ANNIE GROVES

Where the Heart Is

COPYRIGHT

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2009

Copyright © Annie Groves 2020

Annie Groves asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication.

Source ISBN: 9780007265923

Ebook Edition © DECEMBER 2014 ISBN: 9780007353217

Version: 2017-09-12

DEDICATION

For my readers who have so kindly and generously supported me. I hope you are all enjoying reading about the Campion family as much as I am enjoying telling their story.

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Prologue

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-One

Twenty-Two

Twenty-Three

Twenty-Four

Twenty-Five

Twenty-Six

Twenty-Seven

Twenty-Eight

Twenty-Nine

Thirty

Thirty-One

Thirty-Two

Epilogue

Keep Reading

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Other Books By

About the Publisher

PROLOGUE

Christmas Day 1941

Katie Needham couldn’t wait any longer. It was Christmas Morning, after all, even if it wasn’t even six o’clock yet, and she had been soooo very patient, promising herself that she wouldn’t open Luke’s letter until it was Christmas, hoping that saving it to read then would help to make up for his being so far away in Egypt, whilst she was here in Hampstead.

Her small attic bedroom in the house where her parents were currently living with friends, now London was being heavily bombed, was freezing cold, and Katie thought longingly of the cosiness of her room in her fiancé, Luke’s, family home in Liverpool. She was missing the warmth and bustle of the Campion household already and she had only arrived here yesterday, she acknowledged guiltily. She felt under her pillow for Luke’s letter, her guilt dissipated by the heady warmth of her love and excitement as she retrieved her precious letter, and then reached out to switch on the bedside lamp.

A tender smile curled her mouth as she traced her own name on the envelope. One day, when this awful war was over, she would be Mrs Luke Campion.

Mrs Luke Campion.

Quickly she opened her letter – from the side as she had been taught to do working for the Postal Censorship Office – her heart skipping a beat when she saw Luke’s signature at the bottom.

Oh, Luke. Tenderly she pressed her lips to it, closing her eyes as she did so, as though somehow she could conjure up Luke himself, to put his strong arms around her, his dark head bent over her own, his warm lips on hers, kissing her.

Oh, Luke …

She mustn’t cry. After all, there were thousands of young women who, like her, were facing Christmas without the men they loved – some of them knowing that their men would never be coming back to hold them and kiss them.

Katie’s hand shook slightly as she smoothed out the airmail letter and began to read.

‘Katie …’ Just Katie? Not even ‘Dear Katie’, never mind ‘Dearest’. But then Luke was on active service in the desert.

Katie,

I am writing to tell you that I wish to bring our engagement to an end.

What? No! There must be some mistake.

Frantically Katie read the cold matter-of-fact sentence again, and then a third time, her distress growing with each read, tears of shock and disbelief blurring her vision as she tried to read on.

Through the good offices of ‘a concerned friend’ I have been warned that you have been seeing someone else – no doubt believing yourself safe from discovery with me out here in the desert.

A concerned friend. Who? A horrible certainty, mixed with a dreadful sinking feeling, invaded her tummy. Carole. It had to be. But surely not; she knew how much Katie loved Luke. She and Carole had been such good pals, working together and Carole dating one of the men under Luke in his role as the unit’s corporal. But then Carole had got involved with an Irish boy they had met at the Grafton dance hall and her head had been turned by his attentions.

Katie hadn’t deliberately got Carole into trouble when she had told their supervisor about these Irishmen asking so many questions, but the reality was that Carole had broken the Censorship Office rules of secrecy and she had been dismissed.

She had blamed Katie for that, and had threatened retaliation. But to write lies to Luke about her …

There’s no point in you writing to me saying that it isn’t true, as I won’t be opening your letter. I should have known something like this would happen. After all, I saw what you were like that time you flirted with that cyclist.

The cold words almost leaped off the page like physical blows.

‘That’s not true,’ Katie protested aloud. ‘You know it wasn’t like that.’

Luke’s jealousy had been the one flaw in their relationship and her happiness. Sometimes she had felt as though he almost wanted to find her out in some kind of betrayal. It had hurt her dreadfully that he didn’t trust her love for him.

If we’re honest we did rather rush into things, and I dare say that without the war we’d have realised pretty quickly that we weren’t suited.

The last thing a serving soldier needs is the worry of wondering if his girl is being unfaithful to him behind his back, and it seems to me that I shall be a good deal happier without that worry.

Tears welled in Katie’s eyes and splashed down onto the letter, making the ink run. Surely if Luke had loved her as much as he had said he did he would never have been so unkind and hurtful. Instead he would have understood how much she loved him and that she would never ever so much as look at another man because of that.

Before they had fallen out, Carole had told her that Andy, her boyfriend, had written to her that Cairo was filled with pretty girls. Perhaps Luke was glad of an excuse to break off their engagement. Perhaps in fact he had already met someone else …

A savage pain gripped her, tightening her chest and trapping her breath.

I am writing to my parents to tell them that our engagement is over, although for their sake, especially my mother’s, I don’t intend to tell them what you have done. I shall simply say that we have grown apart and the engagement is over.

Luke

As Katie tried to gulp back her tears the light from the lamp shone on the engagement ring Luke had given her just before he had been posted overseas.

That had been such a special day, filled with sunshine and happiness. She had felt so happy, so proud, so delighted, not just that she was going to be his wife but that she was going to be a member of the family she had come to love so much.

Jean, Luke’s mother; Sam, his father; his sister, Grace, now married to Seb who was ostensibly with the RAF but working for the intelligence agency known as the Y Section, and then the twins, Lou and Sasha, had all welcomed her so warmly into their family and she had felt so at home there, so safe and protected and loved.

She hadn’t just lost Luke, Katie recognised, she had lost them as well.

