Home > Work > The Skylark's Secret
1 " Even though it's so painful, grief is something we have to go through sooner or later. There's no way round it, no way to avoid it. That something we all learned in the war. You go through it. But if you have a friend or two to walk along that path beside you, it helps you to bear it. "
― Fiona Valpy , The Skylark's Secret
2 " I think of my mum and the Carmichaels and all those other people who lost so much in the war. They were a generation who had to get used to goodbyes. I realise how fortunate I was to be born just as the war ended. into a generation that knew only the optimism of a peace-filled future "
3 " Even though it’s so painful, grief is something we have to go through sooner or later. There’s no way round it, no way to avoid it. That’s something we all learned in the war. You go through it. But if you have a friend or two to walk along that path beside you, it helps you to bear it. "
4 " I think of him playing with the band in the bar, how the music seems to flow from within him until it’s hard to say where his arms end and the guitar begins because they are all part of the same song. Maybe his music has played a part in healing those old wounds. They’ve left their scars, that’s for sure. But maybe playing the songs and singing the words that so many have sung before him have helped to lead him to a place where he’s been able to find a way to live with the loss. Perhaps that’s the only way to deal with grief. It’s such a heavy load to bear alone – but knowing that there are always others to share it is a help. "
5 " The four of them were able to breathe again. But their thanksgiving was muted, overshadowed by the image of more lives lost with the sinking of the enemy battleship. For they knew that the graveyard of the ocean deeps was a lonely one, with ice floes in the place of headstones and only blank-eyed sea creatures there to watch over the bones of lost sailors from both sides of the divide as they were stirred by restless currents "
6 " away on the other side of the world called "
7 " humanity has no borders. "
8 " I run the tip of my finger over the outline of my mother's face, gently tracing the contours of her smile. Yes, I think, my dad must have been the one behind the camera. Because I know how much she loved him. There was no one else who could have made her look that way "
9 " And it’s too late. Mum has gone. "
10 " She gazes out across the darkening waters of the loch for a moment, considering. Then she says, 'No, Lexie. I wasn't angry that you left. I was angry because you came back.' She looks me squarely in the eye. 'You were my hope, you see. The proof that there was a world out there, and it might not have been one that I could ever have been part of but you still linked me to it, even after we lost touch. "
11 " When I’m lonely, cridhe gaolach, Black the night or wild the sea By love’s light my foot finds The old pathway to thee. "
12 " Life may have taken us in different directions for a while, but perhaps those years apart can slide away "
13 " You go through it. But if you have a friend or two to walk along that path beside you, it helps you to bear it. "
