Two Ghosts - Thomas Shelby

1 - It's Good to see you, Soph

Sophie Thorne took a deep breath before picking up her suitcases and stepping down onto the smoke-shrouded platform. After eight years away she had finally decided it was time for her to return to the place she would always call home, otherwise known as Small Heath, where she spent her childhood and teenage years messing around in the streets with her older brother and friends. Although, as she stood on the almost empty platform she didn't yet feel like she was back home. There were only a few other people around, but she vividly remembered every time she had come here as a child with her mother that there were usually loads of people crowding the two platforms as they waited for their trains. However, her train had been delayed by an hour due to problems on the line so it was now half-past-ten at night and she suspected most people were at home with their families, relaxing after a hard day's work.

When she left London a few hours earlier, the sun was still quite high in the sky but as she travelled further North, through the English countryside she witnessed a beautiful sunset over the lush green fields, where the sky turned a range of colours from the palest blue to the most vibrant orange she had ever seen. Then she remembered where she was headed and realised that it would probably be a long time until she would see a sight like it again since the skies of Small Heath were always obscured by a mixture of clouds and the black smoke that billowed out of the hundreds of factories in the area at all times of the day and night. In some ways, Birmingham was quite similar to New York since both cities never slept and were chock full of crime, but where New York had glitz and glamour, Birmingham had smoke, horse shit, and mud.

Sophie decided to move away from Birmingham in 1910. Her main reason for doing so was to fulfil her almost lifelong dream of becoming a nurse. About a month prior to her leaving she found out she had been accepted to train at St Thomas' Hospital and that's when she decided to just go fir it. By the start of the next month she had already begun her training and then three years after that she was a fully qualified nurse, happily working in the most renowned hospital in London. However, a year later Britain declared war on Germany and she decided that it didn't feel right to stay in England when nurses were needed in France to take care of the brave men who risked sacrificing everything for their country, so she decided to sign up to help with the war effort. Within the week, she was shipped across the channel.

Nothing could've prepared her for what she was going to experience over there but somehow she managed to just get on with her job, despite having to work in the worst conditions imaginable. When she was lucky, she was posted inside actual hospitals, miles away from the front lines where the fighting was, but for the majority of the war she was stationed inside flimsy white canvas medical tents where there was nothing to protect those inside from being attacked other than pure luck.

Luck was a rare privilege during the 4 years of fighting.

Sophie had saved countless lives but those that were lost under her care kept her up at night. In the silence, heart-wrenching screams still pierced her eardrums. Whenever she closed her eyes, she was brought back to her days in the white tents, where she was forced to watch those around her bleed to death or succumb to horrific infections whilst she was rooted to the spot, unable to do anything other than helplessly watch on as the life left their eyes, leaving their broken bodies to stiffen and go cold. Other nights she re-lived various other events that happened to her whilst she was out there. Each time she went to sleep she never knew what was going to plague her dreams that night. All she knew was that it was going to be vivid, traumatic, and cause her to wake up in a cold sweat.

From the first second she stepped off the army truck and onto the muddy battlefield, she was surrounded by chaos, but she never allowed herself to stop. Even when she was injured herself, she carried on nursing the wounded back to health because she feared that the second she allowed herself to do that she would never be the same again. Her fears turned out to be pretty well justified as that is exactly what happened. The first night after she returned to London and her job from before the war she started to crumble.