We Slept Through the Peace

How it begins

Florence slept through the unveiling because she had cooked eight hundred breakfasts for the people attending it.

When she woke, the newspaper was already on the stairs. A photograph showed the new clock above the railway works, its hands fixed at noon. Beneath it, the mayor congratulated every hand that had rebuilt the town.

Florence read the list of hands.

No canteen. No cleaners. No night repair crew.

She put the kettle on and tried to decide whether anger was reasonable before tea.

At fifty, she had developed a suspiciously useful talent for being reasonable. It had kept her employed through shortages, cold kitchens, and the year everybody required a hot meal but nobody could explain how the fuel bill would be paid.

A knock came at her door. Walter Bell stood outside holding the ceremony program. He was fifty-two, a railway repairman, and still had a pale line across his forehead where his work cap had been.

'It says the works were silent at dawn,' he said.

'They were not.'

'I know. I was underneath them.'

Florence let him in. He placed the program beside her newspaper. Someone had written THANK YOU TO OUR DAYTIME VOLUNTEERS in very large letters.

'Perhaps they assumed we were invited,' she said.

'We were. For eleven in the morning.'

They considered the invitation. It had arrived with the payroll notices at the beginning of their shift, precisely when attendance would have required either leaving essential work or doing without sleep.

Florence poured two cups.

'We could ask them to do it again.'

Walter looked appalled.

'The speeches?'

'No. A meal.'

She found a clean sheet of wrapping paper. At the top she wrote: FOR EVERYONE WHO WAS THERE WHILE EVERYONE ELSE WAS ASLEEP.

Then she paused. If she cooked, served, and cleared up this celebration too, they would have achieved nothing except another long shift.

Florence drew a line through the word meal.

'First,' she said, 'we are going to need a very different committee.'