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he, but others as well, would soon find out if he was too afraid for war.
    I waited, just behind them. Master Phil’s eyes as light as water met mine over the lady’s frilled shoulder. Some men clattered out of the store and went over to check on a horse tied up nearby, its nose deep in a bag of oats.
    ‘Sir,’ I called, over their talk of the horse, ‘here is Madam’s letter for posting.’
    The lady turned, her lips tight from the interruption.
    ‘Thank you, Ada,’ said Master Phil, and touched his cap to the lady. ‘Please excuse me. It was very nice to meet you. Ada,’ he turned to me, ‘we must also check if Father’s parcels have arrived.’
    With a bob of the head, he began to march up the road towards Market Square. I kept my eyes away from the frilled lady and hurried after him, keeping a distance behind. Once he was alongside the Karoo Gardens, he stopped beneath the striped shade of a pepper tree and waited for me to catch up. Across the square, carts drawn up in front of the town hall wavered in the heat as if readying themselves to drive off on their own. Master Phil wiped his forehead.
    ‘You’ll be a good soldier, sir,’ I said, looking around to check no one was watching. I reached a hand across the space between us to touch his arm. ‘I know you will.’
    * * *
    Some nights during those first seasons of war, while young Master Phil trained in the veld nearby, Madam and Master would cluster about the radiogram and listen to a man with a deep voice called Mr Churchill. Mr Churchill, it seemed, was more important than General Smuts. Sometimes Madam wept at his words, and Master paced up and down, squeezing his hands, his jacket thrown aside on the chair, his normally flat hair in tufts. The radio talked about things called bombs making fires in a town called London, which must be near to Madam’s home in Ireland for her to be so worried. They talked about aeroplanes that dived to deliver the same fire from their guns and caused great ships – still I could not imagine these, nor could I imagine the endless seas on which they floated – to sink beneath the oceans forever. And Miss Rose would run upstairs and shut herself in her bedroom and cry that she was tired of the whole war and why couldn’t everything be just like it was before.
    ‘When will it end?’ Madam would whisper. ‘So many boys lost. Ada,’ raising her voice, looking about for me in the corridor, ‘come and play for us.’
    And I would play quiet nocturnes, or a prelude like Chopin’s Raindrop, its single notes falling into the anxious, pressing silence. Master would return to his newspaper, smoothing down his grey hair. Madam would sit pale in the lamplight, hands clasped in her lap, for once not keeping time with the music.
    Phil has received his orders.
    We try to be cheerful.
    Miriam makes his favourite jam sponge, Ada plays marches, even Rosemary rouses herself to be agreeable. But Edward and I remember too much about the Great War to be swept up in any sort of euphoria.
    Ada has ironed his khakis obsessively. She wants everything to be perfect when he leaves.
    Mr Churchill sent young Master Phil ‘up north’. There was no ocean or great ships there, but a desert more vast and more dry even than our Karoo.
    * * *
    I asked to go to the station to see young Master Phil off. The station was across the Groot Vis, on high ground some distance from Auntie’s small township. My mother Miriam said later that it was not my place to ask such a thing, but seeing as I asked Madam when Mama was busy in the kitchen, it was done before she could forbid me.
    ‘Why, Ada,’ said Madam, with a quick glance at Master behind his newspaper in his chair opposite her, ‘of course you can come.’
    It was the busiest I had ever seen the station. Young men stood about with kitbags over their shoulders and talked in high voices and punched each other with their free arms. A train waited for them, its dark red carriages dusty even before