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"Account of Courtney & Jeremy | gunde | 7

 

After taking a sip of the coffee, which he found to be both warm and strong, David placed his bag on the chair next to him and pulled out the journal.

Not having read the journal, David had at least flipped through it, and had so far learnt that it had belonged to a girl named Cynthia Dixon, who, judging from the bubbling way in which wrote and the subjects which she dealt with, seemed to be undergoing the transition from adolescence to adulthood. The journal seemed to cover a big part of 1941 and early 1942, and as he turned through the pages, David eventually settled for reading an entry which was lacking a date.

What he read in it was an account of how Cynthia’s parents left Hope to celebrate the 25th anniversary of their wedding in Chicago, they seemed to one of the older and more affluent families in Hope, which combined with the fact that her older brother was away studying at college meant that Cynthia was all alone in her house.

She didn’t seem too upset about that though, describing in the entry how Charlie Jones came to keep her company one evening in her family’s great big house right on the top of Lincoln Avenue. Cynthia wrote about how they had kissed, and then followed it up by writing a little passage which implied to David that the two of them had done much more than merely sharing a kiss.

Smiling to himself as he read the last phrase in the entry; “I’ve never been this happy”, David was quite touched by the tasteful description of youthful love, but then he felt a pang of dread when he remembered which year the journal covered.

Flipping back one page, David’s fears were proved correct when he read the date written out in the right-hand corner of the page: 11/23/41, two weeks before the Japanese would bomb Pearl Harbor and trigger the American entrance in World War II (and not, which was what one of his students had claimed, when Pakistan attacked America to trigger the Indian Wars).

David had read the list of men from Hope that had died or gone missing during WWII which had been compiled by the local newspaper after the war, and he distinctly remembered seeing at least one Jones on it.

Going to the last pages of the journal, David saw that it didn’t reach further than March 1942 several months before the United States would become involved in major land battles after being thrown out of most of the Philippines, Bataan would fall in early April, and many Pacific islands.

If Charlie joined up, and David suspected that he would if he was anything like his descendants, then he would most likely not see combat until that summer if he joined the Navy, in August if he joined the Marines, and later in the autumn if he joined the Army. Considering how bloody the war would be, particularly for those who partook in the first American offensives, the risk of him being killed seemed quite large.

David knew that he would have to find out if Cynthia had continued writing journals.

 

What’s next?


          Follow Cynthia

          David's reading is interrupted.

 
 
 

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