Bird of Paradise [antikvár]

Chapter 1Koblenz, 1919Spring came slowly that year and who could blame it. And when it did come there was nothing for it to do, except melt the snow and turn the frozen ground into a sea of mud. It looked for life to nurture - and found death and destruction. No mother animals waited to produce their young, they had all been slaughtered. No seedlings had been planted, the fields were pitted with shells, the men to plánt were dead. No housewives planned their spring cleaning around the first sunny day, they were too busy scavenging for food and anyway the curtains they would have washed had long ago been cut up to make clothes.But most poignant of all for Mara as she trudged through the streets of Koblenz, past ruined buildings gaunt against the sky, was the absence of flowers. How often before the war she had gone shopping with her mother, and they had stopped in somé well-kept square to admire the nodding yellow daffodils or the fat and shiny tulips. She could almost hear her mother's English voice saying, 'You should see the flowers in England, Mara. I remember when I was in the orphanage " and her mother would talk of her childhood, at an orphanage near Tunbridge Wells, then of her life as an English governess to the daughter of the wealthy Vogel family in Koblenz, where she had met and married Franz Vogel, the only son, Mara's father. Listening to her mother,