This week's theme Blue Moon struck a nostalgic note! Hence I snatched this snippet from a modern historical I've had kicking its heels in a cupboard. It's set in 1964 twenty years after a wartime incident that changed the life of one woman in a shocking way, and left an American Army Air Corp pilot thinking he'd been dumped. It's a heart-wrenching re-union love story, in more ways than one.
This is part of the opening chapter.
This is part of the opening chapter.
399 words: code MPA.
She slipped the record on to the turntable with infinite care: a few good winds of the handle, and then needle to outer groove. She could have placed it on the automatic triple-deck player, but this was a once in a blue moon treat. She hugged herself, swayed to the gentle rhythm, the words alone wiped away twenty years. Memories of another life another time flooded to the fore. In one sense it was pure nostalgia, in another unmitigated hell. Tears brimmed. She fought them back.
She glanced at the letters on her desk, the sheer amount unbelievable. Why, why had her mother kept them? And why, in all these years had she never said a word, never revealed the fact that he’d come back? That he hadn’t died on that secret mission in forty-four. Oh God, how different things might have been had she received the letters when they had first arrived at the farm. Had she known then that he’d survived capture and in a German prisoner of war camp she would have waited, and hoped and longed for a happy outcome. To be denied that knowledge, utter cruel. To then be sent away in disgrace, unforgettable and unforgivable.
She leaned on the desk, tears spilling forth. It was all very well to think back to what might have been, but what about the person who’d helped her through her banishment and resulting distress. If her mother had stood by her instead of seeing pregnancy as shameful she would never have met David, and how fortunate she was to have loved twice and twice loved in return. David now taken from her, too.
Out of love for an American pilot she’d gained a daughter. Her love for David had brought forth a son. And what of David, her rock, the man who had become her every thing? She could not now deny the love they had shared for fourteen years.
She snatched at the heavy needle head and scratched the record in haste to obliterate the song and kill the music. She cursed the memory of a crowded dance floor, those oh so blue eyes, and his tight possessive hold. Now, with the letters in her possession, she knew Sophie's father had meant those three little words he had uttered so often when alone together: I love you. Blue Moon had a lot to answer for.To see entries by other participants go here.
