by Emma Carroll
“Aren’t you?” Fran cried.
“A bit,” he admitted. “I mean, we did see them, didn’t we?”
Fran shivered, remembering the leather and dirt smell. “We definitely did.”
“Yesterday, I thought it was all coincidences,” Leo said. “I didn’t honestly believe we’d really get to the point of an all-out war, yet it’s happened. And I can’t stop thinking that those soldiers were a prediction.”
Leo twisted in his seat to look at Fran – properly this time – meeting her eye. “What do you think? Do you still believe in predictions?”
“I don’t know,” she replied.
There were things she could never have predicted, like her friendship with Leo. At the start of the summer, she hadn’t thought much of friendship – she’d preferred her own company. Yet in a strange, fated way, some good had come from Leo’s accident. The two of them had been thrown together and become rather decent friends.
“My mother’s coming home from Paris,” Leo said as they made their way towards the kitchens. “She’s taking us out of boarding school so we can all be together. We’ll be going to our local schools from now on.”
“That’ll help Jessie,” Fran replied. “She needs her family. It’ll be hard for all of you, knowing your dad’s going to war.”
As Fran said it, she thought of her own situation, which wasn’t so very different. She needed her parents. She needed friends. A baby was coming – a brother or a sister. Her little family was growing. Perhaps there was a link between all these things. Perhaps her beloved garden had foreseen the future. Maybe it was telling her this: that difficult times are better faced together.
Behind the story
In The Ghost Garden, nobody wants to listen when Leo tries to warn them about events that are happening in Europe in the summer of 1914, but at the end of the story we learn that his worst fears have come true. Britain has declared war on Germany, and it is likely that Leo’s father and Fran’s will have to go off and fight.
One of the most important steps on the road to war was the assassination that Leo and Jessie argue about. Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary was shot on 28 June 1914. He was killed by a Serbian man, Gavrilo Princip, and this led Austria-Hungary to declare war on Serbia.
At this time, Europe was divided into two large sets of countries. One set was the Allies – the British Empire, France, Belgium and Russia. The Central Powers were the other set, including Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria and Turkey. Once Austria-Hungary had declared war, the other countries were also drawn in. When Germany invaded Belgium on 4 August 1914, Britain felt it had no choice to but to defend its ally, and so war was declared between Britain and Germany.
At first everyone thought the war would be over quickly – by Christmas that year. But in fact it would drag on for four long years and cause the deaths of over 16 million people. New weapons, vehicles and methods of warfare were used for the first time, leading to horrific numbers of casualties.
Peace was finally declared on 11 November 1918, with the Allies being declared the victors. But tensions would continue to simmer in Europe over the next decades and another terrible war would come in 1939.
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