Out of the Blue

She was alone in the carriage as the train dragged itself away from the bustling loneliness of the big city northwards to the small country town and her family farm where she was happily intending to be chief cook and farmhand while her father recovered from back surgery. Lost in her book, she was surprised when the connecting door opened and a man entered from the next carriage – a soldier, tall, dark and, even to her inexperienced eyes, very handsome. Green eyes twinkled and a wide smile lit his face as he sat opposite her, put out his hand and said “hello, brown eyes. I’m Noel.”

Tongue tied with shyness and resenting the intrusion into her solitude, she mumbled some kind of answer and tried unsuccessfully to lose herself back into her book but every time her eyes crept up, green ones smiled back at her, until finally he removed the book from her unprotesting fingers and talked of his family and life in the army. The four hour train journey was the shortest of her life as she fell hopelessly under the spell of those smiling eyes. As he talked she discovered she knew his younger sister and he was the brother that sister had raved about in all their schoolgirlish chats.

Totally inexperienced in the social world and painfully shy, she was unprepared for the persistence of his pursuit over the next few weeks. He charmed her parents, helped with the farm jobs and made her feel as though she was the only person in his world. In no time flat, she was completely smitten. When he was posted overseas to Borneo, letters flew back and forth and when he came come they married, moved across the country into what was, to her, a totally different world, an alien world – a world she was completely unprepared for and didn’t know how to handle.

The marriage didn’t last and she returned to the comfort and safety of her family – sadder and much wiser in the ways of the world but always with the memory of that green-eyed smile in her heart.

Who could possibly have guessed that her last-minute, unexpected train trip would align with his pre-deployment leave and his inexplicable yen to visit his family before he left – something he said he rarely did? Who could possibly have guessed that, of all the carriages on that long train, they would end up in the same one for the whole trip – just the two of them?

Out of the blue, that warm September night in that rattly train carriage, she met the man of her dreams, the love of her life. Even though those dreams turned to dust, her two sons are his living legacy. One has his green eyes, one has her brown eyes, and both have his ready smile and the same devastating charm that captivated her nearly half a century ago.