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The Dandelion Clock

A wish to end all wishes. The war to end all wars.
tolino mediaerschienen am01.07.2023
Families torn apart by the Great War. Can promises be kept? When war is declared in August 1914, Bill, is plucking up his courage to ask his sweetheart, Florrie, to marry him. Bill and Florrie's dreams are dashed when Bill is sent to fight in Gallipoli, Egypt, and Palestine taking with him a horse, Copper, volunteered for service by the 7th Duke's young daughter, Lady Alice. Bill makes promises before he leaves: to marry Florrie and to bring his beloved warhorse home safe to Lady Alice. While Bill fights Turks and Germans in appalling conditions, Florrie fights her own war with rationing, poverty, the loss of her menfolk, and her father's drunken temper. As WW1 proceeds, fearful and with her resilience faltering, her feelings of self-worth plummet, and she turns to her dandelion clocks for reassurance. 'He lives? He lives not? He loves me? He loves me not?' When Bill returns to England six months after the armistice in November 1918, both he and Florrie have been changed by their personal journeys. Has their love survived their wartime romances, spending five years apart, and the tragedies they've endured? Can Bill keep his promises to Florrie and Lady Alice? An insight into the military history of the 1914 1918 war as fought by the Royal Buckinghamshire Hussars and the Queen's Own Worcestershire Yeomanry - some of the 'PALS brigades'. At first thought, 'not real soldiers' by the regular army, the Royal Bucks and the Worcester Yeomanry fought with great courage and suffered huge losses. In fact, the Worcesters sustained more losses than any brigade in any war, and the PALS earnt the respect of all those who fought with them. Although Military Fiction, it is a story inspired by real people and based on real events that doesn't forget the role of strong women in the Great War or their need for a wartime romance - love where they could find it. 'Bryn is, without doubt, one of the best writers of historical fiction writing in English today. In The Dandelion Clock you will not just read about the horrors of war, you will live them in all their stark reality.' - Frank Parker, author of Called to Account 'She truly captured what it was like to be a soldier but also what it was like for loved ones left at home. It is a story of courage, of duty, of heartbreak and of promises made, not to be broken, no matter what the emotional cost. This book had me in tears, in parts, the writing so compelling. It deserves to be read. I strongly recommend.'

Rebecca lives in West Wales with her husband where she writes mystery, historical, and fantasy fiction and paints the stunning coast in watercolours.mehr

Produkt

KlappentextFamilies torn apart by the Great War. Can promises be kept? When war is declared in August 1914, Bill, is plucking up his courage to ask his sweetheart, Florrie, to marry him. Bill and Florrie's dreams are dashed when Bill is sent to fight in Gallipoli, Egypt, and Palestine taking with him a horse, Copper, volunteered for service by the 7th Duke's young daughter, Lady Alice. Bill makes promises before he leaves: to marry Florrie and to bring his beloved warhorse home safe to Lady Alice. While Bill fights Turks and Germans in appalling conditions, Florrie fights her own war with rationing, poverty, the loss of her menfolk, and her father's drunken temper. As WW1 proceeds, fearful and with her resilience faltering, her feelings of self-worth plummet, and she turns to her dandelion clocks for reassurance. 'He lives? He lives not? He loves me? He loves me not?' When Bill returns to England six months after the armistice in November 1918, both he and Florrie have been changed by their personal journeys. Has their love survived their wartime romances, spending five years apart, and the tragedies they've endured? Can Bill keep his promises to Florrie and Lady Alice? An insight into the military history of the 1914 1918 war as fought by the Royal Buckinghamshire Hussars and the Queen's Own Worcestershire Yeomanry - some of the 'PALS brigades'. At first thought, 'not real soldiers' by the regular army, the Royal Bucks and the Worcester Yeomanry fought with great courage and suffered huge losses. In fact, the Worcesters sustained more losses than any brigade in any war, and the PALS earnt the respect of all those who fought with them. Although Military Fiction, it is a story inspired by real people and based on real events that doesn't forget the role of strong women in the Great War or their need for a wartime romance - love where they could find it. 'Bryn is, without doubt, one of the best writers of historical fiction writing in English today. In The Dandelion Clock you will not just read about the horrors of war, you will live them in all their stark reality.' - Frank Parker, author of Called to Account 'She truly captured what it was like to be a soldier but also what it was like for loved ones left at home. It is a story of courage, of duty, of heartbreak and of promises made, not to be broken, no matter what the emotional cost. This book had me in tears, in parts, the writing so compelling. It deserves to be read. I strongly recommend.'

