It took a month before I received another letter from Mum.

By then, the parcel containing the rest of my things had arrived and the work on the Goodwin farm had progressed. Since the weather had started to change, most of our work had moved inside the house and slowly it had all started to come to life. We had fixed the squeaky floorboards, the wobbly steps, the gap in the bannister and had started to make some headway on mending the kitchen cabinets. Mrs Goodwin said the house somehow managed to look worse when we were working.

After a month, Mrs Goodwin had warmed to me although not as much as her husband has, I never expected her to. At least she had stopped giving me strange looks and could tolerate me being in the same room as her for longer than a few minutes. I doubted she would ever truly warm up to me but I think we were both content doing our own thing without the other interfering. She didn't try and stop me from helping out with any of the work on the farm and I didn't get under her feet when she was doing something.

"How would your mum react if she saw you in those?" Enid asked, gesturing to the dark blue pair of slacks I was wearing.

"She'd kill me." I laughed.

"I don't know how I feel about them personally, they're rather revealing."

"Forty years ago showing your ankle was revealing," Eva said, turning around to look at us. She backed up and almost walked into a lamppost had Mark not pulled her to the side at the last second. "I think she suits them. That and it's probably easier to do carpentry in those than in a skirt."

"Definitely. My skirts are for church only now. These are a lot better."

"I don't think I'd ever wear them. They just don't look right."

Eva glanced at me and then quickly looked away to stop herself from laughing at the ridiculousness of Enid's comment. She had always been one to stick with tradition and sometimes we wonder if she would have preferred to wear the floor-length dress of the Victorian era.

We moved through the village, peering into shop windows but with none of us having any money to hand, we could just look at it. After a month of being out of London, we had finally managed to find time for the four of us to meet up and spend some time together. With the weather holding up rather well, albeit a little chilly, we had decided to spend the day exploring the village rather than cooped up inside and getting underfoot with our host families. There wasn't all that much to do other than peer into shop windows, but we always found something.

People were milling about the square, moving into shops and looking through shop windows just like we were. Some of the older people walking around gave us funny looks in response to us walking around. They no doubt viewed us as hooligans who were up to no good; not everyone had taken to having evacuees around. That didn't stop us, though, we used to get the same looks in London and it never put a damper on our day.

After looking in all the shops in the square, we sat down on a set of benches just off to the side of the main square. Mark draped himself over one of the benches and it took a sharp kick from Enid to get him to move, but he did so begrudgingly. Eva and I took the other bench with me stacking my feet on top of one another and Eva, having spent far too much time with Mrs Williams, tucked her ankles.

I stared out into the village square, watching the younger children dart in and out of their parents, begging for sweets or complaining that they had been walking for too long and wanted to go home. The trees that surrounded the square had started to turn orange with the changing season, leaves drifting to the ground and creating a fun crunching sound when stepped on. Dad and I used to go to Hyde Park in Autumn just to jump on the fallen leaves.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Alec emerge from one of the small alleyways that led out of the village. He looked at me and smiled, walking across the square to join us.

"You look like you're having fun," he said.

"Riveting. What are you up to?"

"Duchess threw a shoe so Dad took her to get a new one. It was either wander around the village or get stuck having a tea party with my younger sisters."

"Don't you have any other friends?"

"Why go to them when I have the pleasure of your company?"

Beside me, Eva cleared her throat. "Who's this?"

"Oh, right. Eva, Enid, this is Alec. And of course, you've already met Mark. Alec is from here."

Alec nudged his head towards the bench beside me and I shuffled closer towards Eva so he could sit down beside me. I had seen Alec a few times since our trip to the clearing. He had dropped off some additional supplies for the work on the farm and given me several horse riding lessons in the paddock as well. My horse riding skills were coming along quite nicely according to Mr Goodwin and we had advanced beyond walking to a trot with the next move being a trot.

We spent a good hour or so just sitting on those benches, talking between each other with Enid, Eva and Mark getting to know Alec a little better. He asked about how they were getting on in the country and whether they enjoyed their time in such a new place. The others asked questions about how the two of us knew each other and then started telling stories about some of the situations they had gotten themselves into, especially Mark, who managed to get himself into a world of trouble very quickly.

Somehow he had managed to almost fall face-first down a well, became tangled in some ivy and almost burnt down his host families kitchen in the first few days of living with them. Mark had always been clumsy but this was a new level, even for him and he no doubt would have been better at the Post Office with Eva than on an active farm where he could cause a lot of damage.

