The Last Train Home

Chapter Forty-One

Every day I waited for a letter from Dad, but one didn't come.

I hoped that with Anthony home and news of the successful evacuation from Dunkirk covering the papers, he might finally write to tell me he would be coming home, but he didn't. Deep down I knew there would be a logical reason for him not being able to write, no doubt the Navy had decided to keep some ships in the English channel to prevent a potential sea invasion, but that didn't stop the thoughts that something bad had happened to him. All I wanted was to know that he was alive. That wasn't too much to ask.

Rather than think about it, I threw myself into work on the treehouse which Alec had been right about being a good distraction. Neither of us talked about the war or our families and instead just focused on the task at hand and tried not to fall out of the tree. Mr Thompson had borrowed an extra ladder from a neighbouring farm so that Alec and I could both work on the treehouse at the same time. We had started to make decent headway because of it.

"Move it a little to the left," I said, my speech slightly garbled by the nails I had between my teeth.

"Like this?" Alec moved the piece of wood to the right.

"Wrong way."

"You said left and that would usually mean my right or your left."

"Not this time. When I say left, I mean your left."

"That's just confusing. Why can't you do it the same way everyone else does?"

"Because it's funny. Now move the wood to your left."

Alec huffed and shifted the plank of wood in the right direction. I grinned and removed one of the nails from my mouth, hammering it into the wood and the support beam underneath. Once the nail was in, I did the same thing a few inches away from it to ensure it wouldn't move before handing the hammer and some nails over to Alec who pulled a face when I gave him some of the nails I had kept between my teeth.

I took a swig from a bottle of water we kept in the tree with us and tried to remove the metallic taste from my mouth, although it didn't work. Alec hammered the nails in on his side of the plank of wood and then wiggled the whole thing to ensure that it wasn't going to go anywhere no matter what happened. The nails held which was a welcomed relief since we would have to sit on that bit of wood in order to put the next one in. Luckily, it gave us something decent to sit on rather than a branch or the top rung of a ladder.

We grabbed one of the other boards that we had precariously placed to one side so we wouldn't have to keep climbing up and down the tree. It worked to some extent, but it did mean we risked damaging a piece of material if it fell and crashed to the ground. Alec and I followed the same actions that we had with the first piece and laid it out on the support beams already attached to the tree. Once in the right place, we hammered the nails in and checked it's stability by shaking it a few times.

"What are you two doing?" a voice called from below us. Startled, Alec almost dropped the hammer through a gap in the trees which would have rendered anyone below us either unconscious or dead. I glanced down through the branches and saw Mark's face smiling up at us.

"Yelling at someone in a tree who is also holding a hammer is a terrible idea," I said, accepting the hammer from Alec and tucking it into my tool belt.

"How was I to know you have a hammer? You could be doing anything!"

"We're building a treehouse, Mark. Tools are part of that unless we hammer the nails in with our heads. Although come to think of it, Alec's head might work as a great hammer."

"Hey!"

"Joking. Maybe."

I laughed and swung my legs over the start of the treehouse, finding the top rung of the ladder closest to me and scaling the rungs. When I reached the ground, I dusted my hands off and made sure there weren't any splinters hiding under my skin. Alec followed, frowning like a child.