Rebecca lives in West Wales with her husband where she writes mystery, historical, and fantasy fiction and paints the stunning coast in watercolours.
Details
Weitere ISBN/GTIN9783757930721
ProduktartE-Book
EinbandartE-Book
FormatEPUB
Erscheinungsjahr2023
Erscheinungsdatum01.07.2023
Seiten377 Seiten
SpracheEnglisch
Dateigrösse1384
Artikel-Nr.11725281
Rubriken
Genre9200

Inhalt/Kritik

Leseprobe


CHAPTER ONE

On the idle hill of summer

Sleepy with the flow of streams,

Far I hear the steady drummer

Drumming like a noise in dreams.

Far and near and low and louder

On the roads of earth go by,

Dear to friends and food for powder

Soldiers marching, all to die.

A Shropshire Lad, AE Houseman 1896

***

Northamptonshire, England: June 1914.

The water was cold around Bill´s ankles, and mud oozed between his toes as he waded the brook to free the fishing line caught in a hawthorn bush. He unravelled the fine line from the thorns and waded back to the bank where his older brother, Ernie, sat munching a cheese sandwich.

You ain´t caught bugger all except a tree, Billy Mason.´ Ernie´s grin mocked him.

Being called Billy, as if he were a baby, infuriated him. Don´t call me that or I swear...´ He was rising to the bait as Ernie knew he would. He flopped on the ground beside his brother and stretched out on the grassy bank. You ain´t done so well, either, Ern. Two tiddlers ain´t nothing to brag about.´

I still beat you.´

A rare half-afternoon off work before haymaking began had seen them revisiting their favourite childhood haunt, the Ise Brook by Warkton Bridge. White cloud-horses galloped past in a Saturday summer sky, reminding him of his cousin, Sam´s, excited story.

Sam´s joined the Yeomanry and is training on Saturdays. He reckons His Grace is encouraging sons of tenant farmers to join. Sam reckons it´s a hell of a laugh. They´ve given him a uniform, and they train on horseback with swords.´ He waved his arm as if wielding a long sabre. What do you reckon, Ern? You think we should see if we can join?´

Mmmm.´ Ernie cocked his head to one side while he chewed. We ain´t sons of tenant farmers.´

Dad being His Grace´s head gardener must surely count for something. Folk admire Boughton House for its gardens.´

Ernie nodded. We could go along next weekend, I suppose. I reckon Kitty would admire me in uniform.´

And we´d be doing our duty, training to keep the peace.´

Peace? Nothing ever happens around here to need the peace keeping.´ Ernie waved an expansive arm at the avenue of chestnut trees, and the quiet brook that flowed sluggishly between high grassy banks and through Boughton Park, the Northamptonshire estate of the 6th Duke of Buccleuch, to which Warkton and the surrounding villages belonged. Peace we´ve got in bucketsful.´

It´ll be a right doddle, then, Ern. A horse, a sword, a musket, maybe, and -´ he admitted the less noble reason for his enthusiasm - I reckon it would impress Florrie, too. That settles it, then. We´ll go along and try our luck.´ He broached the subject that had kept him awake half the night. You reckon I should ask Florrie´s dad for her hand?´

She´s a good-looking woman and knows how to care for a man. You´re twenty, Bill, and Florrie´s of age. What´s stopping you? You love her, don´t you?´

He´d pinched flowers from the garden and given them to her on her twenty-first birthday back in April. Course I do, I can´t think of anything grander than being married to Florrie, but her dad scares the shit out of me. Where would we live, and how do I earn enough to support a family?´

Ernie swallowed and frowned, wiping crumbs from his mouth. There´s no room for another body at home, that´s for sure, let alone a family. You could move in with her, surely? Them houses have front parlours. Couldn´t you could put a bed in there?´

I was hoping to avoid that. Joe Wesley rules Florrie and her brothers and sisters with a rod of...´ He´d been going to say iron, but Joe had a stick he used to beat his children, like he´d beaten their mother when he was drunk and before she´d succumbed to one too many childbirths. You´re right, though. I don´t see another option. All the estate cottages here are occupied, and anyway old Joe´d struggle to raise his children without Florrie. She´s like a mother to them. If I want to marry her, I´ll have to leave Warkton, move into Joe´s front parlour, and find work in Kettering.´

It´d mean me and Kitty could marry and have us boys´ bedroom in the cottage.´ Ernie took a swig of cold tea from a bottle and helped himself to another sandwich. The shoe factories pay well, I hear, but it ain´t like working the land, Bill.´

Haymaking under a blue sky, stacking the sheaves of corn into stooks, walking the furrows behind the plough and the duke´s bay Shire mares: he´d miss it, but it was hard graft and farm work meant he was out all weathers. At least a factory would be dry in winter, and life in town would be more exciting unless he got to join the Yeomanry and charge around Boughton Estate, sword in hand, on a blood horse. He sucked on the sweet stem of a blade of grass. Kettering was only a mile or two across the fields; he wouldn´t have to give up everything to be with Florrie.

