Dear James,
Home isn’t too great. Everyone just mopes around because everyone’s gone off to fight.
Maybe I shouldn’t have written that. I know what you’re going through.
Well, I don’t. But I get the idea, I suppose.
I had my first day as a nurse last week. It was the most horrible thing I’d ever seen in my whole life and I was about to run away, but the Sister talked to me and it was fine after that.
I wish it were that simple.
I see so many vile things; limbs ripped off, eyes mutilated and sore, and just blood and mud and more blood and more mud until it just swirls into this massive puddle. And you’re going though a thousand times more than that.
WHY?
WHY?
What’s the point in killing thousands of men for something that happened in a tiny town hundreds of miles away, across the Channel, across France in some place that no one but people there have ever heard of? Maybe this is wrong, but what are we fighting for?
What are we fighting for?
You and Jack were such scamps. Remember when you dared Jack to eat a worm and he sicked it up in the middle of class? And Ciara started telling him off and the teacher didn’t know what to do ‘cos she was one of those posh teachers?
Remember how you two used to tease Luke when he was sitting on the steps in the playground ruffling his hair and try and get the attention of the girls in the year above us? He was so arrogant. Thank God Mary cured him of that.
Of course I remember you all playing football. We used to come watch, cheer like you were Chelsea in action. You weren’t very good though.
I miss you too, you know that.
Just be careful, yeah, James?
Really, really, careful.
Rose xx
YOU ARE READING
«letters to the somme»
Fiksi Umuma patchwork of letters and telegrams and shorts telling the story of a girl and a boy who are caught in the crossfire of the first world war. all through the heartache and the pain and the blood comes a gleam of hope, of peace. commemorating the ce...
