‘Thank you for the lack of conversation. Silence is indeed golden.’
‘You’re welcome,’ I said.
‘You don’t say much, and I like that. There is poetry in silence but most don’t stop to hear it. They just talk, talk, talk, but say nothing because they are afraid of hearing their own heartbeat. Afraid of their own mortality.’

Where did life go?
Every day I find myself asking this one same question of the mirror, yet the answer always eludes me. All I see is a stranger staring back.

I was neither old enough to have made myself a hero nor young enough to have escaped the newsreel images or the long dark shadows that the returning soldiers dragged behind them like empty coffins. For no one ever really wins a war: some just lose a little less than others.

Dulcie’s eyes widened. ‘I knew you were young, but that’s obscene. Sixteen.’
I laughed. ‘Is it?’
‘Yes. Sixteen is barely even a memory for me. Sixteen is a foreign country. Sixteen is a photograph in a suitcase left on a train bound for the Orient long ago. Some might suggest that to have so much ahead of you is utterly enviable, though if I had a chance to do it again I wouldn’t. At least not now.’

‘And I didn’t say you were. Romance needn’t mean love hearts and red roses, you know. Romance is feelings and romance is freedom. Romance is adventure and nature and wanderlust. It is the sound of the sea and the rain on your tarpaulin and a buzzard hovering across the meadow and waking in the morning to wonder what the day will bring and then going to find out. That is romance.’