The diamonds in her engagement ring seemed to quiver beneath her tears. Her fingers trembled as she slipped it off and put it in the envelope that had contained Luke’s letter.

From now on, for her, no matter how long she lived, Christmas Day would always be the day she remembered that Luke had destroyed their love and broken her heart.

ONE

Mid-February 1942

Lou Campion eased her regulation WAAF duffel bag off the luggage rack. She had packed everything so carefully, warned by the more experienced girls of what she could expect if she didn’t, but still somehow or other she had ended up with the sharp edge of one shoe catching in the net as she tried to roll the bag clear.

The February afternoon was already fading into dusk, the seemingly endless frost-rimed flat fields the train had carried them through on the long journey from Crewe now wreathed in fog. Lou was tired and hungry and feeling very sorry for herself, already missing the familiarity of Wilmslow where she had done her initial ‘square bashing’ training along with dozens of other new recruits.

They were a jolly crowd, even if she had been teased at first for her naïvety when they had found out that she had joined up with dreams of learning to fly.

‘Have you heard this?’ one of the girls, a chirpy cockney who seemed to know everything, had asked the others. ‘Lou here reckons she’s going to learn to fly. No, love, what the RAF wants you for is to mend the planes, not fly them.’

Lou remembered how she had gone bright red with discomfort when the other girl burst out laughing.

‘You’ve got a lot to learn and no mistake,’ the girl had continued. ‘The only flying you’ll be doing is off the end of the sergeant’s boot on your backside if she gets to hear what you’ve just said. Hates women pilots, the sarge does. Says they shouldn’t be allowed. See, the thing is, it’s only them rich posh types in ATA that get to do that; them as already can fly before they get taken on – savvy? No, love, wot you’ll be doing is filling in forms and fixing broken engines – and that’s if you’re lucky.’

‘Leave off her,’ one of the other girls had called out. ‘The poor kid wasn’t to know. It’s not as bad as she’s making out,’ she had told Lou comfortingly, ‘especially if you get put in a decent set of girls.’

The last thing Lou had expected when she had originally signed on for the WAAF was that she would end up being sent for training as a flight mechanic. However, flight mechanics were a Grade Two trade and, as such, Lou would be paid two shillings a day more than less skilled personnel.

She had felt quite pleased and proud of herself then, but this morning, standing on Crewe station with the other new WAAFs, waiting for the train to take them to Wendover – the nearest train station to RAF Halton, the RAF’s largest training station and the Regimental HQ – she had wondered what exactly she had let herself in for. If Wilmslow in Cheshire had seemed green and rural compared with Liverpool, travelling through the pretty Buckinghamshire countryside had had Lou studying the landscape with wary curiosity. Such clean-looking picturebook little towns, so many fields and trees.

The train had slowed down. Betty Gibson, a bubbly redhead who kept them all entertained during the long cold journey with her stories of how accident-prone she was, had jumped to her feet announcing chirpily, ‘We’re here, everyone.’

There were five girls altogether, all from the north of England, although Lou was the only one from Liverpool. They’d soon introduced themselves and exchanged stories. Lou had discovered that she was the youngest, and a chubby placid girl named Ellen Walters, from Rochdale, the eldest. Of the others, Ruby Symonds, Patricia Black and Betty Gibson, Lou suspected that Betty was the one she had most in common with, and she’d been pleased when she’d learned that, like she, Betty was down to do an eighteen-week flight mechanic course. Lou had enjoyed their company on the long journey but that hadn’t stopped her missing her twin, Sasha.

‘Fancy you being a twin,’ Ruby had commented when they had all introduced themselves, ‘and her not joining with you.’

‘I bet the WAAF wouldn’t have allowed them to train together even if she had,’ Betty had said. ‘Just think, though, the larks we could have had if she had joined and you’d both been here.’

A frown crinkled Lou’s forehead now as she remembered Betty’s comment, and the miserable feeling she hated so much began to fill her, bringing a prickling sensation to her eyes. She did miss Sasha. Being without her twin felt a bit like losing a tooth and having a hole where it should have been, which you just couldn’t help prodding with your tongue no matter how much it hurt – only worse, much much worse.

Not that Sasha would be missing her, of course. Oh, no, Sasha had got her precious boyfriend to keep her company, the boyfriend whose company she had preferred to Lou’s.

The train had stopped now, and all the other girls were grabbing their kitbags.

‘These things weigh a ton,’ Betty complained, ‘and I hate the way no matter how carefully you pack a kitbag you still seem to end up with something sticking into your shoulder.’

‘It’s not surprising they’re so heavy when you think of our uniforms and everything we have to pack into them,’ Lou pointed out.

‘Item, one air-force blue battledress and beret, one dress jacket and skirt with cap for best wear, three blouses, one pair black lace-up shoes, two pairs grey lisle stockings and three pairs of grey knickers, two pairs of blue and white striped Bovril pyjamas,’ they all began to chant together, before dissolving in a shared fit of giggles.

‘At least it’s not as bad as the ATS uniform,’ Patricia said.

‘Come on,’ Ellen warned them. ‘If we don’t get off we’ll end up at the next station, then we’ll miss our transport and then we shall really be in trouble.’

Still laughing the girls picked up their kitbags and hurried off the train, Betty going first and Lou bringing up the rear, scrambling down onto the platform just as a military lorry pulled up on the other side of the fence separating Wendover station from the road.

‘Are you from Halton?’ Betty called out cheerfully to the uniformed driver, who had climbed out of the lorry.

‘That’s right. Climb on board, girls,’ the driver invited.

‘I’ve heard that Halton is quite some place.’ Ellen remarked once they’d all clambered into the back of their transport. ‘It’s even got its own cinema. And a big posh house that used to belong to the Rothschild family that the officers get to use as their mess.’

