A Warrior Returns

The battle of Ypres had stripped her of a comfortable middle class childhood and any chance of a decent education; it had condemned her to a series of brutal early twentieth century orphanages, followed by a life of servitude in the hard impersonal downstairs environments of stately homes just as surely as if the German hand grenade had exploded in her face and not her father’s. Now all she wanted was to keep the peace; keep a man in her life. But who was this man? The happy-go-lucky crane driver she’d married had been transformed into a cold-eyed rigid disciplinarian by what he’d seen and done during the war. The unspoken ghosts of his conscience were never far from him and seemed to mock the desperate trapped predicament he found himself in ever since the army had dismissed him as so much unwanted baggage. And he had made the foolish mistake of trusting a sibling; his sister had refused to relinquish the rent book he had loaned her, making him homeless. The anger, the hopelessness and frustration had to vent, something had to give. And when it did the repercussions were cruel and far reaching.