Letters Across the Sea by Genevieve Graham (best short novels of all time txt) 📗

and threadbare, and from its fit I could tell he was now a much smaller man than he used to be. His boots were worn and wet.

“Aren’t you cold, Mr. Rabinowitz?”

He waved a hand. “This coat’s been with me forever. It’ll do. These days they don’t make nothing that ain’t schlock. Mrs. Rabinowitz will patch this up. Thirty-seven years she’s been patching me up.” He chuckled, then shivered despite himself.

No one was going to patch up his old coat. I thought of the noisy, whirring sewing machines at Eaton’s, remembering the thick grey wool I’d made into so many coats, and I wondered how much they cost.

I was reluctant to leave him there, alone in the bitter cold, but I didn’t have a choice. “I’m sorry, Mr. Rabinowitz, but I have to go to work,” I said. “I don’t want to be late.”

“Ah yes, don’t let me keep you,” he replied. “I should be getting back to the factory myself.”

When I arrived at work, the newsroom was darkened by the storm outside, adding to the doom and gloom forever being typed up in the office. Mr. Rabinowitz drifted to the back of my mind as I pulled out the latest news from the war, which brought my daily fears for my brothers back to the forefront. One by one, they’d all gone to fight. Eighteen-year-old Liam had been the last to go, in 1940.

Jimmy had joined the Royal Canadian Air Force, and his brief letters home were messily scrawled stories of danger that kept me from sleeping. In the summer of 1940, he and the rest of the Number 1 Fighter Squadron had flown their one-man Hurricanes during the Battle of Britain, and he’d written with a sort of crazy glee about their first engagement of enemy planes in August.

Those bombers couldn’t keep up with us. What a thrill to finally get into the fight! We shot down three, and four others took some heavy fire.

There was a big ink blot, then he continued on.

We did lose one of ours, though, and that was a sobering fact to remember as we all touched down at the base.

The next letter sounded less like a celebration, and it had chilled me to the bone.

We weren’t so lucky today. The Messerschmitts came out of the sun—you remember what that’s like? When you’re out in the field and someone pops a fly ball right into the sun? There’s no way to see it, then all of a sudden it’s in your face. Well, we fought well, but we lost three more planes.

I kept track of the numbers he sent me. Later, I’d see them printed in our paper.

“Your brother’s a hero,” Ian reminded me one morning in October as I sat at my desk, staring at nothing. “Thirty-one enemy aircraft destroyed, and another forty or so more damaged. He and his squadron are saving a lot of lives, Molly. Try to think of it that way.”

“I’m trying,” I’d replied, “but then I think of the sixteen downed Hurricanes, and those Canadian boys who will never see their families again. And I think it could be Jimmy next time. And I can’t imagine a world without Jimmy in it.”

Liam was just as bad at stopping my heart. Maybe worse. He was with the Royal Canadian Navy, sailing on a corvette through the deep waters of the St. Lawrence, trying to stay above the surface while wolf packs of U-boats hunted from the deep. At least he tried to inject a little humour when he could.

I was awful glad to hear from you that Louise is all right, he’d written privately to me. It doesn’t matter how many times I write, she still seems worried. Please tell her I love her—even though I have probably told her fifty times recently. I keep promising I’ll be back so I can marry her, whether she likes it or not!

Hey, I wanted to tell you about our cuisine out here, Molly. You know how tired we were of corned beef and cabbage? Well, guess what we eat practically every day out here? Corned beef and powdered potatoes! What I would do for some of Mum’s overcooked cabbage right about now.

I didn’t bother writing back to tell him I missed corned beef too. Our weekly individual rations were very restrictive, including no more than a cup of sugar per week and four ounces of butter. Meat was so hard to find, they’d come up with cans of a new, seasoned ham called Spam, and I was not a fan. Vegetables were hard to find these days too, considering everyone’s victory gardens were all done for the season. Good thing Mum and I had canned like fiends.

Mark and the Royal Regiment were, so far, as safe as could be in Iceland, where they were protecting that unappreciative country from Russians. He’d made it clear in his letters that he was not pleased about the assignment.

Iceland is dull and most of the locals don’t want us here. I told Helen there’s no need to worry about the girls out here. If any of them say so much as hello to us, they’re reported to the police! We’re bored out of our minds. But they say if Hitler wins Iceland, we lose the North Atlantic, so I guess this is where they want us.

Then, just yesterday, we’d gotten a letter from Richie, saying he was in Hong Kong. That had been a big surprise to us all. He’d known they were sailing somewhere, but no one had let the cat out of the bag about exactly where until the second day of the voyage. He wrote that Britain was vaguely concerned that the Japanese might come after Hong Kong, one of their colonies, but the Brits were too busy fighting Germany to do anything about it. Their solution was to send troops from Canada and British India to make a show of force. I’d been worried about him being so far away, but