‘A cinema? Who needs films when there’s a camp full of handsome RAF men to keep us entertained?’ Betty laughed.

‘I thought there were rules about not fraternising with the men,’ Ruby said.

‘Well, yes,’ Betty agreed, ‘but just think of the fun we can have breaking them. I don’t know about the rest of you, but fun is definitely what I want to have. What do you say, Lou?’

‘I agree,’ Lou replied, more out of bravado than anything else, because the very last thing she wanted to do was to get involved with any man – in or out of uniform. She had learned her lesson where the opposite sex was concerned with Kieran Mallory and, although she hated admitting it, deep down inside that lesson still hurt.

It was because of him that she and Sasha had lost the closeness they had once shared and which Lou had taken for granted would always be there. He had driven the initial wedge between them by pretending he was sweet on Lou when he was with her and sweet on Sasha when he was with Sasha.

Lou had thought the rift had been mended when they had both sworn off boys, but then Sasha had got involved with the Bomb Disposal sapper who had helped to rescue her when she had been trapped in an unexploded bomb shaft.

She mustn’t think about Sasha and all the things that had made her feel so miserable, Lou warned herself. She was a Waaf now, and her own person, even if sometimes being her own person felt so very lonely.

As the lorry lumbered towards their destination Lou smothered a yawn. It had been a long day, so long in fact that she was actually looking forward to going to bed, even though that meant sleeping in a hard military bed with its three-part-biscuit mattress and itchy blankets, in a hut filled with thirty girls. It was amazing what you could get used to.

‘I hope they give us something to eat before we bed down,’ Betty said.

‘We’ll be lucky if they do,’

Ellen replied. ‘It’s gone nine o’clock now. I reckon it will be a quick admission, and then we’ll be marching into our billets. And to think I could have trained as a postal clerk.’

‘Looks like we’re here, girls,’ Lou told them as she saw the start of the camp’s perimeter fence from the open back of the transport, the wire shining in the moonlight.

The lorry slowed down by the guardhouse and the barrier was raised to allow them through. Another five minutes and they were clambering out in front of a brick building, easing cramped cold limbs and shouldering their kitbags.

‘Watch out,’ Betty warned as the door opened, and a sergeant and another NCO stepped out, the latter holding a clipboard.

One by one she called out their names and numbers, then told them, ‘You’re in Hut Number Thirty. Sergeant James here will escort you to the mess for your supper, but you’ll have to look sharp. It’s lights out at ten p.m. I don’t know what you’ve been taught or told wherever it is you’ve come from, but here at Halton we pride ourselves on doing things by the book.

‘You’ll be woken up at six by the PA system. No one gets to go for breakfast until the corporal in charge of their hut has done a proper inspection of beds and uniforms. After breakfast, everyone musters for a proper parade. There’s no slouching around and turning up at classes individually here. We’ve got a reputation to maintain and it’s the job of us NCOs to make sure that it is maintained. You have been warned.

‘Now tomorrow morning, since it’s your first day, after parade you’ll all present yourselves to the MO for medicals and vaccinations.

‘One day a week here we all have to wear our gas masks. Anyone found not doing so will be put on a charge. All right, Sergeant, you can take over now.’

Obeying the sergeant’s command to fall in, Lou decided tiredly that she was relieved that Sasha wasn’t here to tell her that she’d have been much better off staying at the telephone exchange, because the way she was feeling right now she might just be inclined to agree with her.

Tucked up cosily in bed with her new husband in the pretty bedroom with its dormer window and cream-painted walls, on which she had carefully stencilled pink roses to match their pink eiderdown, Grace gave a deep sigh.

The wonderful intimacy of being married still made her colour up a little self-consciously, and she felt excited inside now Seb came into their bedroom from the bathroom, in his blue and white striped pyjamas, freshly shaved, smelling of soap.

‘What, not fed up of being married to me already, are you?’ Seb demanded in mock outrage.

‘No, of course not. I love being married to you,’ Grace assured him fervently.

‘Do you now? Well, I’m very glad to hear that because I certainly love being married to you,’ said Seb, before drawing her into his arms so that he could kiss her.

Naturally it was several minutes before Grace could speak again, but when she could she told him, ‘I was just thinking about Mum, Seb. She’s ever so upset about Luke and Katie. She thought they were perfect for one another – we all did – and now Luke’s gone and broken off their engagement.

‘Perhaps it’s for the best.’

‘How can you say that?’ Seb had released her now and Grace shivered a little, despite the warmth of the flannelette nightdress she was wearing, the neck tied with pretty pink ribbon. ‘Mum is heartbroken, and Katie will be too. She loves Luke so much. Anyway, I thought you liked Katie.’

‘I do,’ Seb assured her, reaching up to pull the cord to switch off the two wall lights either side of the bed.

‘Then—’

‘I know that Luke is your brother and of course you love him. He’s a fine soldier, and a good brother, but it seemed to me that whilst he loved Katie, he hurt her quite a lot with his lack of trust. You can’t build a good marriage without trust, or at least not in my book. Perhaps without this war Luke and Katie could have married and not had any problems, but war changes things, it sharpens and intensifies so much.’

Grace sighed again, as she snuggled into Seb’s waiting arms and put her head on his shoulder. They were so lucky. They had one another, and they had this cosy cottage where she was so happy making a home for them both. She knew that Seb was right, but she still couldn’t help feeling sad. They had all liked Katie so very much.

‘I’m so lucky to have found you,’ she told her husband, ‘but I do feel guilty about not being in Liverpool to help Mum. She’s got so much to worry about now, and so has Auntie Francine. Mum told me that uncle Brandon is very poorly and going to die soon. They’ve been married such a short time.’