As the conversation continued, I glanced over to the Post Office and saw Mrs Goodwin emerge from inside. We had walked into the village together since she had some errands to run and then went our separate ways, I had seen her in the shop windows and watched her disappear into the post office about half an hour before. She must have been having a long conversation with Mrs Williams. When she saw us sitting on the benches, she immediately started to walk in our direction with a white envelope in hand.

"This arrived for you," she said, handing over the envelope. "It looks like a letter from your mum."

"Thank you."

"Home by six, yes?"

"Yes."

"Good." She turned to Alec. "Alec."

"Afternoon, Mrs G."

I watched Mrs Goodwin walk away and turned to look at Alex who had a stupid grin on his face; Mrs Goodwin hated his little nickname. When she had walked out of sight, I ran my finger under the back of the envelope to open it and then pulled the letter out, handing it to Eva to read. Alec looked at me and raised an eyebrow but I said nothing and instead just looked at Eva as she read through the letter, one that looked oddly short considering it took a month.

Mum was never short about anything. Whenever she told a story, she would go on several tangents before finally making it back to her point about half an hour later. It could take her an hour to say something that could have been said in two minutes and most of the time her letters weren't that much different. The first letter she wrote to Dad once he left for training ended up being three pages long and she just wanted to see how he was getting on. A short letter had never been her style.

"She says she's not going to change her mind," Eva said. She handed the letter back.

"That's it?"

"Pretty much."

"Change her mind about what?" Mark asked, leaning forward on the bench so he could peer around Enid to look at us.

"She wants me to stay here until the war's over, I wrote to her asking her to change her mind but apparently no amount of pleading will get her to change her mind."

"Getting bored of me already, are you?" Alec teased. He nudged me lightly in the side as I tucked the letter back into the envelope and stuffed it into the pockets of my slacks. It was nice to have pockets.

"Maybe it's for the best. Mum says it's safer here," Enid said.

"Safer how? If the Germans wanted to invade, where are they going to start? In a city, or from the coast which we happen to be a fair bit closer to here than we were back home?"

I slumped back against the bench and stared out across the square, balancing my feet on top of each other and rocking them from side to side. How could the country be any safer than the city? We had planes flying over almost every day and we were a lot closer to the coast which meant we were closer to a potential invasion. London seemed like a safer bet to me.

We stayed on the bench until late evening when everyone was due home and it started to get dark. All of us went our separate ways with Eva heading back to the Post Office, Enid and Mark heading one way and Alec and I going the other. The letter rustled in my pocket as we walked and neither of us said a word but I knew there was something that Alec was itching to ask.

He had been rather quiet for the last few hours we were sat in the village, only joining in with the conversation when prompted and instead just stared out into the distance like he was watching something. I doubted it had anything to do with him feeling left out since the others were all pretty welcoming when it came to him and were willing to include him in everything, even stories of what we used to get up to back in London.

"You want to ask, don't you?" I said after a little while of silence.

"Ask what?"

"Why I gave my letter to Eva to read."

He shrugged. "Not my place to pry into why you do things."

"You know when we first met I said that school and I didn't really get on?" He nodded. "That's why. My reading has never been the best and I never really got my head around it, even now. I just get confused with how words are spelt compared to what they really say."

"Do the Goodwin's know?"

I shake my head. "I haven't told them. Most of my work I do doesn't involve reading so I don't see why they have to know."

"Don't you think they should? If you're staying with them long term."

"Maybe, but right now I'm better off with them not knowing. You won't say anything, will you?"

"It's not my place, but I don't think they'll think anything less of you because of it. The fact that you told me is a step forward in itself. They're good people, they'll understand."

Alec and I parted ways at the top of the hill and I started down towards the Goodwin farm on my own, seeing the smoke rising from the chimney as I went. Although I knew Alec might have a point in that the Goodwin's would have to know about my reading issues sooner or later, I preferred to go with later. They had no reason to know something that didn't really affect my time with them since I spent most of my time working on the farm and reading didn't factor in.

If it came up and I had no choice but to tell them, then I would but they didn't need to know and it wasn't something I could just work into an everyday conversation. Just because I happened to be living with them until the war ended and it was deemed safe for me to return home, didn't mean I had to tell them every little thing about me.

There were some things better left unsaid and this was one of them.

A/N - Hello! We are back with Chapter Fifteen! I have no idea how long this story is going to be since it just keeps going xD We shall see!

Questions! Do you think Sybil will tell Mr Goodwin? Did you guess that Sybil is dyslexic? 

Let me know!

First Published - June 23rd, 2021