It‘s a story of ordinary, everyday courage. A story about the determination to stay true to your Self through the darkest times so that when, at last, you cross back to safety you can find your voice again and live your life free from fear.

I‘ve learned the importance of staying true to what really matters: to love, to loyalty and to living your life as it‘s meant to be lived.

“Life is not about waiting for the storm to pass, it‘s about learning to dance in the rain.”

I know how living in a state of fear creates an inertia. It saps your strength and drains your energy, until you become trapped like a fly in a spider‘s web. The more you struggle, at first, the tighter the silken threads are woven around you, until finally escape becomes impossible.

‘I think we should promise that we will stay true to ourselves. No matter what happens. No matter how bad things get. We should hold on to that truth.'

‘You know, Abi, we all bring our own baggage along with us. Perhaps that‘s what we humans have in common – what binds us together.'

But now there was a rainbow of colour in her heart, no longer dulled with the jet of despair but tinged with a hint of gold, the colour of love. That was enough for now.

Follow what you love and it will lead you where you need to go…

The colour of a heart, my mother used to say, is lightened or darkened by shades of kindness and thoughtfulness, putting others at their ease, warmth and generosity. It‘s not the splash of brightness on the outside, all the clothes and possessions, but what‘s inside of us that matters.

‘An idle brain is the divil‘s forge.'

No one hands success to you on a plate. You have to work every step of the way, every stitch of the way in your case, if you want to make your mark. Work hard and play hard.

So you can‘t have the boy back yet? So you failed at the last hurdle? That‘s no reason to give up now. It‘s not the size of the dog in a fight, it‘s the fight in the dog, Izzy used to say.

Parenthood was not some ready-to-wear garment you could slip on and off when it suited. It was like a shift, a hair shirt at times. You wore it all the time and it could scratch and pinch next to the skin.

One day she would have her own place with a garden where her son could play and roam safely, a place where she would be proud to entertain her relatives, set high above the twinkling lights of the town. One day she would make them all proud of her.

‘By putting one foot in front of the other, slowly, until a path opens up before you. One day this strange journey will make sense to you but not now. It is too soon. Remember, a mountain is climbed from the foothills. Find some of your own people, they will help you.‘

Follow what you love and it will lead you where you need to go.

Still, it‘s no the size of the dog in a fight but the fight in the dog.

How drab now were the colours of war – mourning, blackouts, khaki and camouflage – against the rainbow colours of their courtship. How could she ever set the heather ablaze without his inspiration?

The acid of bitterness corrodes away goodness and resolve.

Love knows no rules or regulations, no rations and blackouts, curfews and call-ups.

But when love was this urgent it had to be obeyed and to hell with the consequences which would surely follow their deception.

When sorrow sleeps best wake it not.

‘We have to set the heather on fire, Miss Nichol. Make our mark however small… leave something more than footprints in the sand or it‘s all a waste of time.

You don‘t choose the moment when love races like a rip tide, flooding over the shore, she thought. You don‘t choose your passion. It pulses like blood through your veins and roars up behind you in a leather helmet, setting the heather on fire with its heat.

How strange that people could cross your path for the briefest of moments and yet leave their mark on you for the rest of your life.

‘She pleases the eye, as well you ken, but it‘s the colour of her heart which will be the making of her. Rainbows are nothing but tricks o‘ light on water and there‘s no ark without tears, Jeanie.‘

‘What‘s the world without colour, Angus Nichol? Why, the very ark of the rainbow is in the child – the sunset in her hair, the sea-shifts blue and green in her eyes, the sand and pebbles dust her cheeks. Is she not a very rainbow of God‘s mercy?‘ Her loving words made Netta‘s red hair and freckles just about bearable.

Everything we build, everything we have, is so, so precarious. Couldn‘t she see that? Only by keeping to the rules can we maintain the standards that we hold dear.

And when I saw the moon, I was reminded once again of God – he was here, this was his presence. We needed to remember him and draw back into his arms. He could save us – if we only would follow his designated path, we would find peace and love and comfort.

‘If we don‘t hold on to ourselves and be true to each other, what do we have? It is more important than ever to be decent and good human beings. Otherwise, this rotten war wins.‘

Elsie said, ‘Sometimes people don‘t do what we want them to do or think what we want them to. Especially family, I have found!‘ ‘So… how… how do you cope with that?‘ ‘Accept that sometimes even good people get it wrong.‘

There are people you come across in life who you feel like you have known forever. You sense their fears; you can read their dreams.

