The Last Train Home

Chapter Forty-Six

"I'm impressed, Syb. It looks really stable; now all it needs is a roof," Jonathan said, running his hands along the wooden pieces of wood that made up the walls of our treehouse.

"And you managed to do it all without a single injury."

I looked at Barbara and laughed. "Thanks for the vote of confidence."

"You know what I mean. I had my reservations about this task, but you both appear to have done a wonderful job. Well, except the roof."

"We're working on that bit. We don't know what will be the best way to put it on," Alec said. He cleared a splatter of mud from his glasses and chewed on his bottom lip.

"It's still an excellent piece of construction, with or without the roof."

Jonathan slowly made his way down the ladder to join us on the ground, brushing off his hands and trousers once his feet touched the grass. He had insisted upon inspecting the stability of the treehouse just to make sure we hadn't done anything wrong that could lead to either of us falling from the tree. There was no doubt in either my mind or Alec's that the treehouse we had built was stable, especially since we had been walking on it every day for two weeks. If something were to happen, I'm more than certain that it already would have.

Our next steps were to construct an actual ladder so that Mr Thompson could have his back and to put a roof on it. We wanted the treehouse to be completely weatherproof, but it needed a roof first and we weren't sure how to put it on. The only feasible way we could think of was having someone up in the branches above the treehouse to put it together that way, but even for us, that felt like it would be too dangerous to try. Neither of us had considered the construction of the roof when we started.

Still, being most of the way through the work on the treehouse was an achievement itself since neither of us had taken on a project like that without an adult's help. We had done something rather spectacular in a matter of weeks, something that came from a scribble drawing on a torn piece of paper. If someone had told me two years before that I would have achieved such a thing, I doubt I would have believed them. A lot had happened in eleven months.

Somehow, through the construction of the treehouse, we stumbled into August and I could hardly believe that it had been almost a year since we boarded that train. It felt like it had only been a few months, but then August appeared and suddenly it had been eleven months. Time certainly did fly faster than I thought and none of us knew how much longer the war would go on for.

"You'll have plenty of time to figure out how to put the roof on over the next few days. The good weather is supposed to hold up so there's no danger of it getting rained on," Jonathan said.

"Fingers crossed. If it rains, I might cry." Alec pretended to wipe away a tear.

"Make sure you don't cry until I'm present, that's something I would pay money to see."

"Why are you so mean to me?"

"Because it's fun."

"That's enough, you two," Barbara said. "You squabble like an old married couple."

"We would know, my dear." Jonathan laughed and kissed her on the cheek. "We should go, I only wanted to see the progress on the treehouse."

"That dog of yours better not have chewed my furniture, Sybil."

"Goose knows better than to chew the furniture." I exchanged a look with Alec and quickly looked away. We both held onto a secret of catching Goose chewing on the corner of the living room rug and having to spin the entire rug around so Barbara wouldn't notice.