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The German soldier’s body pressed against the young French girl as they lay, bodies pressed together, in the barn with the broken roof, revealing a sky filled with dark, rolling clouds. The girl felt the clouds had been that way for years, and in many ways, they had. Darkness was omnipresent, the clouds only amplifying that other darkness; the noise, the screams, the never-ending foreboding were never far away. She had lived it for so long that it had become second nature, and she was convinced it would never end. Until the day he arrived, when everything changed, she knew life would never be the same again.

The German jerked, bony hips crashing against the girl. She flinched, the pain momentarily intense and painful. His weight was crushing, but for reasons she did not understand, she did not want him to stop. She had never wanted him to stop. His movements were clumsy, his hands cold, but she did not care. All she knew was that she never wanted him to stop. The summer had been leading up to this moment, and she tried to remember each second, each breath against her face from his full, dry lips.

She pressed her head backwards, dark strands of unkempt hair falling against a straw bale, her eyes locked on the gap in the roof. She was taken aback to see a sliver of bright sun slicing through the hole and could not remember the last time she felt it on her face. Also, as she sucked in the air, it was as if the warmth of an impossible summer was filling her lungs rather than the usual toxic combination of everything else about the farm she had grown up on; the never-ending mud, the animals whose bodies were now as rotten as the vegetables dying in the ground. The girl was so used to the smell of the dying farm and the baked earth that it was like a perfume ingrained into her skin. But now, all she could smell was him; beads of sweat trickled down his back, congregating in a pool in the palm of her hand. She rested it for a while, unsure of what to do with it. Even lying down, the soldier was tall, almost twice her size. It did not matter: on this lazy day when everything seemed possible, it felt like their bodies fitted together like two pieces of a perfect puzzle.

It was the first time he had taken her into his broad arms; in fact, it was the first time any man had touched her in such an intimate way. Of course, she was used to her father sweeping her up, throwing her like a rag doll in the lavender field. That was different; he had not done it in a long time. Somewhere along the way, Papa had stopped seeing her as a child, yet she did not feel like a woman, nor did he treat her like one.

At some point, she had stopped being his little girl, and he had turned his back on her, concentrating instead on her older brother Jean, who was far more valuable and exciting, though she did not understand why. Jean could barely string a sentence together, and when he tried, all that emerged was guttural and mechanical. Nothing made sense, and nothing raised interest. Jean was as dull as a winter morning filled with rolling black clouds, spitting rain and ice that formed into mud piles. One of his eyes was crooked, the result of a farming accident to which he was prone due to his careless nature. The eye drooped, throwing his face off balance and giving him the air of being perpetually grumpy, which he usually was, so it made little difference. Their relationship as siblings had always been antagonistic, and the girl found herself terrified of what could often become violent outbursts.

The girl hated everything about winter on the farm. It was dirty, cold, and endless, filled with eternal nights and punishing weather. Still, her parents and Jean seemed to accept it, as if the thought of something else, something more, was so unattainable that it was not even worth considering. But to her, it was all she thought of, thoughts which consumed her every waking moment. I have to get out of here. This cannot be my life.

The soldier shifted his weight in a way that told her it was not his first time. She imagined a string of lovers before her, beautiful women with blonde hair swept high above their foreheads, lips painted bright red, and eyes darkened with makeup. They were everything she was not, and as he moved above her, she hated everything she was: lank hair that had never been cut by anyone but her mother, cheeks still lined with imprints of fingernails from when she had tried to squeeze the adolescence from her skin. She hated herself and her body more than she could stand, and she knew that the only reason he was on top of her had nothing to do with desire and everything to do with opportunity and the dawning realisation that his life might be over at any moment.

Their eyes met, filling the girl with a series of constricting emotions: fear, pain and what she was sure was longing because it was a feeling that had been growing since the very first day she met him. She may not have been able to articulate it, but part of her always knew that it would end this way after that first meeting.

‘What is your name?’ he breathed into her ear in broken English.

The girl bit a strand of hair that had fallen across her face. They had been exchanging longing looks for weeks but had not spoken. She turned her head, adjusting her body under his weight, and he asked her name again, the lilt of his voice changing with the rhythmic swaying of his body. Each time his hips crashed against hers, it felt as if a knife was being thrown into her guts; only the pain was not entirely unpleasant.

What is your name? The only English she knew was from the radiogram, which was quite different, clipped and regal. The soldier spoke the language gruffly, like how she imagined the men on the streets of London, a place she dreamed of visiting but somehow knew she never would, would sound.

‘Daisy.’ The name escaped her thin, pale lips as if she were uttering a prayer.

‘Daisy,’ he repeated in such a way she could not determine whether he thought it beautiful or ugly.

