Their ears rang and their senses reeled. Bill loosed off a short burst 'to keep the bastards honest.' Niall saw them bringing up some kind of rocket l...uncher. He shouted a warning to Bill and the pair dived behind the stacks of ingots.They were only just in time as the projectile struck beside the door and exploded with stunning force. The noise made the previous grenade explosion seem like a tap on a child's drum by comparison. Bill and Niall were completely deafened. The shock would have. Sometimes we would be kept outside by their next door neighbour Geoff. He was a former RAF pilot and now a widower who liked to talk and would often tell long rambling stories about his career which we never managed to escape from. It was noticeable that he was not maintaining his house and garden, paint was peeling off the property and in places there were more weeds than flowers in the garden.Ian had been a specialist radar engineer and his former employer asked him to return part-time to. Part of her wanted to beg him to stay, to take her upstairs and into her lonely bedroom and make her remember all those things that she'd loved about being a woman. She wanted to feel that excitement, that joy. She wanted to remember what it was like to fall asleep, satisfied, in a man's arms and wake up to his kiss.But another part of her screamed in denial. She wanted to wake up in Lineal's arms, to remember the joy of his kiss, or his love making. She wanted to be true to him, to the memory. ** ** ** ** ** ** ** I awoke to a shoe nudging my side. Not gently. Looking up startled, from the blanket on the carpeted floor where I lay, I saw two things. I was under a tent, and I was being kicked by a fierce looking man, so ancient his skin looked like leather. He spoke to me then, but I did not understand him. The words flowed out of him in tones both singsong and guttural, a mish-mash that hit my ears like birdsong and a dying dog’s final whimpers. ‘Do you speak English? British?’ I.