[Cardiff, Wales - 11:42AM 27/02/1919]
The first thing that struck me about Cardiff was how ordinary it all looked.
For five years I had imagined this moment in fragments, the streets washed in their usual atmosphere, the whole city somehow waiting for me, frozen in the shape I'd left it. But the truth was crueller in its simplicity.
People still hurried past with their collars turned up against the wind off the docks. Tram bells still clattered in the distance. Somewhere down a side street a child laughed, sharp and bright, and a woman called after him to slow down before he broke his neck.
The world had gone on.
My cane tapped against the pavement with a rhythm I was still learning to pretend belonged to me.
Tap. Step. Drag.
Tap. Step. Drag.
Every cobble underfoot felt familiar and strange all at once. The streets near the bay still smelt of coal smoke, salt, and the iron stink of the docks, though beneath it now there lingered something emptier. Less noise. Fewer men. Too many ghosts.
I knew after all that the wartime economy had hollowed out a lot, and the sudden slump in spending meant Britain would soon be in a recession.
I kept my collar turned up as I made my way toward Louisa Street.
Not Bute Street.
That realisation had hit me like an artillery piece the moment I'd asked directions from a woman outside the tobacconist across from the burnt-out wreck that was once my family home.
"The Sullivans?" she'd said. "Oh, they moved after the riot trouble. A few Easters ago now. Say you are that son of theirs, are you, Teddy? Ain't it? I swear they said you were dead."
So that was it then.
The letters.
Sent to the wrong street, the wrong door, the wrong life.
For a moment I had almost laughed.
Two years in Germany, five letters sent with shaking hands, and all of it undone by a house move and a common Irish name.
I had then solemnly nodded before asking if she had known where they were. I had been really tempted to buy some cigarettes; after all, I had smoked hundreds while in the trenches, but the modern part of me baulked at the idea of dying of lung cancer of all things.
By the time I turned onto Louisa Street, it was already past noon since the directions the kind woman had given me were bad at best, and I was unfamiliar with this part of the city. My palms were damp around the handle of the cane.
I stared at the house a young girl playing on the street had pointed to.
Smaller than I expected. Narrow weathered-orange brick front, the curtains still looking fairly new since I guess the old ones had burnt down, one flowerpot on the sill despite the cold.
I stood outside for longer than I meant to.
The question: What if they'd changed too much? Echoed in my mind, the new home obviously didn't help matters. I mean, I definitely had.
At last I lifted the raw iron knocker and wrapped it twice.
For a heartbeat, nothing.
Then footsteps.
Slow ones.
The door opened.
Mam stared at me.
For a terrible moment there was no recognition at all, only polite confusion for the stranger on her step.
Then her hand flew to her mouth.
"Te-ddy?"
Her voice broke on the second syllable.
I forgot every speech I'd ever rehearsed in my head. Forgot the careful way I meant to explain the leg, the letters, the years.
"Allo, Mam," I said. My own voice came out thin and shaking.
She made a sound I'd never heard from her before. It was half sob, half gasp, and then she threw herself at me so suddenly I nearly lost my balance.
My cane clattered to the cobble of the street as I wrapped my arms around her and rested my forehead on her shoulder.
Her arms wrapped around me, tight enough to hurt, and I clung to her just as fiercely, breathing in soap, wool, and the faint scent of home that no German barracks could ever imitate.
"Oh God, oh God," she kept saying into my coat, now sobbing. "They said you were gone. They said you were gone."
"I know," I whispered.
Her hands moved to my face as she drew back, touching my cheek as if she still half expected me to vanish.
Then her eyes dropped.
To the cane.
To the unnatural set of my stance.
Her expression crumpled.
"Oh, my boy." Those words were filled with so much as she cupped my cheek.
I swallowed hard. "It's only the lower half."
A useless attempt at humour.
It made her laugh once through tears, which somehow hurt worse.
She drew me inside, shutting the cold out behind us.
The house was quieter than it should have been.
No heavy tread from Da in the next room. No voice calling from upstairs. Neither of my brothers rattled on about some foolish thing they'd done. I frowned before I could stop myself.
"Mam," I said slowly, "where's Da?" "The boys?"
The silence that followed told me before her face did.
Her hands twisted in the hem of her apron.
The colour drained from my chest.
"No," I said.
Her eyes filled again.
"The influenza," she whispered. "Last winter…"
The words landed like lead.
I stared at her as she began to ramble in that way she did when upset, "You see, his lungs had been weakened after the fire… Wait, how did you find us? Did you see the house? Well, during the rising over in Ireland, your father was rather vocal in the union, and my best guess is someone tried to set an example. You'd be surprised how quickly a fire can spread and… "
No battlefield. No shell. No grand last stand.
Just sickness.
