LITMIR.BIZ

       1

      1942

      Home. Keth Purvis smiled with pure pleasure. Where he was being driven he had no idea, and cared still less, because this morning he had disembarked at Greenock. Not quite home. Holdenby in the North Riding of Yorkshire was home, but Scotland was near enough! Now he was only a telephone call away from Daisy; now, the Atlantic no longer separated them.

      ‘So do you want the good news first, or the bad?’ his superior in Washington had asked.

      ‘Whichever, sir.’

      They had turned him down, he’d thought; turned down his request to return to England, but the bad news was that that request was approved – with conditions. The good news was that when he returned to England, when a passage could be arranged for him, he would be promoted to the rank of captain.

      He wasn’t, he recalled, offered any details. It was a take-it-or-leave-it deal, with no questions asked and no answers given.

      He had taken it; had grasped it eagerly, for what condition could be so demanding that Daisy was not worth it?

      That had been on his birthday in July. Now it was September and the heather on the hills fading, the bracken turning to gold. Days of waiting became weeks, then months. His elation turned to dejection. They had forgotten him, he was sure of it, until one day he was on his way on a troopship filled with American soldiers and airmen and, though he only once glimpsed them, a score of nurses,

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