Crystal's Song by Millie Gray Page A

check?”
    “You maybe pay me something for my trouble?” replied the guard in broken English.
    “No! But won’t all the stuff you and your mates have taken from our Red Cross parcels no be enough, like? The parcels and their contents are all we have to trade with right now.” Fred now looked straight into the guard’s eyes. He hoped the man could read in his steely stare that he was telling him they wouldn’t always be prisoners and that they both knew how the war was going to end.
    Half an hour had gone by before the guard returned, clutching a bundle of letters. “Here,” he said with a big smirk on his face. “Look how good I am to you! I have even brought two Red Cross parcels for you to divide among you all.”
    Fred smiled his thanks and began to skim through the letters. All had been posted about two months previously and he wondered what had happened to the ones that would have gone to their first Stalag. He shook his head, thinking it was better to have a few letters than none at all. Luckily, there were two for Charlie and Fred held them up for him to see. “Aye,” said the dying man, “that’s Ma’s handwriting. Beautiful, is it no?” He then started to cough and retch before falling backwards and closing his eyes. Fred didn’t realise for a few minutes that he had gone, but then he tore open the envelopes and, taking out the letters, read them to Charlie. If only, he thought, the old myth was true that the spirit didn’t leave the body for half an hour after death and that Charlie was hearing his mother’s words.

    The men were disheartened by the loss of Charlie but death in the camp was an all too common occurrence and they accepted it stoically. The divvying up of the Red Cross parcels helped to blunt their grief, especially as those who smoked could now share a cigarette – their first smoke for a year. Those who had letters from home read out juicy items of news. However, pleased as he was to get as many as six letters, Tam was rather put out that no one had said a word about how his darling Phyllis was faring. He felt shocked by the family’s callousness and scanned the letters again – but no – not even Dinah (whose two letters began, “Dear Tam,” and then were heavily censored since, no doubt, she’d written about how the war was going and ended: “Missing you so much, darling. Your ever-loving wife, Dinah.”) mentioned Phyllis.
    His mother’s letter was all about how hard Dod was finding the conditions in Saughton Prison where you had to buy your own fags and how she was sure Tam would be outraged at such cruelty. Then there was a letter from his son Johnny who, like his mother, had almost all of his letter censored so that Tam couldn’t tell whether he’d mentioned Phyllis. Finally there was a letter from Senga, who could now write beautifully but was only eager that he should know how many eggs the hens had laid – and he didn’t know, because the number, which the Germans must have thought was propaganda that would have given heart to the prisoners, had been blacked out!
    Tam was still pondering about Phyllis when Billy Morrison grabbed his own letters and then rubbed the one from his dearest chaste sweetheart, Violet, against his chest before beginning to read it. Everyone was startled when Billy, instead of offering his usual refrain of, “Oh lads, listen. She loves me! She does! Keeping herself pure for me, so she is. Dreams, she does, of our wedding night!” suddenly leapt from his bed and screamed, “Jessie Bell! Jessie Bell!”
    “Who in the name of heavens is Jessie Bell?” asked Tam, grabbing hold of Billy and trying to calm him.
    “No other,” sobbed Billy, throwing the letter to the floor, “than my Violet!”
    Fred bent down, picked up the letter and began to read it. “The bitch – she sure is a bloody Jezebel!”
    “What’s wrong?” the others chorused.
    “Gone off with another man?” asked Tam.
    “Aye. But the man in question went right