Gretchen:    I was never alone. I never quite understood loneliness as other people did. Being solitary was not a burden. The mind's eye never betrayed a thought because it saw things unseen even if I were never aware. My friends are still my companions. We are aged and can recall past happenings with a startling clarity if there is a need to. We played the usual childhood games and got into mischief. That is so different to children of today. The air we breathed was so different back then. Our pallor is healthy, not showing signs of illness or the cold clay of old age. John, my eldest brother, was impish, always getting into fights. He would stand up for me because I remained quiet when so-called friends made fun of my harelip. Mam said I was her "Precious Bane". I wish I understood then before the darkness came to my heart. Carrying out a conversation with she, I little understood as I saw a diminutive light on the ceiling eddying into thin skeins of gossamer silk as I was repeatedly urged to converse with a child who was as lonely as I. A voice, so sweet, would sing a hymn that soon made me laugh. So much was shown to me that day that I remembered only years later when I stared at the dry skin on my hands and her face mocked me, imploring me to walk along the path she had taken me to play on when I was but a child. Tearfully, I answered that I still spoke to her as a girl, not as the older Gretchen who stared at her aged hands as her grandchildren asked her to play with them. For goodness sake, this is how I wanted to be. To be old never entered my mind then. Did my mind protect me somehow from the true appearance of the companion I conversed with? One of the last things I recalled before sleeping was the smell of thyme in the small bedroom. The window is closed, so how could this come from the garden. So many voices spoke. I did not like what I heard. "Sleep," one voice shrieked in my ear, "was not eternal." They were always awake because they are sentient. I did not know what they meant."The mind is nothing", another said. "Peas in a pod have no consciousness," another opined. These words were spoken to a six-year-old girl desperate to fall asleep and dream of playing hopscotch in the street with her friends on the morrow. I knew only once that the dead spoke to me. There would be no peace for me until I awakened from the dream my new companion had entrapped me in.

Gretchen was in her late forties as the Great War continued with the terrible loss of life. She still lived in the small village in Wales with her husband and children. Older people respected her because of her abilities to speak with the dead. One day, she reads the local newspaper and sees that five men from the village have been killed in Flanders. Hal Flaxton, a Captain in the Welsh Guards, then speaks to her. She has seen his name on the casualty list and he tells her that his body is already forgotten. He urges Gretchen to contact his wife, Lucy, as he needs to tell her what happened to him. Against her better wishes, inviting ridicule, Gretchen writes to Lucy Flaxton. . .