girl’. And decades on, when the cancer struck, he would cope and care for Lily with a dour devotion.
David was bound to think, on that journey home, of the breathless Rachel, the schoolgirl daughter of his mother’s friend. She’d been there at their house, on each of his leaves, and he knew full well she loved him blatantly. Everything in him, of manhood, pride and celebration, yearned for her. Yet somehow now, post-war, aged twenty-two, she not quite seventeen, he would keep feeling the gulf between all he’d seen, the nauseous blood, the gristle exposed, and the world of the child. So they would circle each other for several tremulous months, before in time they panicked and married others.
Each married a shit. Only after many, many years, after the bitterness, the blows, the pettiness, were they free, their every emotion rising with a rush.
In 1995, the celebrations marked the end of the war, and the following golden peace.  None of the boys attended. Spencer said, ‘I’m just glad I came back and I think of the boys who didn’t’. He stayed in playing rummy with Lily (recovered years ago but frail). Tim and his partner Sebastian drank their Merlot in their favourite London wine bar. David and Rachel went in a rural morning for their walk in the Teifi marshes, saw the radiance of the kingfisher, felt the wetlands’ wealth and depth.
Robert Nisbet
Robert Nisbet is a Welsh writer whose work has been widely published in the USA. Burningword Literary Journal and three other magazines have nominated him for a Pushcart.