excerpt

Nora never let Joe know that they had been espied that night. She continued to write her long letters every week, letters in which she tried to hide her sadness and her melancholy and her bitter disappointment. Three months after Joe’s departure she was pregnant again, and that added to her bitterness. But she hid her gall from Joe. She did not want him to think she was accusing him of failing her. Joe wrote sad, serious letters with only an occasional light or amusing remark. But they were letters full of tenderness and love, like those he used to write before he learned of Nora’s marriage. It was almost as if the marriage had never happened, as if Joe and Nora were the lovers they had been before, with their own marriage to look forward to when the war was over. Nora realised that this was a fantasy to which Joe clung to help him through the bloody butcher days of war, the black, tense nights of watch and wait and pray. She gave him what he needed. She wrote what he wanted to read. She almost came to believe in it herself. Nor was it difficult. That they were both as deeply in love as ever was true and needed no deception. That they could ever enjoy that love outside of their passionate letters was where they lived in a soothing fantasy.
As time passed Joe’s letters became more morbid. He was losing his friends one by one but kept referring to a very old companion who was with him still, who never left his side. This old companion was never named, and it was some time before Nora realised who the companion was. In one of his letters Joe wrote:
He’s been with me since that day your father pulled me out of the harbour. He fought over me with Dr Starkey when I had pneumonia and he lost that time. He wants me to go with him somewhere, but I just turn to him and say, “I’m sorry, friend; but I have this girl back in Ireland and I’m going to her first. We have a lot to do, this girl and I. I hope you can wait a bit longer.” He’s waiting, my darling, but he’s becoming impatient. How long can this war last?’
Joe was excited about a posting to a Buckley-class frigate, the HMS Bullen. On 6 December 1944, the Bullen was torpedoed by U-Boat U-775, in the frigid waters of Pentland Firth, northwest of Scotland. The Bullen broke in two and sank in two hours. Of the one hundred and sixty-eight crew members on board, seventy-one went down with the ship. One of those lost was Chief Petty Officer Joseph Ignatius Carney. His turn had come. And this time there was no Michael Carrick to pull him out of the icy water.
A few weeks later Nora gave birth to a daughter whom she christened Josephine Siobhan.

https://draft2digital.com/book/3562904

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1926763270