Crystal's Song by Millie Gray

nuns will beat the living daylights oot of me until they think I’m no longer in moral danger!”
    “Who says the Holy Sisters are cruel?”
    “Who says? Just have a look at Sadie Thomson, raped by her father and he’s still abusing his daughters at will. She was sent to Glasgow to give birth to her bairn and she’ll never be the same again.” Dinah shook her head. “Mammy, they say Sadie’s so crazed noo, always looking for the bairn that’s God knows where, that they’re thinking she’ll need to go to Bangour Village Hospital!”
    “Dinah, the choice is yours.”
    “But it’s no. I want to abort this,” Dinah looked down at her stomach, “and you’re only thinking of yourself and your conscience by making me have it.”
    “Yes. And, as I’ve said, the choice is either you thole all the embarrassment – and can I remind you that I’ll have to put up with that too – or you go to the nuns!”

8
    Even now, in October 1943, Fred Armstrong couldn’t really say the men had settled into the fertile farmland surroundings of Frankvitz, which they’d reached after their gruelling march of some 550 kilometres through Poland in June 1941. They just hadn’t been able to understand why they had been moved. They’d worked very hard in the sugar-beet factory and although their diet was poor and the conditions appalling they had caused no trouble. They were even grateful that the stability meant they occasionally got letters from home and had been given access three times to their looted Red Cross parcels!
    The surprising thing about the farmland was that it was also being worked by Polish male along with Russian male and female prisoners of war. At the end of the day the four different groups would trudge wearily towards their designated huts for the night.
    Normally the chat there would always come around to exchanging ideas on how to escape, though to be realistic there was no way that anyone could escape and survive. So it caused much amusement when Billy announced that he thought they should try to dig a tunnel. His mates thought Billy hadn’t quite grasped that you didn’t have to dig a tunnel to get out of farmland – you just had to walk out when the guards weren’t looking. Fred had gone out of his way to tell all that to Billy, who in turn shook his head and patiently went on to explain that he wouldn’t be digging a tunnel in order to escape – but to get into the Russian women’s sleeping quarters at night!

    Christmas 1943 was just three days away when Fred found himself putting his bony fingers to his face and savagely massaging his sunken cheeks. He was desperate to avert his mind from the problem in front of him. Oh yes, he did try to work miracles for his men, but Charlie, brave and always optimistic Charlie Tracey, just wasn’t going to make it. The trouble for Charlie, and indeed for all of them, was that, having been force-marched from their first camp to this farmland, the long trek, the starvation diet and all the other deprivations had taken their harsh toll. And that was on top of the years spent in captivity. No one, no matter how tall, now weighed more than six-and-a-half stone. This meant they were susceptible to all types of infection and in particular to the dysentery that was rife within the camp.
    Fred had nursed Charlie through his first bout of dysentery, but this second one would, he feared, take him away.
    “Sarge,” asked Charlie, whose voice was so weak that Fred had to lean over to hear, “any letters … from hame? I just ken my ma would have written at least once since my birthday last April.”
    Lifting himself from Charlie’s bed, Fred gave a nod of assent before striding out of the bunk house and calling to one of the guards. “Look,” he said to the big abusive Bulgarian who had taken the job of guarding the prisoners rather than be shot, “that young lad in there, Charlie Tracey, is dying and he was asking if there were any letters for him. Could you