STARSHINE, THE OCEAN AND THR UNICORN
Chapter Four                                                                                                          Part Twelve

                        Autumn found me somewhere in the heart of England.  I never knew quite where.  I enjoyed the sense of concealment.  If I did not know where I was then neither did anybody else.  I was in hiding from time, place and identity.  I lived and worked at a soldier's convalescent home.  The house and its grounds were a perfect isolation, walled off and detached from the rest of the country.  A quiet place where the wounded withdrew from the war, dulled their senses and cocooned themselves in peace.
                          In spite of their disfigurements, their lost limbs, burnt off faces and empty eye sockets, the soldiers seemed to be preoccupied with a silent, unworldly serenity, as though the losing of a limb and the gaining of a stump was of no importance.  They had done what they had done, it had happened and it no longer mattered.  They were washed, dressed and fed by brisk, starched nurses who trotted from one to the next.  I would watch men as they were pushed in chairs or hobbling on crutches down the corridors or out in the grounds.  The grandeur of the Georgian manor house and the quiet beauty of its trees and parklands meant nothing to them whether they were blind or sighted.  They saw nothing, they were somewhere else seeing something else, but they never said where and they never said what. My innocence of the war was in keeping with their silence.
                          I preoccupied myself with work, hard, energetic, feverish work.  I washed dishes, I scoured pots and pans until they gleamed, I peeled and chopped potatoes, carrots and onions by the sack full, I made gallons of tea and every evening when the men have been put to bed I spent four hours on my knees scrubbing floors.  As I scrubbed at the dirt and then scrubbed harder at the germs and bacteria and all that was invisible  but might be there, my mind would writhe and turn through bitterness, humiliation and guilt.  These three had followed me from my past.  When I had run from my marriage I thought that I had escaped them, but I had not.  Memories of my imprisonment and my husband's wicked disdain would resurge in great waves that crashed and cut into me again and again, as though his destruction of me  would not rest until complete.  I would stand determined like rock but I feared these waves and their erosion of my mind and spirit.  I feared being lost again in darkness and madness.  I feared my weakness and I could not believe in my strength.  I had been too humiliated to believe in my strength. I was still filled with his poison and his poison now took the form of humiliation.  Sometimes I would rage with a bitterness that was itself poisonous and wanted to kill and wipe him off the face of the earth.  Other times I would feel an overwhelming sense of guilt and my heart would stop at the sheer terror of my disloyalty to myself.  I had let it happen.  I had walked down my own path to my own fate and then I had closed my eyes and let myself fall into a deep, dark pit when I could have turned and run.  I would remember the dream of the crocodile, how I swam frantically to the river bank, terrified of the crocodile right behind me about to snap at my legs and tear them from my body, and when I reached the bank and hauled myself onto the chalk mud, I turned and saw that the crocodile had not moved from the centre of the river.  Although when I reached land I became strong and the earth beneath my feet became fertile, heralding my escape and progression, I still bore my own guilt for not understanding that the crocodile could not move and could not catch me and that I should have run sooner.  I took the blame for my own inaction, my own weakness and I understood that it had been my own fears that had held me prisoner.  Although there was no doubting my husband's insane cruelty, his crocodile's savagery, his snake's venom and his rape of my soul, it was I who had stayed and not run, so my humiliation was self inflicted and my guilt proven. 
                     After scrubbing my floors and mind with harsh, abrasive, punishing brushes I would go to my tiny attic room exhausted and sleep. And so I lived, worked and burned until the end of the war.
                             On Armistice day my innocence of the war was shattered.  I had never tried to understand it.  I had never thought about it.  I did not know whether it was glorious or inglorious. It was just something men went to and they either came back or they didn't. The day war ceased there was a change in the soldiers, it was not one of relief or joy but one of despair.  Their quiet serenity left them and tears streamed from their dead fish eyes.  They wept and screamed and in their wailing I could hear the horror they had repressed being unleashed.  I covered my ears and ran from the house.  I did not stop running until I was far away. I uncovered my ears, I could still hear the nightmare sound coming from the house.  A dry, demonic whine came from the back of a throat behind me.  I swung round and there at the foot of a tree sat a soldier.  His face was burnt away, he had no eyes and no hands.  He sat hunched up with his knees up to where his chin used to be.  I knelt beside him and held one of his misshapen stumps.  His dry, cracked voice came from his lipless mouth and he told me of war. 
        "I didn't know it was real, but now that its over it must have been real. We're cursing the dead that left us behind.  Even if our bodies were whole, a man cannot live with what he knows." 
                           I wept.
                           That night I was once again on a train with my hat box on my lap.  The train rattled through the night. My naivety had been shed.  I looked at my hat box and cried. Then I felt George's touch on the palm of my hand and I knew that he lived.