She shuffled underneath him, unsure how she should be moving, her only guide the distant memories of father and mother and the squeaky bed with its bumpy mattress and her mother making sounds so unfamiliar it sounded like air being blown into the tyres of the old tractor. She hoped she was doing it right, but was unsure, with nothing to base her assumptions on and no instructions. Instead, she concentrated on the hole in the barn roof and began making a similar sound to the soldier. Fast, laboured breaths, but after a moment, he stopped, fixing her with a confused look as if assessing whether she was in distress. She smiled, hoping it would reassure him. It did not; he asked something in German that she did not understand. Still, the tenderness of his voice was enough to break through the barrier of a language that had always sounded to her like it was spoken in a series of outbursts, growing more terrifying as it progressed.

‘I’m not in pain,’ she said in English, though Daisy was unsure what she felt then, so she wrapped her arms around his broad, smooth back and pressed her mouth against his shoulder. He smelt of the soap she had smuggled to him, and though the scent reminded her of Papa and her brother Jean, there was something different about it on the soldier’s skin, and before she could stop herself, her tongue slid across his clavicle, and she moaned, ‘What is your name?’

He kissed her, his body shuddering. ‘Hans.’

Hans. Her necklace moved across her chest, and he reached to touch it, taking it between his fingers and scraping a nail between the rudimentary scratches in the metal spelling out her name. It was one of the few gifts Papa had ever made her, and she cherished it. Daisy. He smiled as he spoke her name, and it made her feel intoxicated, like the one time she had been allowed to drink wine at Christmas time. She felt giddy, lightheaded, and a little sick, but she was sure she had never been happier.

Daisy’s summer had been changed irrevocably by his sudden arrival. The secret in the old barn that she had come across by accident. She found him hurt, blood pouring from an open wound on his chest. He had recoiled at her sudden arrival, searching for a weapon and before she understood what she was doing, she moved to him and tore a piece of material from her dress and used it to soak up the blood. He screamed with pain, and it made her take his hand, and though she did not understand why, she wanted to send him a message. You are safe here. Daisy knew it was wrong and that they were natural enemies; her thoughts were shaped only by what her parents had told her. The Germans were more or less the bogeyman. But Hans was anything but, and it had taken her less than a second to understand there was nothing terrible about Hans. He was as good a man as she had ever met, and how he came to the farm was oddly unimportant to her.

All Daisy knew was that she never wanted him to leave. She wanted her and Hans to live in the bubble they had created that summer in the barn that was no longer used. The farm once thrived, with the old barn mainly used as storage for hay to feed the animals. However, the War had taken its toll on everything, leaving the farm deserted. Daisy had grown up with all the animals, but they either sold or ate them, leaving the fields empty and barren. The relentless winter of War had depleted the land and everything around it. The barn had fallen into ruin, which is how she had come to it in the first place, because it was the only place on the farm where she could be alone and escape the boredom of her family. Their conversations were always the same, and Daisy felt no part in them. Even before Hans, she was not sure she could hate someone just because of where they were born or who they were. If she did, wouldn’t she be as bad as everyone claimed they were?

One evening during the summer, after supper, when Papa would turn on the radiogram, Daisy heard talk suggesting the War would end soon and that the Americans would be arriving at any moment and would drive the Germans out of France once and for all. Daisy had scarcely dared to believe it. She had only been nine when the War started, and subsequently, her life, the farm, and its four buildings were all she had known. Life before felt like a distant memory, and she no longer associated it with school books. What good is school to you now when the world burns around us? Papa had asked of her. Despite his quiet demeanour, he had a quick temper and a disposition that leaned towards melancholy, which worsened all that had happened to them.

Papa had wanted to fight, but a leg injury in his youth had prevented it, leaving him watching his friends and neighbours going to War, some never to return. It had left him empty, torn between relief and shame. Daisy was never sure when the subsequent beating would come and for what reason, only that he appeared to feel better in the days that followed. Jean, her brother, older by only a few years, took the brunt of the anger, only until his fists and arms grew more prominent and more robust than their father’s. Papa never hit Maman, though Daisy was never sure why. Their relationship was undoubtedly volatile, but often at night, she awoke to hear her mother’s voice. It was soft and soothing, like the breeze that blew through the lavender fields, and though Daisy could not hear the words, she understood their meaning even at her young age. Maman was soothing Papa and casting aside the demons who filled his every waking hour.

Hans rolled off Daisy, casually throwing a hand over her stomach, emitting a sound of being content and spent. Daisy lay spellbound, unsure of what to do. Her skirt and underskirt hitched around her waist, leaving her feeling exposed. However, she couldn’t pull them down and instead twisted her legs, feeling surprised by the warm sensation in her sex. She could not be sure, but it felt as if there was blood, but the pain was dull and did not worry her. I’m a woman now, she thought with a sense of pride she had never felt before.

Everything about the situation made her want to run away and scream, but she could not leave Hans because, for reasons she did not comprehend, she was sure it would be a betrayal. The two of them were now joined in ways she could not explain. The secret they shared had just exploded into something she did not understand, only that it was now impossible to go back. The only way was forward. She touched Hans’ hand, her fingers entwining around his, and it felt as if it was the most natural thing in the world. For the longest time, France had been burning, but now, in this moment, it seemed to Daisy that it was no longer. There was hope. There was a future to prepare for, and for the first time, Daisy had hope.