‘We’ll go and see your mum the minute we both get leave, if that will help put your mind at rest.’

‘Yes, it will.’

‘Good. Now it seems to me that it’s an awfully long time since I last kissed my wife.’

‘Oh, Seb.’ Grace gave a small giggle and then said nothing at all as her husband’s arms wrapped lovingly around her.

TWO

‘It can’t be morning already,’ Lou heard Betty complain as the public address system announced that it was six o’clock and time for them to get up.

Inside the cold darkness of the hut, all the young women were waking up, and going through the automatic actions of pulling on clothes and making beds, ignoring slowly numbing fingers as they hurried against the clock.

In common with accommodation huts at bases all over the country, theirs housed thirty girls with a small separate ‘room’ for their corporal. Two stoves supposedly kept the place warm although only those with beds close to them actually felt their benefit.

At six thirty on the dot their corporal appeared. The girls stood stiffly at the end of their beds whilst she walked up and down the line, inspecting them.

Lou quailed a little inwardly when the corporal looked at the buttons on her jacket. Lou had learned whilst square bashing that it was a matter of pride to look as though one belonged and wasn’t ‘new’, and so she had paid a small amount to swap her buttons for those on the uniform of another girl who was leaving the WAAF on medical grounds. She felt immensely proud of her well-polished buttons but now she wondered if swapping them was going to get her into trouble.

To her relief, Ruby, who was standing next to her, suddenly gasped and put her hand on her tummy as it rumbled loudly, distracting their corporal’s attention, although Lou didn’t relax properly until the corporal commanded them to ‘Fall out’ and they were all free to go for their breakfast.

Without anything being said, the five new arrivals kept together, waiting until some of the other girls were ready to leave the hut and then tagging along behind them, Ruby complaining that she was ‘starving’.

‘Yes, we all heard,’ Ellen pointed out.

‘Ablutions block is over there, just in case no one told you that when you arrived,’ one of the girls ahead turned round to tell them. Sturdily built, with a mop of chestnut hair and bright blue eyes, she nodded in the direction of another brick building. ‘I’m Hawkins – Jessie Hawkins – by the way, and these two here are Lawson and Marsh.’

Taking her lead, Lou and the others quickly introduced themselves, all using their surnames.

‘You’ll find that Halton takes a bit of getting used to if you did your square bashing somewhere small,’ Jessie Hawkins informed them. ‘We’re pretty close to Chequers here, of course, so we get an awful lot of top brass coming in. You’ll find that the officers and NCOs are pretty hot on discipline. Do you remember that girl who got court-martialled for jumping into a Lancaster?’ she appealed to the other two.

They nodded silently.

‘For a Waaf to fly is, of course, a court-martialling offence,’ she continued, ‘and whilst we all know there are some places where you can get away with it, you can’t here. One wrong move and you’re out.’

Lou felt a shiver of apprehension run down her spine at the thought of that happening to her and her having to return home in disgrace to face her parents. When she had broken her news to them after Grace’s wedding her father had been not just angry with her for enlisting without their permission but also scathing in his opinion that she wouldn’t be able to ‘stick it out’ since she had spent her life finding ways to get round the parental rules he and her mother had put in place to protect all their children.

‘In fact,’ Jessie continued warningly, ‘there’s a bit of competition between the huts to get good reports, and the best pass-out rate from the courses. Our hut came second last year and this year we’re hoping to be first. I’m just telling you so that you know what’s what and to make sure that there’s no letting the side down.’

Behind Jessie’s back Betty pulled a face at Lou as they were forced to quick march behind the others to keep up, and whispered, ‘I thought it was the corporals who were supposed to tell us what to do, not one of our own. I reckon she’s going to be on our backs all the time, bossing us and spoiling our fun. Part of the reason I joined up was so that I could have a bit of fun.’

Although it wasn’t daylight yet, the length of their march toward the mess indicated how big their new base was, the more practical-looking buildings dominated by the big house to the rear of them.

‘So what’s that posh-looking place then?’ Ruby asked cheekily, gesturing towards it.

‘Top brass and high-ranking RAF officers’ mess,’ Jessie told her promptly. ‘And strictly off limits to you lot.’

Under cover of Jessie’s answer Betty dug Lou in the ribs and giggled, ‘If some handsome officer tried it on with Jessie, I reckon the first thing she’d say to him would be, “No, it’s strictly off limits.”’

Betty was fun, Lou acknowledged, as she struggled to keep her own face straight.

‘I suppose the officers still get a plimsoll line painted round their baths?’ was Ellen’s comment, referring to the new practice of painting a line to mark the five-inch depth of water one could have in one’s bath.

‘You can forget about baths here,’ Jessie told her. ‘It’s showers for us and if you aren’t quick enough it will be a cold shower.’

Although Lou hadn’t seen much of the base yet, what she had seen of it seemed to be immaculately spruce and smart, a regular showplace compared with her brother’s old army barracks at Seacombe and the small base in Wilmslow where she had trained. Halton was smarter and prouder of itself, somehow. The Buckinghamshire countryside around them looked far less war weary than Liverpool. There was no doubting the pride of the girls here. Backs were ramrod straight, shoes were highly polished, and the girls themselves all seemed so neat and confident. Would she fit in here, with her renowned untidiness? Lou hoped so.

The mess was huge, or so it seemed to Lou, and filled with girls either already eating or queuing up for their breakfast, whilst the smell of frying bacon and toast filled the air.

Soon the five newcomers were tucking in to a very welcome meal.

‘At least the grub’s good,’ Ruby announced with relish when she had polished off her own breakfast. She looked at Lou’s plate. ‘Are you going to eat that toast?’ Then, without waiting for Lou’s response, she removed it from Lou’s plate to her own, with a cheeky grin.

