Day 12 of my drabble-a-day challenge! Here is today’s drabble:

Mamie Counts Planes

Mamie counts. Every night.

At first, she hated them roaring overhead.

"That's the seventeenth tonight," she'd mutter as she brewed her evening cocoa.

She'd try to read.

"Eighteenth."

She'd stuff her head under her pillow, and still start awake.

Now, she sits in her chair, blanket round her shoulders, and counts them both ways. Thirty three went out tonight, thirty have come back.

The cocoa is cold.

"Thirty one," she whispers, as a coughing engine limps home.

Mamie waits. She waits until sunrise.

Then she slips down to the church, and lights candles for the crews which didn't make it.

My mum was born during the Second World War. Her father, my grandfather, was away in the navy fighting.

Although she was just a small child, she has a very strong memory of lying in her cot and hearing the bombers fly out every night from the nearby airbase - and fly back. It made me wonder how the adults felt, hearing the planes leave and return each night.