Had we but world enough and time,

by blancmange

The story can now resume. ATONEMENT fanfic! I was never meant to be a writer, but there are too few stories for Robbie and Cecilia out here, so I felt a need to contribute...

So long as men can breathe or eyes can see/ So long lives this and this gives life to thee. (WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Sonnet 18)

ONE:

In another life, Cecilia had chocolate on Wednesdays. In fact, she had chocolate on any day that pleased her, and in endless quantities. In a better world, an orange was not a mother's desperate love letter to her evacuee son, lost on the way to a northern farm. An orange was an orange. There was a whole universe of unspoken darkness that was negated and cast off in that other life.

How would this Other Cecilia ever be able to explain the alternative to her hungry, waiting counterpart in bombed-out London? There are no words that can explain to blind eyes the true sensations of light and colour. There was no way that Nurse Tallis, with a cold finger tapping on her pocket watch while walking through a grey Clapham on Sunday morning, could comprehend fully the other story that had woven its staccato rhythms around her. Her world, beyond that evening in nineteen thirty-five, no longer had the capacity to continue in its original path.

But, if it had...

In another life, the story had resumed. Private Turner had returned, grey-faced and weary; the syllables of her name rolled off his parched lips as his shrunken spirit learnt once again to fill his civilian shoes. Or, perhaps, he had never left. There

TO BE CONTINUED as soon as I'm done with studying for maths.

Note from the author

VERY MUCH A WORK IN PROGRESS.

part of the next paragraph:

But, if it had… If the story had resumed, and in its sprawling

I AM LISTENING TO VERA LYNN.