Her grey eyes had crinkled in a rare smile when he´d kissed her. His hand went to his lips where the touch of hers still lingered. She had a hard life for a girl her age and smiled too rarely, but he could make her happy and protect her from her father. If he worked hard, he could afford to rent their own home, eventually. Florrie deserved to be happy. I shall ask him.´ He´d try to catch the old bugger in a good mood before he asked though. Mind made up, he sat upright again. Hey, you haven´t left me much grub, you greedy bugger.´ He grabbed what little was left of their lunch and shoved Ernie in the brook.

***

Florrie brushed back her hair with quick fingers and tied it in a neat bun. It was Friday afternoon, the dinner was cooking, and she must hurry if she wanted to meet Father at the gates of the Kettering Gas Company when he left work. Missing him didn´t bear thinking about: he´d be up The Cherry Tree, or The Windmill, drinking his wages away, and there´d be nothing left to feed the family for the coming week. Worse still, he´d roll in drunk, complain his dinner was ruined, and lay about her or Nell with his stick before he collapsed unconscious in his chair.

She did her best to please him, but his drinking had become worse this last year. As the oldest of the girls, she tried so hard to keep the family fed and clothed, and the house clean, but it was more thankless work than the Kettering Corset Company, where she´d worked for pennies from the age of eleven until her mother´s death less than a year ago.

A noise from the living room made her turn. Her sister, Jane, was doing an extra shift at the corset factory, the older boys were still at work, and Arthur, at twelve, was in his last term at school and was playing football in the street with his friends. She didn´t begrudge him his last month of freedom. Work, when school closed for the summer, would trap him for the rest of his life. Little Ellen, the baby of the family at eight, was in the garden checking if the sheet she´d wet during the night was dry, which meant the noise could only be their sister, Mabel, home from work. Boxes for shoes were steady employment in a shoe-making town even if they did only pay her a pittance.

She peered around the door between the kitchen and the living room. Mabel, keep an eye on the dinner. Nell can come with me to the gasworks and help carry the shopping. The walk will do her good.´

Mabel glanced at the clock on the mantelshelf. You´d better hurry.´

She called Ellen, known affectionately as Nell, and gave the child´s hair a quick brush. Come on, Nell. Best foot forward.´

Outside, the air smelt of leather, and the clacking of the machinery in the shoe factory down the street carried on the breeze. They turned uphill and were rewarded by the smell of horse manure from the Kettering Co-operative Society stables in Crown Street. It was a long walk through town from Regent Street to Gas Lane, where the gasworks were. Father would be hot, tired, and thirsty.

He was a stoker, keeping the coking ovens fuelled with coal. It was hot, hard, filthy work, and she was proud of the fact that he helped keep the street lamps alight at night and gas cookers cooking. The smoke from the gasworks´ chimneys hung over the town, filling the air with smuts of soot that would doubtless fall on Nell´s still damp sheet. Her little sister dragged at her hand. Impatient, she quickened her pace. Come on, Nell. If you want to eat next week, stop dawdling.´

The gates of the Kettering Gas Company stood shut. The clock above them showed ten minutes to the end of shift. Already, men on foot or with bicycles gathered in the lane ready for their turn at stoking, and a small knot of women waited with children clutching at their skirts. Their menfolk were hard men, muscled and stocky with grim red faces, and long used to shovelling coal into the ovens for hour after hour in stifling heat. Was it any wonder so many of them were drunkards and spent their wages in the public houses, and the women looked worn down by childbearing and poverty?

Would this be her lot if Bill asked her to marry him? She´d had dreams once. Dreams of dancing on stage like Phyllis Bedells, a Covent Garden ballerina, whose pictures she´d seen in the newspaper, but those dreams had evaporated when Mother died. The family had needed looking after, and, as eldest daughter, the lot had fallen to her. Anyway, she´d probably never have been good enough to dance in public and couldn´t have afforded the fare to London.

Her heartbeat quickened. Bill had seen her dance and had kissed her, but marriage wasn´t necessarily on...

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