Staring out of the train window, the boy sighed as the miles flew past, each taking him further from his family – his worried mother and the father he would never see alive again. He was to stay with a distant aunt he’d never met, out in the country, having been packed and rushed out of his home in the… (more…)
The boy surveyed his work. Three years of his thirteen crafting, bending, filing, sawing and polishing and the results lay before him like a sleeping dragon. Almost every corner of his father’s library was filled with pipes, pistons, bellows and wires – grapevines and tendrils in a forgotten greenhouse. It was New Year’s Eve, 1916 – 1917 would see the… (more…)