Mike 💙

Remembrance Day. It was twelve winters since the end of the War. To the Doctor, it seemed like an impenetrable thicket of days and months separating his steady, peaceful life now from his existence then. But sometimes those trees thinned and he still heard the guns in the distance over the downs. Sometimes when he was walking with Wolf along the hollow-ways in the autumn twilight, he wanted to call to him to get down, to be careful, to watch his head, but there was nothing to be careful about. In the Times that morning, one bishop, not theirs of course, had said perhaps everyone should stop laying wreaths, abolish the Silence, let the War be, let the Dead rest in their scarred ground. Old Fox looked grave when he mentioned it, and at their little ceremony at the village memorial he asked the Doctor to lay the main wreath. And when they stood with heads bowed for those two minutes, the frozen air was speared by the song of a little robin somewhere in the orchard, a sweet, piercing song which the Doctor had heard before in the midst of battle, and for a moment he wondered if he was conjuring it too, like the shells he heard in the thunder or the trench whistles which called at the station or the shuffle and heavy breathing of the ghosts that came at night from time to time, asking for a gasper or resting their packs for a brief moment on their long march home.

Sometimes the sky over Old Fox's village was a little different from the rest of Dorset. Sometimes on dull and overcast winter afternoons, the clouds parted and a particular light fell across the downs into their valley - an ethereal rose-gold light which seemed to bless the fields and the cottages and the lanes and the woods. And so it was on that quiet day at the end of January. When the Doctor looked up from his notes after his last, rather difficult patient, it was as though some fiery Homeric sunset from his schooldays had seeped into the world, archaic and strange and god-scribed. He lit a cigarette and watched it in wonder, and even that common workaday smoke weaved and plumed in the air like the rarest incense.