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Ruth would surface, briefly, from her coma and mumble the words “knockout redhead.” And Clem, sitting by her hospital bed, would hear them as “Got out of bed yet?” Reliably, he misunderstood her to the very end.)
    George Ackroyd pursued Ruth Little for two weeks. In the stifling nights, she dreamed about, or imagined, a clumsy red deer harried by a lean and lupine shadow.
    She forbade him to come anywhere near her work. As in all country towns, Borstead’s pulse was gossip. So he waited in the shade of the elm. She dreaded these encounters yet came to yearn for them. The utterly familiar lane became strange and perilous; she was terrified of being seen with him. Willy and her mother did not come home this way — he took the main Cromer road and turned off at Bratton Cross — but her neighbors often did.
    Half a mile beyond the elm, the lane cut through Skeyton Woods. And eventually, fearfully, she led him into the trees.
    And then he was gone. For two afternoons, Ruth pedaled slowly beneath the spread of the elm, then waited by the rotting five-bar gate that opened into the wood. On the first of these afternoons, when it became clear to her that he was not going to come, she felt something that might have been relief. On the second, she filled with hurt and was astonished to find herself, for the first time since early childhood, crying.
    The following Tuesday morning, she found an envelope on her desk. It was addressed to MISS R. LITTLE, C/O CUBITT AND LARK, THE SQUARE, BORSTEAD, NORFOLK.
    She looked at it, alarmed, as though it were something ominous or sinister: a spider on a slice of cake, perhaps. She had never in her life received a letter. When she found the courage to pick it up, it felt fragile. The paper was thin; she could almost read the writing through the envelope. (She worried that somebody might already have done so.)
    The handwriting was fussy and tilted, almost italic.
Dear Ruth,
I expect youll be wondering where I got to. I hope so anyway! Well I got a posting with only 10 hrs notice. I hoped to see you but I could not get away. I can not tell you where I’m going for obvious reasons. (EG I would get shot!) I will think about you Ruth and I think you know what I mean (!) As you know I am a city boy born and bred but from now on I will think of trees and country side etc in a new way.
I dont know when I’ll be back but I will be back. We have not known each other long Ruth but if your so inclined I ask you to wait for me. When I come back I will come down there and ask you a very serious question. I think you know what that question is.
I will think of you Ruth as I say. I hope you will think of me too.
Go careful on that bike!
Yours sincerely,
George (Ackroyd)

H E WAS ONLY a couple of months older than her. (She thought it was more than that. She considered herself a girl and him a man.)
    He was born in Sheffield, the eldest of four children. He left school at the age of fourteen, in 1932. It was not a good time. Unemployment was rife. Men waited at factory gates on the off chance of a day’s work. With his mates, George went on the cadge: gleaning spilled coal, running betting slips, a bit of petty theft. The pressure was on him, though. His younger siblings were waiting for his clothes and his bed.
    A week after his uncelebrated fifteenth birthday, he joined the army. He went from short trousers into full uniform. He signed up for fifteen years.
    He was sent for basic training to Catterick, where he showed some aptitude for mechanics — inherited, perhaps, from his father, who had been a lathe operator — and was attached as a trainee fitter to the Royal Engineers.
    He had five good years, learning his trade, and how to drink, in postings up and down the country. He once, years later, spoke fondly to Clem of an army-versus-civvy mass punch-up in Yeovil, Somerset, in 1937.
    He was genuinely astonished by the war; he hadn’t been paying attention. Hitler had been a sort of joke in the