It was left to Betty to say what Lou suspected they were all thinking. ‘I think we’ve all done very well getting posted here. Halton’s got everything anyone could want to have a good time, and that’s what we’re going to do, isn’t it, girls?’ she demanded, lifting her cup in a toast.

Half an hour later, marching on the parade ground flanked by the RAF regiment, led by its sergeant major with its mascot – a goat with a dangerous-looking set of horns – Lou knew that she dare not look at Betty to see if she was sharing her own desire to break into nervous giggles. There had certainly not been anything like this at Wilmslow. Halton quite obviously took its square bashing very seriously indeed.

Those Waafs already on courses were marched to their classrooms until only thirty or so girls were left, to be marched over to the medical facility ready for their medicals.

‘I don’t know why we have to have another medical and more inoculations,’ Betty grumbled.

‘They’re probably testing our pain threshold,’ Lou grinned, quickly standing to attention when a medical orderly appeared and shouted out her name.

‘Bye, Mum. I’m off to work now.’

‘Well, you take care, Sasha, love,’ Jean Campion told her daughter as they hugged briefly, ‘and no dawdling home tonight, mind, because your dad’s got an ARP meeting and he’ll be wanting his tea on time.’

Jean shook her head ruefully as the door closed behind Sasha. Automatically wiping the already pristine sink, she tried desperately not to think about the unexpected and unwelcome changes the last few weeks had brought to the family, and the grief and upset they had caused. There was still a war on, after all, and, as Sam had said, life had to go on, no matter how they all felt. It was their duty to put a brave face on things. But to suffer two such blows, and over Christmas as well. Her hand stilled and then trembled.

It had been bad enough – a shock, even – to learn that Lou had volunteered for the WAAF and not said a word about it to anyone, including her own twin sister, without getting that letter from Luke, saying that he and Katie were no longer engaged.

Jean looked over to the dresser, where the polite little letter Katie had sent them was sitting, her engagement ring still wrapped up inside it, to be returned to Luke. Jean’s caring eyes had seen how the ink was ever so slightly blurred here and there, as though poor Katie had been crying when she wrote it.

Jean had done as Katie had asked in her letter, and had parcelled up her things and sent them on to her, obeying Sam’s command that she must not try to interfere in what had happened, but it hadn’t been easy.

‘It’s their business and it’s up to them what they do,’ Sam had told her when she had said that there must be something they could do to put things right between the young couple.

‘But Katie’s like another daughter to me, Sam,’ Jean had protested. ‘I took to her the minute she came here as our billetee.’

Sam, though, had remained adamant: Jean was not to interfere. ‘No good will come of forcing them to be together because you want Katie as a daughter-in-law, if that isn’t what they want,’ he had told her, and Jean had had to acknowledge that he was right.

She did miss Katie, though. The house seemed so empty without her, for all that she had been so gentle and quiet.

Jean had her address; she could write to her. But Sam wouldn’t approve of her doing that, Jean knew.

She couldn’t help wishing that Grace, her eldest daughter, was still living in Liverpool, and popping home for a quick cup of tea as she had done when she’d been working at Mill Street Hospital. She could have talked things over with Grace in a way that she couldn’t with Sam. But Grace was married, and she and Seb were living in Whitchurch in Shropshire, where Seb had been posted by the RAF.

The house felt so empty with only the three of them in it now, she and Sam and Sasha.

Jean wiped her hands on her apron and looked at the clock. It was just gone eight o’clock and she had a WVS meeting to attend at ten, otherwise, she could have gone over to Wallasey on the ferry to see her own twin sister, Vi.

Although they were twins, Jean and Vi weren’t exactly close. Vi liked to let Jean know how much better she thought she had done than Jean by moving out to Wallasey when her husband, Edwin’s, business had expanded.

Now, though, things had changed. Just before Christmas Vi’s daughter, Bella, had told Jean that her father had left her mother, and that she was worried about her mother’s health because Vi had started drinking.

It was hard for Jean to imagine her very proper twin behaving in such a way – a real shock – but beneath her concern at what Bella had had to tell her, Jean felt a very real sympathy and anxiety for her sister, despite the fact that they had grown apart.

She had tried to imagine how she would have felt if her Sam had come home one day and announced that he was leaving her to go off with some girl half her age – not that Sam would ever do something so terrible, but if he did then Jean knew how hard to bear it would be. She knew that the shame alone would crucify her twin, with her determination not just to keep up appearances but always to go one better than her neighbours.

For all her Edwin’s money, there was no way that Jean would have wanted to swap places with Vi. Edwin could never measure up to her own reliable, hard-working Sam, who had always been such a good husband and father. And for all that she was so disappointed about Luke and Katie splitting up, at least her son hadn’t gone and got some poor girl pregnant and then abandoned her to marry someone else, like Vi’s Charlie had.

Then there was Bella. She was doing well now, running that nursery she was in charge of, and Jean freely admitted that she was proud to have her as her niece, but there had been a time when Bella had been a very spoiled and selfish girl indeed.

Sam had made it plain over the years that the less the Campions had to do with Vi and her family the better, but things were different now, and Jean felt that it was her duty to to try to help her sister.

Tomorrow morning she’d walk down to the ferry terminal and go over to see her twin, Jean decided.

She looked at the dresser again. They’d had a letter from Lou this morning telling them that now that her WAAF induction period was over, she’d been selected to go on a training course to be flight mechanic.