"Well…your father tried to get both of your brothers out of the attic, but neither made it. Your father, well, he was never the same after. I think he blamed himself, so when he got it from the crowded docks because of other men working through, because, well, who else was going to do it? I think he just gave up."
I felt suddenly unsteady and reached for the table.
Mam stepped closer, her voice trembling. "It took him four days."
I shut my eyes.
I could see him as clearly as if he stood before me, thick hands blackened by dock tar, the smell of tobacco on his coat, the way he always filled a doorway.
Gone.
Before I could gather myself, she began crying in earnest, as if she had been holding it together, barely coping with the fact that, to her, she had lost nearly everyone, and now she was allowed to break.
The room tilted.
Two years I had spent mourning a life I thought had left me behind.
And all the while home had been burying its own dead.
I sank into the nearest chair; if I had had the strength after years of malnutrition, I probably would have crushed the armrests with how tight I gripped them, the phantom ache in my missing leg flaring as though the memory itself could wound flesh.
Mam moved her chair closer, placing her hands on top of mine.
"You're here now," she said softly, stifling her sobs.
I looked at the empty chair by the hearth, the one Da always claimed, and felt grief open inside me in a way the war never had.
I had survived shells, blood loss, prison camps, silence…
And still I had come home too late…
I was still sitting at the kitchen table, Mam's hand warm over mine, when the front door opened hard enough to rattle the latch.
"I swear if Mr Price thinks I'm coming in on Sunday after today, he can shove those ledgers we…"
Margaret stopped dead in the doorway.
Her voice cut off so sharply the silence rang.
I turned before I fully thought to, and for a moment all I could do was stare.
She had grown into herself.
The gangly twelve-year-old girl I'd left behind had become a woman somewhere in the years I'd been gone, taller than I remembered; hell, she was the same height as me, and with her shoulders squared with the kind of tiredness responsibility carves into a person, I could tell she'd been through a lot. But it was the hair that caught me.
Bright red.
Not the faded dark auburn it had been when she was fifteen, but the same vivid, burning copper Mam's had once been when I was little, before years, grief and three children had softened it into a mottled ash.
Margaret's eyes widened.
"Teddy?"
I was already pushing myself up, nearly knocking the chair back in my haste. My cane scraped across the floor as I caught my balance and crossed the room in two uneven steps.
She dropped her satchel.
Then she was in my arms.
Her hands clutched the back of my coat like she was afraid I might vanish if she let go, and I held her just as tightly, breathing in cold air, paper dust, and the faint lavender soap Mam still bought when she could.
"You're alive," she said into my shoulder, voice cracking.
"Aye."
Her fingers gripped harder. "You stupid bastard, we thought you were dead. Why the Hell didn't you write?"
I let out something that might have been a laugh if it hadn't hurt.
"So did everyone else. And I did it; it just didn't get through to you."
When we finally pulled apart, she looked me over the same way Mam had, noticing the slightly gaunt face, slightly off-kilter stance and the few tiny scars across my face, but her gaze landed on the cane.
Her mouth tightened, but she didn't say anything.
Mam rose from the stove. "Margaret, love, would you take your brother up to Cathays?"
The room went still again.
Mam turned back toward the range before either of us could answer, fussing with the black iron pot hanging over the heat.
"I'll get supper on," she said softly. "He should see them."
Margaret met my eyes and gave one slow nod before gesturing to the door.
"Come on then."
The walk north felt longer than it should have.
Not because of the leg, though the cold did make my stump ache where leather met the scar tissue, but because every street seemed to hold a memory. A shopfront changed. A pub sign replaced. A bomb of silence where Da's laugh ought to have lived.
Margaret, with her arm wrapped around my free arm, kept her pace slower to match mine without making it obvious.
For a while we said nothing.
Cathays was quiet when we arrived, all grey stone and damp grass under a pale sky. The cemetery stretched farther than I'd imagined, rows upon rows of markers like an army standing at attention. I'd known it was here; it was where almost everyone ended up, but I'd never been here in person to visit someone.
She led me without hesitation.
"They're here."
The stone was plain.
Too plain for the men beneath it.
Patrick Sullivan
and his sons John Sullivan and Billy Sullivan
I stared at the names until they blurred.
For a long time neither of us spoke.
At last Margaret broke the silence.
"What was it like?"
I knew she didn't mean Germany.
She meant all of it.
The war. The wound. The missing years.
I kept my eyes on the grave.
"Loud," I said after a while. "Mostly loud…and then a lot of quiet."
She huffed the smallest laugh.
"That sounds like you."
I let myself smile faintly.
"It was mud and noise and waiting. Then blood and more waiting." I rested both hands atop the cane. "The Germans patched me up well enough. Camp after that. Hospital mostly."
She was quiet for a moment.
"Mam took in washing after Da died," she said. "And mending. Anything people would pay for."
I looked over at her.
She stood with her hands folded in front of her coat, face set carefully neutral.
