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Gladys Parnell was sure she'd gone mad. She stood at the centre of the room, her mind back in 1914 and regressing. Between the rehashing of her lousy fate she juggled grimly with un-alterable facts. She could easily make her escape by taking a few steps to an unlocked door and divert herself with a cup of tea, play a record, or turn on the radio but she preferred to imagine herself trapped in a bolted dungeon. Circumstances had improved in recent years and the flat had been refurbished but the rich William Morris wallpaper she'd so carefully chosen now seemed a monstrous mistake, reminding her of claustrophobic terrors that had plagued her since childhood. The place shuffled and creaked. Long-ago voices intensified fears and anger. Sod his 'new house', Parnell was a rotten liar and she'd ceased to care. Her life was halfway over and futile. A quotation she couldn't source iced her heart:

'ere the worm pierce your winding sheet, ere the spider
make a thin curtain for your epitaph.'

She gulped a phenobarbitone pill - the only good thing about Parnell was the medication he supplied - and willed herself to control the damnable memories which her husband claimed were just waking fantasies. He did that, of course, to absolve himself of the horror of the marriage. That was no fantasy. Gladys forgot nothing. After thirty years she could still describe in minute detail the feculent fingers and greasy hair of the undertaker who'd collected granny in her coffin. He'd wiped his filthy boots on the recently swept doormat, spreading horse shit everywhere. And God, the body odour! She was good with smells. The whole crew stank to high heaven.
Her introspection hit the pits: 'Mummy said when men stink they can't be domesticated, simple as that. Daddy was a dream - he smelt divine'.

She half turned. If she could move her body as easily as her mind she wouldn't have thoughts like this; she'd give up half her remaining years to be back in Clifton. . . that bright magic world of her youth. Today offered no hope - Hitler's war was real and her mind was finally accepting the horror. Warsaw was in ruins but for now the girls were safe in Clifton - and Rory would be there too if Parnell had an ounce of sense. A false air raid alarm terrified London. The warning system is a complete cock-up. Hitler's bound to win. Parnell's high placed friends all agree on that.

Her sleep is constantly broken by nightmares. Parnell slept like a drugged hog. Doctors say her night terrors are a legacy of childhood traumas. Aunt Doris calls them an affliction of gifted kids. She'd be forty next March and her childhood had been bliss. Her quack knew this - he simply had no answers. Medical schools turned out idiots.
When fascist bombers razed Guernica, Franco's war felt just as unreal. She loathed geography at school. In her atlas the British Empire was coloured pink and covered the globe. Daddy said the sun never set on it and that's all red-blooded Englishmen need to know. He traded in rail-stock and knew foreign trains were late, dirty and dangerous, like the people who ran them: 'Britons should salute the flag and stay at home'.

This is a page from Milk and Honey by Gerald Moore, available for purchase from Lazarus Press.

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