Sam had merely grunted when Jean had read the letter to him, but then Sam was a bit old-fashioned about what was and was not women’s work, and he would much rather that Lou had stayed at home working at the telephone exchange with Sasha. Jean would have preferred to have had both twins at home as well, but what was done was done, and she didn’t want any of her children ever to feel that they weren’t loved or wanted every bit as much as their siblings. Sasha had always been the calmer, more biddable twin, and Lou the impatient rebel. It was hard sometimes to think of the twins as being the age they were. It didn’t seem two minutes since they’d been little girls. Jean sighed to herself, remembering the time Sam had been giving the pretty yellow kitchen walls their biannual fresh coat of distemper, and somehow or other Lou had hold of the paintbrush when Sam had put it down, wanting to ‘help’ with the work. The result had been yellow distemper on everything, including the twins. The memory made Jean smile, but her smile was tinged with sadness. Keeping her children safe had been hard enough when they had been small and under her wing; she had never dreamed how much harder it would be when they were grown. But then, like all who were old enough to remember the First World War, she had not believed that such dreadful times would ever come again.

How wrong they had all been.

THREE

It was strange now to recall how nervous she had been the first morning she had turned up for work at the Postal Censorship Office in Liverpool, Katie thought tiredly as she got off the train at Holborn tube station, hurried along with the flow of passengers along the tunnel and then up into the daylight and cold of the February morning, carrying her suitcase, so that she could go straight from work to the billet that her new employers had found for her. Her parents’ friends had been willing to allow her to stay in their attic room but she had been told that there was a billet going in a house in Cadogan Place, off Sloane Street, which had been requisitioned by the War Office, and that it would make much more sense for her to move in there. Of course she had agreed.

Like Liverpool, London had been badly blitzed by German bombers, the evidence of the damage the city had suffered inescapable, that same air of weary greyness evident in people’s faces here, just as it had been in Liverpool.

Of course the new rationing of soap wouldn’t help, Katie acknowledged. A lot of Londoners were up in arms, declaring that their allowance should be increased because of London’s hard water and the soap’s reluctance to lather. Katie had felt rather guilty about the small hoard of Pears she had acquired over Christmas and had immediately offered both her parents and their friends a bar each.

The Postal Censorship Office was situated in High Holborn, and Katie huddled deeper into her coat, glad of her scarf and gloves, knitted for her by Jean and lovingly given to her before she had left Liverpool for London just before Christmas.

She must not cry, she would not cry, Katie told herself fiercely, but she was still forced to blink away the moisture blurring her vision.

A newspaper vendor standing on the street, stamping his feet, caught her eye. The papers were full of the dreadful news of the fall of Singapore. What had she got to cry about compared with what those poor people had to endure, Katie rebuked herself.

The war was wearing everyone down. There seemed no end to the bad news and the losses amongst the British fighting men. The spirit that had got them through the blitz was beginning to wear thin under the burden of worry loss and deprivation. You could see it in people’s faces – and no doubt in her own, Katie realised.

When she finally reached the building she was looking for Katie hesitated for a moment before going in. It was impossible not to contrast how she was feeling now with what she had felt that first morning at the Postal Censorship Office in Liverpool; hard too not to think of Carole, who had been so kind to her then, and who she had thought of as her friend. She must just tell herself that in causing Luke to end their engagement Carole had done her a favour, Katie warned herself determinedly. How could she ever have been truly happy with Luke, no matter how much she loved him, when he refused to trust her?

Once she was inside the building the well-built uniformed guard on duty directed Katie towards the reception desk, where she produced the letter confirming her position. She didn’t have to wait long before someone came to collect her, a calm-looking older girl, as different from Carole as it was possible to be, Katie thought gratefully as the other girl introduced herself as Marcy Dunne.

‘You’ll be on my section,’ Marcy explained. ‘I’m the most senior of us, although not a supervisor. We deal with the mail coming in from and going out to our POWs, and I must warn you that it can sometimes be difficult – we get to read an awful lot of Dear John letters. It looks like you’re moving to a new billet?’ she commented, eyeing Katie’s suitcase.

‘Yes,’ Katie confirmed. ‘I’ve been staying with some friends of my parents, but I’ve been offered a billet within easier reach of here.’

When Marcy said, ‘Good show,’ Katie wasn’t sure whether her approval was because of the billet or because Katie had been careful not to give any details of where or what her billet was.

‘You’ll need to go to Admin first to get yourself sorted out with a pass, and a number to write on the correspondence you deal with.’

Katie nodded. It was the rule that everyone who checked a letter had to write their Postal Censorship number on it.

An hour later, when Katie had been given her pass and her number, Marcy reappeared to take her to where she would be working.

The room they eventually entered was set up very much the same as that in Liverpool, although here the desks were individual, like school desks, rather than long tables. Marcy showed Katie to what would be hers, and then introduced her to the half-dozen or so girls who were already at work – naturally, with it being her first day, Katie had been keen to arrive early – including one named Gina Vincent, who gave Katie a warm friendly smile that made her feel that she was genuinely welcome.

‘You’ll soon settle in, I’m sure,’ Marcy assured Katie. ‘There’s a Joe Lyons not far away, and a decent British Restaurant, although you’ll find that it gets pretty busy, what with so many government departments around.

‘As you’ve done this kind of work before you’ll know the ropes. If anything strikes you as suspect, inform your supervisor. We’ve got fairly senior representatives from all the services here, as well. Any questions?’

‘No, I don’t think so.’

‘I’ve put you next to Caroline for today so that you can work together until you get the hang of the way we do things here,’ Marcy added.

‘No doubt Mrs Harper, the supervisor for our group, will have a word with you when she arrives.’

