The truth is all memory is fiction

She only remembered what she wanted to remember.
Meeting a new book, it is said, is like meeting a new person or in her case a whole new family.
Sybil was scared of losing them even before she had found them. She couldn't talk about bereavement as she hadn't been able to say goodbye to her dad. Through life always on 'red alert' waiting for another disaster to 'shoot her in the foot!
When her kids were growing up waiting for something to happen but at the same time knowing very well that it wouldn't. It had only been lately that the reason for her cliff hanging existence was nailed to the past. A child loses a parent every twenty minutes. It was reassuring to know that there was more awareness regarding the impact of loss on the child now.

Memories we have make us who we are. Kindness of others can tip the uncertain child into someone who knows right from wrong and where the boundaries end.
She wanted to soak up the world that was lost decades since but why should she wish to do this?
The past shouldn't matter yet it did. Her loss was of no importance but to her of course it was everything.
The train was stuck in a tunnel just outside St Pancras Station but they had light. Her mum had lived her life in the dark right from the moment she warmly slid in the arms of her distressed mother who hadn't been prepared for a blind child.

Sybil knew that her mum was loved and that she had gone for a while to the local infants school before the authorities realised they couldn't cope with a child with special needs. So there had followed weeks of boarding school loneliness where the pecking order was set in motion.
She was a good pianist,loved English but hated sport. A steam train puffed her home alongside evacuees and displaced families.

Townsfold had got on with life whilst she had been gone. Men propping up the bar at The Bell once they had gone home for a scrub up from the leather or the ore from their boots or the stink of manure on their hands or their kids screaming voices from their heads. But then there were men laying oceans and tides and poppies away who would never come home for a pint or a moan again or dream of a better life ahead. Whilst their childrens eyes scanned the street on hearing footsteps of men in black delivering coal in sacks on their backs. Then there was the milk-man Fred calling in vain for his horse to come back as it flew wildly down the lane and away from the pub with milk cascading after it down the hill.

Then, as now, folk always wanted a better life and one without wars yet sometimes there was no option to fight but...