"And you?"
"Bookkeeping at Price's office. Deliveries when they need them. Shop work some evenings." A small shrug. "Whatever keeps the coal scuttle full."
Guilt twisted in my chest.
While I had been learning to walk again, they had been learning how to survive.
I looked back at the stone.
"I get a full disability pension."
Margaret turned sharply toward me.
"A proper one?"
I nodded. "A whole forty shillings a week. Enough that Mam shouldn't need to scrub anyone else's linens unless she wants to. Besides, I'm sure I'll find something to do as well."
For the first time since she'd seen me, something softer crossed her face.
Not happiness exactly.
Relief.
Real, aching relief.
"Well," she said, brushing at her eye with the heel of her hand, "that'll be the first bit of good news this family's had in years."
I looked at Da's name one last time.
"I'm sorry I was late."
Margaret stepped closer, her shoulder brushing mine.
"You're here now," she said.
It wasn't forgiveness; after all, there was nothing to forgive.
By the time Margaret and I turned back onto Louisa Street, the light had begun to fade into that dull Cardiff grey that always seemed to swallow the colour out of the world.
Neither of us had spoken much on the walk home.
There was only so much grief a person could put into words before it became something else entirely, something heavier and quieter, something that settled into the bones.
My cane clicked against the pavement in a slow, steady rhythm beside Margaret's quicker footfalls.
Tap. Step.
Tap. Step.
The cold had worked its way through the leather of the prosthetic and into the stump, leaving behind that deep, blunt ache I was learning to live with, but for once it seemed far away.
Home was at the end of the row.
The familiar dark red brick looked almost black in the evening damp, soot caught in the mortar lines, the single upstairs window glowing amber through thin curtains.
For a moment I simply stood there.
Margaret nudged my elbow gently. "Come on before Mam thinks we've fallen into an open grave."
I snorted despite myself and followed her inside as I said, "It just feels too easy, you know, like life shouldn't be moving on without them."
She simply nodded as she pushed open the door. The moment it happened, the smell hit me.
Bacon.
Leeks.
Onions.
It rolled out of the little house in a wave so warm and familiar it stopped me dead in the threshold.
For one disorienting second I wasn't twenty-two, made of scar tissue and leather.
I was fifteen again, boots muddy from the docks, Da laughing in the next room, Mam at the range with her sleeves rolled up while Jack stole bits of bacon from the pan when he thought she wasn't looking.
The years between then and now seemed to collapse inward.
I closed my eyes and just breathed.
Fat crackling in the pan.
Sweet onion softening in its own juices.
The green, earthy scent of leeks.
It was the smell of winter suppers. Of paydays when Da had managed to bring something decent home. Of Welsh kitchens with steam on the windows and tea leaves in the pot.
The smell of being wanted somewhere.
Mam's voice drifted from the kitchen.
"You two?"
Margaret was already shrugging off her coat. "No, it's the king. He's come for his supper."
"Then he can wash his hands first," Mam called back.
I laughed, a real laugh this time; it felt rusty from disuse.
When I stepped into the kitchen, the sight of the black iron pan on the range nearly undid me as much as the smell had.
Bacon curled and crisped in the heat while chopped leeks and onions softened down around it, turning glossy and pale gold. Beside it sat thick slices of bread already cut, and the kettle hissed quietly on the hob.
Mam turned from the stove, wooden spoon in hand.
"There you are." Her eyes flicked to my face, reading something there. "You look frozen through."
"A bit."
"Well, sit down before you fall down."
I lowered myself into the chair at the table, setting the cane against the wall where it rattled softly before going still.
Margaret busied herself with the plates.
For a moment, nobody spoke.
Not because there was nothing to say, but because the room itself was saying enough.
The scrape of crockery.
The crackle of bacon.
The hiss of onion in hot fat.
The sigh of the kettle.
Ordinary sounds.
Beautifully ordinary.
Mam spooned the bacon, leeks, and onions onto thick hunks of bread, the juices soaking into the crust.
"Eat," she said, setting the plate in front of me.
I looked down at it.
Simple food, what I had eaten for most of my life.
But after camp broth and hospital bread, it might as well have been a feast.
I took the first bite and nearly had to stop.
Salt from the bacon.
Sweetness from the onions.
The soft, grassy warmth of leeks.
Grease soaking into fresh bread.
Margaret sat opposite me, watching with the faintest smile.
"Good?"
I swallowed hard.
"It tastes like the best thing since I left."
Mam's face softened at that.
For the first time since stepping off the train, the hollow space inside my chest eased.
Not gone.
Never gone.
But quieter.
Outside, Cardiff carried on in the dark beyond the window, trams clattering and dock whistles sounding somewhere far off.
But in the little kitchen on Louisa Street, with the smell of bacon and onions in the air and with the last of my family close enough to touch, the war finally felt a little farther away.