He had read of the one who was coming home. Aged eighteen years and four months, just accepted into a Guards regiment and killed by an explosion three days earlier in bloody Helmand Province, five weeks after arriving in Afghanistan. The family, friends and supporters were dribbling out of the Cross Keys public house and were crossing the road, weaving between the last traffic that the police would allow up and down the High Street before closing it. It was a good word that was used, repatriation, and he liked the thought of it for a fallen squaddie. The town, Wootton Bassett in Wiltshire, with a population of about ten thousand and nothing special to say for itself, represented – as the quiet fell from a sunlit blue sky – the mourning of a nation for a soldier who had given his young life that a greater number might walk in freedom and in peace… Well, that was what the tabloids printed.
No more traffic now. The relatives, friends and supporters were in place, and some of the kids among them wore T-shirts with a picture of what seemed to be almost a child soldier with a smiling face and a battlefield helmet that was a size too large. They all had flowers and some had already started to weep. Every eye, and Doug Bentley’s, gazed left down the street, towards the raised town hall and the top of the hill, beyond the church and its bell tower, where the road came from the RAF base into which the coffin had been flown. He saw women in floral dresses, kids in jeans and sneakers, men standing straight and clutching shopping bags, the staff of shops, banks and coffee houses, and people with dogs that sat still and quiet at their sides. Early on, Doug had realised this was no place for generals, admirals, air marshals or senior politicians. The tabloids called it ‘the tribute of Middle England’.