At least she had been able to get a transfer from Liverpool to High Holborn, Katie comforted herself as she diplomatically allowed Caroline to show her how to open the envelopes from the side, so that the letter inside wasn’t in any way damaged, although of course she already knew the procedure. She couldn’t have borne to have had to go back to her old desk, with all its memories, and she certainly couldn’t have gone back to her billet with Luke’s parents. The head of her department at Liverpool’s Postal Censorship Office had told her that her request for a transfer to London would make the London Office very happy indeed as they were short of staff, whilst the return to Ireland, of the young Irishmen who had caused Katie so much heart-searching had also meant that there was no longer an ongoing covert operation to keep a check on any mail they might have sent or received whilst living in Liverpool. She must forget about Liverpool and all the memories it held, she told herself, and try to focus on the present instead. She had a job to do, after all, and worthwhile one.

Because of her experience working in Liverpool and the excellent report she had been given, she had now been upgraded to work on more sensitive mail and cablegrams here in London and, modest as always, Katie hoped that they weren’t thinking she was better at her job than she actually was.

‘I’m sure you’ll like it working here,’ Caroline assured her, having given Katie’s dexterous opening of the small pile of envelopes she had handed to her an approving smile. ‘Our first office was in a converted prison, but this is much better. And conveniently central too. Not that we didn’t have a bit of a time with it during the blitz, mind you.’

Katie nodded, but Caroline’s reference to the blitz reminded her of Luke and his kindness to her when Liverpool had been bombed, and she had to blink away her tears. She was trying desperately hard not to think about Luke or Liverpool, or anything connected with her poor broken heart, but it wasn’t easy. The last thing she wanted to do, though, was to break down completely and make a fool of herself.

Perhaps another kind of girl would have written right back to Luke and firmly put him right by explaining just what had really happened, but Katie just hadn’t had the heart to do that. Not when Luke had made it so obvious that he didn’t trust her. She wasn’t the sort to cling on to a man when she felt in her heart that he had fallen out of love with her and that he was glad of an excuse to break things off.

FOUR

Emily decided that it was a good job that Tommy, the boy she had found half starved and freezing, living off scraps at the back of the theatre in Liverpool where her good-for-nothing husband was the manager, wasn’t here to see her peering anxiously out of the kitchen window like this. He’d be bound to ask questions. He was a bright boy, was Tommy, and no mistake, and all the brighter too since they had left Liverpool and come to live here in Whitchurch. Happy as larks, she and Tommy were, with their tacit agreement that neither would reveal to anyone else his or her past or the fact that they were not even related, never mind aunt and adopted nephew, as everyone now believed them to be.

Or at least Emily had been happy. Until last week when she had gone and spoiled everything, like the silly fool she was, by going and giving Wilhelm, the German POW who kept her vegetable garden so productive for her, a pair of thick woollen socks she had knitted for him.

Of course he wouldn’t want to come here any more now that she had gone and made a fool of herself – yes, and probably made him feel like a fool as well, embarrassing him with her gift; her, a plain woman who had never been what you might call pretty even in her youth, and who no man, especially a handsome, well-set-up man like Wilhelm, would want to think admired him. A daft lonely married woman, who had no right to be knitting socks for any man other than her husband. Not that he would have welcomed hand-knitted socks. A bit of a dandy Con had always considered himself.

Poor Wilhelm had probably had his fellow POWs laughing their heads off at him on account of her gift. Why hadn’t she just left things as they were instead of behaving so daft and losing Wilhelm’s company into the bargain?

It was over a week now since she had given him the socks and she hadn’t seen him since. Normally he appeared most days, not spending as much time here as he had done in the summer, of course, since it was winter and there was plenty to keep him busy at Whiteside Farm where he and some of the other POWs worked, but he’d been here most days, tidying the vegetable garden and even insisting on doing other little jobs for her, like fixing that loose handle on the back door and sorting out the gutter blocked with autumn leaves.

She’d enjoyed the few minutes they’d usually shared together when she took him his cup of tea and a bit of something to eat – looked forward to them, in fact – and now it was all spoiled thanks to her own stupidity. What on earth had possessed her? Hadn’t she learned anything from the misery of her marriage to Con? Her husband had been unfaithful to her from the day they had married, and the truth was that she’d been glad to leave him behind in Liverpool.

The trouble was that she hadn’t really thought through just how her knitting Wilhelm those socks might look. All she’d thought of was his poor cold feet in those thin Wellington boots he always wore. It hadn’t been until she mentioned after church on Sunday about knitting the socks, and Biddy Evans, who was related to old Mrs Evans and her daughter, Brenda, who ran the local post office, had given a little tinkling laugh and said so loudly that everyone around them must have heard her, ‘Knitting socks for a POW! Well, I never. You’ll have him thinking you’re sweet on him next,’ that Emily had realised just what kind of interpretation others, including Wilhelm himself, might put on her gift.

Thankfully her kind neighbour Ivy Wilson had immediately said that Biddy was talking nonsense and that Emily was to be applauded for her charitable act, but of course the damage had been done by then and Emily had hardly dared look at anyone since when she went shopping, she felt so uncomfortable and self-conscious about what Biddy had said.

She was glad that it was still winter and the days short. That way Tommy wasn’t going to start asking when he came in from school why Wilhelm hadn’t been round. Proper fond of Wilhelm, Tommy was. It did a boy good to have a decent hard-working man around, not like that feckless husband of hers. Not that he had approved of her taking Tommy in, not for one minute. But then it was her money they’d been living on and her house they’d been living in, and for the first time in her marriage Emily had stuck to her guns and told her husband that if it came to a choice between him and Tommy then she was choosing Tommy.

Now that she had done exactly that she was happier than she had ever been in the whole of her life, or at least she had been until she had gone and made a fool of herself with those socks and frightened Wilhelm away.

‘What are you still doing here, Lena? Your shift finished half an hour ago. Gavin will have something to say to me, I’m sure, if he thinks I’m making his wife work longer than she should,’ Bella teased her billetee, before bending down to look into the pram where Lena’s nearly three-month-old baby daughter, Janette, named after Gavin’s mother, Janet, was smiling up at them both, her big brown eyes wide open, her soft dark curls escaping from under her white knitted bonnet, one fat little hand lying on top of the smart white coverlet embroidered with yellow daisies that had been made from an old dress of Bella’s.

