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By Root 1522 0

was all about. I’d experienced first-hand the terror of living in a war zone: I’d lived with people who’d feared for their lives and lost them, and I’d feared for my own at times. I’d seen what hatred can do to a beautiful country, brought to its knees by its own people, but I’d felt such love and kindness too, such as I don’t think I ever felt again. Seen horror, but humanity too. Kit, I’m sure, saw more. We never discussed it. Kit lasted longer than me: he didn’t return to England until the war ended the following year, in 1995. He’d been working out of an aid station in Sarajevo with a chaplain from the Italian forces, which regularly came under heavy artillery fire. He was lucky to escape with his life. Brett was not so lucky. Ten days after I left, he was killed on a convoy to Bechistanova, his Bedford lorry shelled and engulfed in flames. Pablo, Gretel and the others survived, although I never heard from them again.

When he returned home, Kit, who’d been working under the aegis of the Catholic Church in Sarajevo, ditched his place to read Business Studies at Durham, and enrolled instead at Wycliffe Hall Bible College in Oxford to read Theology. Thereafter, he became a priest. He came back from the Balkans with God, and I came back with a baby. The spoils of war, you might say.

10

As I leaned on the warm bonnet of my car outside Thame station fifteen years later, waiting for Seffen to emerge with Laura’s daughters, Biba and Daisy, it struck me how, all things considered, the years had been kind to us. To Seffy and me. The first had been tricky admittedly. Mum had been beside herself with anxiety, convinced I’d ‘wrecked my life’, but Dad, after the initial shock, had understood. Kit obviously did, and so too did Laura, because coincidentally, she was about to have a baby. After the shock of discovering she was pregnant by her boyfriend, who was not yet divorced, she then declared herself the happiest girl alive when Hugh, the happiest man, promptly proposed, pending his decree absolute from Carla. So two babies landed unexpectedly in the Carrington family lap that year, and as even my mother admitted later with a sigh as she fussed over them in their cots, what, in a way, could be nicer?

I watched them now, coming through the station concourse together, arguing hotly, which wasn’t unusual. Both tall and slender, Biba blonde and Seffy dark with beautiful, leaf-shaped eyes: two cousins brought up together from the year dot, whilst Daisy, fair and dreamy, lagged behind.

‘Hi, Hattie.’ Biba kissed me abstractedly, her cheeks pink. ‘Seffy says the girls at my school are known as the Slutty Stevens – how gross is that? Why are boys so vile? Is it because they’re basically immature and scared of us?’

‘Undoubtedly,’ I agreed, kissing my son. ‘Hi, darling.’

‘Mum, all I said, right, was that St Steven’s girls are generally messy, using slutty in its true literal sense and not its more modern usage to imply a woman of loose morals, which obviously would be an outrageous slur on their character. What’s wrong with that?’ His eyes widened in mock outrage as Biba went to thump him. He caught her flailing wrists, laughing.

‘Ooh, hey,’ he soothed, ‘relax. You’re all stirred up.’

‘You are soo horrible!’

‘Just breathe,’ he commanded, ‘breathe.’

I ignored them and greeted Daisy.

‘Hello, darling.’

‘Hi, Hattie. Have you seen my girls?’

‘Not recently, but the last time I looked they seemed in fine fettle. I’m afraid chickens aren’t really my thing, though, so perhaps I’m not the best judge.’

‘Bantams,’ she corrected as I relieved her of her bag, which weighed a ton. Why these girls brought their entire wardrobes home for one weekend was beyond me, whilst Seffy, of course, in true, teenage-boy style, appeared to have brought nothing. Not even a toothbrush or a pair of pants, I observed, as he ducked into the back of the car laughing, still under attack from Biba’s fists. She told him precisely what the girls at her school thought of the boys at his, which seemed to be arrogant gits without a brain cell between them, whilst