Is this what sadness is all about? Is it what comes over us when beautiful memories shatter in hindsight because the remembered happiness fed not just on actual circumstances but on a promise that was not kept?

Sometimes the memory of happiness cannot stay true because it ended unhappily. Because happiness is only real if it lasts forever? Because things always end painfully if they contained pain, conscious or unconscious, all along? But what is unconscious, unrecognized pain?

For this is what we do. Put one foot forward and then the other. Lift our eyes to the snarl and smile of the world once more. Think. Act. Feel. Add our little consequence to the tides of good and evil that flood and drain the world. Drag our shadowed crosses into the hope of another night. Push our brave hearts into the promise of a new day.

I‘d always thought that fate was something unchangeable: fixed for every one of us at birth, and as constant as the circuit of the stars. But I suddenly realised that life is stranger and more beautiful than that. The truth is that, no matter what kind of game you find yourself in, no matter how good or bad the luck, you can change your life completely with a single thought or a single act of love.

The only kingdom that makes any man a king is the kingdom of his own soul. The only power that has any real meaning is the power to better the world.

They couldn‘t understand that every time I entered the slum I felt the urge to let go and surrender to a simpler, poorer life that was yet richer in respect, and love, and a vicinal connectedness to the surrounding sea of human hearts.

Nothing in any life, no matter how well or poorly lived, is wiser than failure or clearer than sorrow. And in the tiny, precious wisdom that they give to us, even those dread and hated enemies, suffering and failure, have their reason and their right to be.

The cloak of the past is cut from patches of feeling, and sewn with rebus threads. Most of the time, the best we can do is wrap it around ourselves for comfort or drag it behind us as we struggle to go on. But everything has its cause and its meaning. Every life, every love, every action and feeling and thought has its reason and significance: its beginning, and the part it plays in the end. Sometimes, we do see.

My people, the people of my blood, we do not want to hate, because when we do hate, it is with the whole of the soul, and it can never forgive the hated one.

I knew him. I was his best friend—his only friend. If he lived, after he did this to me, there was no limit to his evil. That is how a man destroys his own soul—he loses the last limit to his evil. And I watched him, when he cut me with his knife, and when he walked away the last time, and I knew that he lost his soul. It cost him his soul, what he did … the things he did to me.‘

The sorrowing I‘d shunned had taken so long to find me because I couldn‘t let him go. In my heart, I still held him as tightly as I‘d hugged Abdullah only minutes before. In my heart, I was still there on the mountain, kneeling in the snow and cradling the handsome head in my arms. As the stars slowly reappeared in the silent endlessness of sky, I cut the last mooring rope of grief, and surrendered to the all-sustaining tide of destiny.

I let her cry for us. I let her live and die for us in the long, slow stories our bodies told. Then, when the tears stopped, she surrounded us with poised and fluent beauty—a beauty that was hers alone: born in her brave heart, and substantialised in the truth of her love and her flesh. And it almost worked.

I turned to look at her. The sky in her eyes held tiny storms. Her lips, embossed with secret thoughts, were swollen to the truth she was trying to tell me.

I know now what was happening to me, what was overwhelming me, what was about to consume and almost destroy me. Didier had even given me a name for it—assassin grief, he‘d once called it: the kind of grief that lies in wait and attacks from ambush, with no warning and no mercy. I know now that assassin grief can hide for years and then strike suddenly, on the happiest day, without discernible reason or exegesis.

'It was the kind of beauty that grows from the sum of its parts rather than from any one outstanding feature: a beauty that strikes the eye rather than the heart, and a beauty that sours if it isn‘t nourished by some goodness from within.'

'You can‘t reason with a man who has no sense of money and its … its value. It‘s the one thing all civilised men have in common, don‘t you agree? If money doesn‘t mean anything, there is no civilisation. There is nothing.‘

I didn‘t know then, as I do now, that love‘s a one-way street. Love, like respect, isn‘t something you get; it‘s something you give.

I‘d loved him too much, it seemed to me in that winter of war, for him to simply be gone, to be dead. If so much love could vanish into the earth and speak no more, smile no more, then love was nothing. And I wouldn‘t believe that.