We lived in difficult times when death was commonplace. Once when we were in the fields we looked up to see a Lancaster bomber with one wing missing, spiralling toward the ground. Some screamed. Some bent their heads and sobbed. None was unmoved by the sight. We saw just two parachutes open and realised the fate of the rest of the crew. 

   Yet Olga's death came like an unexpected bomb that shattered many lives. She was shy, gentle and loving, dark, skinny and pretty. She was everything I was not.

   The accident happened outside our Church. She was cycling home from school on the first day of December 1942, five days after her sixteenth birthday. It was a damp day. An army convoy of lorries and tanks was travelling through the town. She might have swerved out into the path of the lorry. She was delicate so her bike might have been too heavy for her. Nothing anyone did to explain how the accident happened could bring her back. 

   I was already at home when a knock came on the door.

"Tell your mother there's been an accident. It's Olga!"

I cycled to the scene while my mother started to walk there. Olga had been taken into the house across the road from the Church. She had been placed on the kitchen floor. I saw her. Her brains were trailing beside her head like pigtails.

"She's not going to be put on a cold slab in the morgue," my mother yelled.

She was brought home. Hiding the massive injury, white bandages were draped around her head. She looked as though she was wearing a fashionable turban. She was put to bed on the side where she always slept and my parents and I sat beside her. My immediate selfish thought was, where I was going to sleep. As much as I loved her I could not sleep beside her now she was dead. 

"She's still warm," my father said as he kissed her face. "She can't be dead."

He wept as he stared at her in disbelief. Her face was unmarked and she looked as if she was just sleeping. My mother gently sobbed. I remember her taking her hand and stroking it. "Mummy's here, darling," she said, comforting the corpse as she had so often in the past comforted the living child.

   But life had left the lovely, gentle, twinkling, Olga with the long, skinny legs she disliked and I envied.

   I had a new hat and coat for Olga's funeral. Relatives came from Leicester. Our small semi-detached house was packed with people. Some were praying, older people were crying, "why couldn't it have been me instead of a young girl?" I watched her coffin as it was lowered into the deep, dark and desolate hole. I turned my head from the darkness and read the inscription on the newly placed wooden cross on the grave next to hers. A young soldier, killed by a landmine a few months before, lay beside her. Here were two young people in the corner of a small English graveyard. Hitherto, the old graveyard was declared, full. Yet, at the insistence of our Vicar, one free space of land in one corner was opened to let in the young soldier and now a young girl. Our Vicar told the Bishop that they belonged here - they should always be here.

   Still, they peacefully lie, undisturbed. Two heaps of bones resting side by side, the remains of two once vibrant, once promising young people who died tragically during a war.