A Sense Of Home

After the war so much was left in ruins and had to be rebuilt - not just homes, but lives too

- TILLY BAGSHAWE

Charlotte stood amid the rubble, eyes closed tight, focusing only on the smells.

 Garibaldi biscuits. Fig rolls. And the delicious, clovey unguent that her grandmother used to use for every known ailment- bruises, cuts, bee stings.

Pomade Divine, it was called.

It had been divine, that time. All of it. Sacred, although of course back then, Charlotte hadn't realised it.

It was years since her grandmother had lived in this cottage, on the outskirts of Burford. Two years now since she'd died. Yeet somehow, in what had once been her larder cupboard, the scents of Lucy Jones lingered. Just like the tiny lines etched into the flagstone floors, indelible rivers of memory, flowing through Lucy's granddaughter now like a pulse.

How strange, Charlotte thought, to be standing in a ruined building not destroyed by war. It was 1947, and across Europe, people were still returning to homes reduced to rubble by Hitler's bombs. But Jasmine cottage's walls had been knocked down by design. Builders, employed by the new owners, a nice family from Begbroke apparently, who wanted to install an indoor loo and other such luxuries before they moved in. Charlotte could almost feel poor Granny Lucy spinning in her grave.

Strange too to be here alone, a single woman again at thirty-six. Not through widowhood, that common loss shared by a whole generation of women whose husbands had fought and died in the war, but through divorce. Like the house, Charlotte thought, I reduced my marriage to rubble by design. Although of course there was far more to it than that.