By Treen Ross
“In each family, a story is playing itself out, and each family’s story embodies its hope and despair,”Augustus Y. Napier, The Family Crucible, Augustus Y. Napier, PhD & Carl A. Whitaker, M.D.
It was easy to see we were kin, two sisters cut from the same pattern piece: each blessed with angular cheekbones and hair in shades of nightfall. Mine, a cascade of scree tumbling down my back and Elsie’s, crow-black waves with that strange blue sheen that made old women mutter. Our most striking feature, though, was our gunmetal eyes. They made people stop mid-sentence as if they felt their past, present and future staring back at them.
“Aye, thae eyes ur just like their da’s, an his da’ afore him. An baith men swallowed by the wars,” we once heard a shopkeeper whisper to his apprentice as we passed. Beside me, Elsie’s chin tilted and she pulled her shoulders back. Our feet fell into step, united as we marched past. We were young, but even then we felt it: the chill of the missing. That gap in the hallway where jackets used to hang, that silence where footsteps no longer tread.
I suppose that loss, that gap, never adequately explained to children, is where it all began: in that liminal space between pretence and reality.
It always started in the dark hallway, shoulders pressed against each other, trying to quiet our breathing, pulses pounding: drumbeats that might betray us.
“You’re on ma fit,” I hissed.
“Shh, A’m listening fur enemy fire!” Elsie spat back.
We waited, ready to go ‘Over the Top’. Time suspended, breath tightened around anticipation. Then our moment came to rise and we moved as one, into our ‘no man’s land’. A whistle blew behind enemy lines: The kettle in Granny’s kitchen.
Neither of us wanted to go first, but it was Elsie, always Elsie, who shot forward like a cannonball keen to shatter the agony of waiting, replacing it with the fear-numbing rush of action. She was all skinny limbs and free spirit. “Forward!” she whispered over her shoulder, already halfway up the hall, her summer dress flowing at her sides, carnation pink combat gear.
I followed, adrenaline draining the fear out of my chest. The floorboards moaned their protest. An explosive sneeze sent Elsie behind me for cover. Then the cold metal key fell from my sweaty, slippery fingers with the clatter of gunfire, and we froze.
In the front room, Granny was napping, and Ma, with the wireless on full, didn’t stir.
We tiptoed onwards, eased open the hall cupboard door, and there it was, illuminated by a single bulb: that smooth black Halloween-esque horror, with a corrugated tube snaking below. The gas mask of a man we never met. Our Grandad. Our Dad’s Dad, lungs scarred, who crossed the Channel back home, tagged like luggage.
We never knew him. Not the sound of his voice or the way he held my Granny’s hand. But we knew it. That mask. It was our proof of him and of the injuries that had ultimately cost him his life. The false face glistened under the flicker of the light like something from another world, not paradise, rather the kind of afterlife you only ever glimpse when you’re scared to death.
“Touch it,” Elsie dared me.
“You touch it,” I shot back, eyes locked, mesmerised by the rubber gleaming above us, fearing that if I looked away, it would jump out and devour us.
Then Elsie whispered in a voice so small, so fragile, I might’ve missed it if we hadn’t been so utterly still, “If we baith touch it an pray, d’ye think oor daddy micht come back safe?”
The words ballooned and floated above us. My mouth opened, ready to cut them down, to say no, to explain why it wouldn’t work. But then I saw her, my little sister, clutching to impossible hope. Her smoky eyes, wide and shining, not now with fear, but something else: belief.
I didn’t speak. Just shrugged and nodded.
I went first, stretching out my hand so my fingertips skimmed the hollow eye sockets. I jolted, not with pain exactly, it was something deeper, more profound, something other, like touching the past. I felt a connection to him through that wartime veil, a kind of mystic communion. Unspoken, sacred. Like reaching beyond the past. “Holy,” I whispered. “It’s holy.”
Elsie touched its tube for the briefest of seconds, then cupped her hands, whimpering. I gasped, bile rising sharp and fast in my throat. We didn’t look at each other. We just ran. We scrambled down the hall, socks slipping and sliding on polished floorboards. Hearts thumping, breath catching, but somehow, we didn’t fall, nor did we cry.
That’s how I remember my sister and me. It’s that image that returns whenever I see the word ‘Faith’ or hear the word ‘Miracle’. It’s this childhood memory that transports me back to that time.
Of course, we were not men of war; we were two little girls in summer frocks, not creeping through trenches but up the dark central hallway of our Granny’s flat. We weren’t looking for fun either, we were looking to be scared, good and proper. We were seeking out the kind of fear that wipes the slate clean and lets you draw another breath.
Looking back, that Saturday afternoon terror served some fundamental, age-old purpose. I think we needed that war relic more than we understood. It was the monster we could control. It was a fear we could name and therefore tame. Not like the other ones, those invisible landmines scattered through our days when someone mentioned ‘Da’, or we asked if he’d be home soon.
We told no one what we did. We never needed to. It was our secret service. We were foot soldiers in a hidden battle. Two little girls in handme-down clothes, with scabby knees, surviving each day, knowing we had to be brave.
Our weekly mission: to scare ourselves half to death, and somehow, survive. Which we did and always made it back. Back to earth, back to normal, and at least there was always a Paradise Slice after tea. Maybe that’s what paradise was for us each Saturday, not a place, but the sugarsweet taste of relief after the fear of the grown-up world.
When our Dad finally made it home, we still had Paradise Slice after tea. That day, though, it was two slices each. As if paradise now had truly arrived on earth: still sweet, yes, but now a taste we shared with the ones we loved.