|
Administrator
|
This post was updated on .
I would like to think that the sun was shining in a clear blue sky when the soldier returned home on that long ago May morning. I know not what his thoughts were as he hugged his wife and picked up his excited five year old son, but he was back and he had survived. Never again would he be called to help defend his country.
Born in Victoria's reign he had served two kings in two wars, as a corporal in the first world war and as a staff sergeant in world war two, but now, and for the rest of his life, he would serve just his family. He would serve his four sons, his four daughters and his beloved wife. The war in Europe was over with his side victorious and he was home.
Good news followed good news in the weeks that followed, they learned that their eldest daughter had blessed them with their first grandchild. On the evening of the fifteenth of August it was announced that Japan had surrendered, which meant their twenty year old son had survived and would, in time, also come home. Happy were the days that followed, the now ex soldier had work and a home and it was here his wife and six younger children spent the halcyon days that led up to their first peacetime Christmas for seven years. Halcyon days of fun, laughter and love, days of being together and being safe, halcyon days which were interrupted by a visit to the family Doctor, whose softly spoken words confirmed the wife and mothers worst fears.
I have no knowledge of her husbands reaction to the news, but I have been told there were times, during that season of goodwill to all men, that his wife cried. She did not want to face the truth that at the age of forty one, with six of her eight children still at school, she was once again pregnant. On June the twelfth of the following year she gave birth to her ninth child, a boy--------------------------------------------------ME!
|
Locked
