Spring Blossoms at Mill Grange

of your future by the mistakes of your past.’
Lowering her hand from his face, Tom kept hold of it as he asked again, ‘If Sam offers you the chance to stay would you take it?’
‘If it’s a permanent post and you and Dylan are here, yes.’ Helen felt herself leaning in. Please kiss me. Please. Now.
‘Right.’ Looking away, Tom sounded determined. ‘Come on.’
 Disappointed, hoping her desire for him hadn’t shown, Helen scrambled to her feet. ‘Where are we going?’
‘To stand on the clapper bridge.’
‘Really?’ Helen couldn’t stop the nervous giggle that shot from her lips. ‘Why?’
‘Because our first kiss should happen somewhere amazing.’ Tom took both her hands in his. Longing shone in his eyes as he returned Helen’s suddenly shy smile. ‘And as we’re archaeologists, you can’t get much more amazing than a prehistoric bridge.’

Twelve
Sunday March 22nd
‘I can’t believe we had to wait so long to see Bert. I did explain that we were virtually family, but apparently that isn’t good enough!’ Sam was still fuming as Tina drove him and Mabel to the hospital through the Sunday afternoon traffic.
Tina glanced in her rear-view mirror at Mabel in the back seat. The old woman had barely spoken since they’d picked her up from the cottage and driven from Upwich towards the Musgrove hospital on the outskirts of Taunton. She seemed shrunken somehow, as if without Bert to direct her boundless, forthright energy, she was rudderless.
Although she’d asked the question before, Tina spoke to Mabel, hoping to pull her out of her frightening silence. ‘Which ward are we looking for when we get there?’
‘Coleridge.’ The word was barely a whisper. ‘It’s the one where you go if you can’t breathe properly. Bert’s on…’ she licked her cracked lips ‘… he’s on a ventilator.’
‘Do you know how to find it, Mabel?’ Sam leaned forward to grab some change that Tina kept in the glove compartment for the car park.
‘No, I…’ Mabel kept her eyes fixed on the window to her side, blindly passing the rows of white and cream council houses that lined the road before they turned into the car park. ‘There was a big lift that could fit Bert in on a trolley. The nurse was nice. He kept talking to me, keeping me going. I didn’t notice how we got there.’
Tina slowed the car, ready to face the hunt for a precious parking space during visiting hours. ‘It’s okay, Mabel, there’ll be a map, or we can ask at reception.’
Almost twenty minutes later, having circled the parking lot more times than they cared to remember, Sam waved frantically as a BMW ahead of them pulled out of a gap, and Tina drove into it.
Helping Mabel out, Sam mouthed to Tina as she went to pay for the ticket, ‘I wish I could come in too.’
‘I know, but it is best I check out the amount of space inside first.’ She took the change from Sam’s hand and whispered, ‘I’ll see how Bert is and, assuming I’m allowed, I’ll text you. But I won’t ask Bert about giving me away until we see him together.’
Staring after them as Tina guided Mabel through the glass doors and on into a stark wilderness hung with a dizzying array of blue and white signs, and heaving with people, Sam backed away. His legs felt shaky and his pulse was already racing.
Angry at himself for not being able to see his friend or support Tina and Mabel, Sam grabbed a coffee from an outside kiosk and moved around the side of the building, sitting on the first bank of grass he came to.
Watching cars moving around the car park opposite, he felt blissfully invisible. The flashbacks to his past, and the cause of his claustrophobia, didn’t come as often since he’d settled with Tina at Mill Grange. But they still came. Sam managed to sleep in the downstairs bedroom, comfortingly near the front door to the Victorian manor house, fairly often now. But if that room was needed for a guest, or if he was having a bad spell, Sam would return to the tent in the garden to sleep. Tina usually moved outside with him, but if it was particularly cold or wet, he’d send her to the attic room she used to store her personal belongings, telling her repeatedly not to feel guilty for doing so.
Bert had told Sam the flashbacks would never truly leave, but they’d lessen month by month, year by year, and that the best way to deal with them was to accept they were part of him. He’d told Sam to use them as a yardstick for positive behaviour; that when he found himself reliving the hells he’d seen, it meant he was being frustrated while trying to do something good; probably for someone else. This, Bert had concluded, meant Sam was a decent person, and thus each flashback, although disturbing, was a mark of his kindness and progress as a human being. It was not a mark of a failure to move on.
He could hear Bert now. ‘Some things you don’t move on from, my boy, but you do learn to live with them.’
Sam loved Bert for that. For giving him a way to breathe through the terrors when they came.
It happened. I couldn’t save them, but I tried. Other people are alive because of me.
Sam clutched his flimsy paper cup until the heat was almost unbearable and the contents were in danger of slopping over the sides, as the nightmare he’d sensed coming, arrived.
The building had burnt around him, but he’d stayed with his fellow squaddies, trying to get the locals out of their home. Sam shifted on the grass. He could smell the smoke, the choking charring stench of trapped, terrified, people. He knew what vision was coming next, and tried hard to relax his shoulder as the sound of crashing timbers and screams echoed through his mind, their horror foreign to the urgent, but relatively calm, bustle around him. Four men