‘And how is my precious, precious niece, the prettiest angel that ever was?’ Bella cooed at the baby, who immediately dimpled her a delighted smile.

‘Spoiled rotten by you and Gavin, and Gavin’s mum, and just about everyone else that she winds round her little finger, that’s how she is,’ Lena laughed, but it was plain that she adored her baby.

Behind them the walls of the nursery, painted a bright sunny yellow by Lena’s husband, Gavin, gave the day room an air of warmth no matter what the weather was outside, the small tables and chairs spotlessly clean, just like the cots and small beds in the ‘sleeping room’ beyond the day room, where the children had their afternoon naps, in comfortable and safe surroundings, watched over by Bella’s carefully selected and trained nursery staff.

‘I was going,’ Lena continued, ‘but Mrs Lewis was late picking up her Cheryl, and so I hung on because I wanted to tell her about Cheryl being a bit off colour and not wanting her dinner.’

Bella was very proud of the nursery in Wallasey, of which she was the manageress. All her girls were handpicked by Bella herself, but there was no doubt in Bella’s mind that Lena was the best of them all. Even so, she didn’t want Gavin thinking that she was taking advantage of Lena and expecting her to work longer than she should. Gavin and Lena were newly married, after all, and the last thing Bella wanted to do was to cause trouble between them.

Lena loved Gavin, Bella knew that, but Lena also felt a strong sense of gratitude towards her. Such a strong sense of gratitude, in fact, that Bella felt she had to be especially careful never to do or say anything that would in any way hurt Lena.

It had been totally out of character for her to take Lena under her wing, Bella would have been the first to admit. Before knowing Lena, she had been selfish and uncaring. But the war and the problems it had brought her, along with the responsibility she felt towards Lena, had changed her, and now Bella knew that she was a very different person from the Bella she had been in 1939 on the eve of her own marriage.

That Bella seemed so alien to her now.

It had taken betrayal by her husband, widowhood, falling in love with the wrong man, having to cope with her father’s desertion of her mother, and her brother’s abandonment of Lena, the girl he had so carelessly impregnated before marrying someone else, to change her into the Bella she was now: a Bella who truly knew the value of friendship and kindness and doing one’s bit for others and a Bella who had suffered the pain of forbidden love and the sacrifice that had entailed for the sake of others. A Bella who no longer felt the need constantly to scheme to make sure that she was considered the prettiest and most sought-after girl in the area, and a Bella who longed only to be the very best person she could be. The Bella who was truly worthy of the love of the man who could never be hers, but who she knew she would love for ever – Jan Polanski, the Polish Air Force pilot, whose mother and sister had been billeted with Bella at one time, and whose marriage to the daughter of a close family friend meant that no matter how much he and Bella loved one another, they could never be together.

‘Well, you must go now,’ Bella warned Lena, ‘otherwise there will be no dinner on the table for Gavin when he comes home from working on the river.’

Gavin was a junior river boat pilot – one of the men who brought safely into dock the convoys of ships that crossed the Atlantic in such dangerous conditions to bring much-needed supplies into the country.

‘However, before you do go, there’s something I want to say to you. It’s about the house.’

Immediately Lena gave Bella an anxious look. Lena and Gavin were now living with Bella in the house Bella’s father had given Bella and her husband when they had first married, and which now belonged to Bella. Guessing what Lena was thinking, Bella gave a quick shake of her head.

‘No, it isn’t anything for you to worry about. It’s my mother, Lena. I don’t have to tell you the situation.’

Lena knew that Bella’s mother, Vi, who had been living on her own since, shockingly, her husband, Edwin, had left her to live with his secretary, had been very badly affected by her husband’s departure.

‘It’s ever such a shame that she’s taken your dad going off the way he did like she has, and I know how much it upsets you, her drinking like she does, and showing herself up in front of her neighbours. Oh …’ Lena paced her hand over her mouth and looked guilty. ‘I’m ever so sorry, Bella. I shouldn’t have said that. I didn’t mean to speak out of turn.’

As though Janette had sensed her mother’s concern she gave a small cry. Bella smiled down at her whilst Lena rocked the pram soothingly.

One of the things Bella insisted on was that no baby in her nursery was ever left to cry.

‘You could never do that, Lena. I don’t have any secrets from you,’ Bella assured her younger friend. ‘It’s true that Mummy is causing both herself and me embarrassment with her drinking, and it’s not good for her health either. Her doctor has told me that. When I called round the other day the cooker was left on. Lord knows what might have happened if I hadn’t decided to go and see her. That was the last straw really, Lena.’ Bella closed her eyes for a moment, remembering what a terrible fright it had given her to walk into her mother’s kitchen and see the ring on the cooker burning. ‘I can hardly sleep these days for worrying about her, so I’ve decided that little though it is, it’s what I want to do—’

‘You’re going to move her in with you?’ Lena guessed, adding immediately, ‘You’ll want me and Gavin to find somewhere else, I expect.’ Lena tried not to sound as low as Bella’s news made her feel. She knew how lucky she and Gavin were, and how generous it had been of Bella to let them live with her.

‘Would you mind, though, Bella, if just for now perhaps me and Gavin could move into Janette’s room with her? I don’t want to put you out, not when you’ve been so good and generous to us, but Gavin was only saying the other night that Mrs Stone, his old landlady, has let his room, and—’

‘No, Lena, please stop,’ Bella pleaded, holding up her hand to stem Lena’s outpouring of words, horrified that Lean would think that she would ask them to leave. ‘Of course I don’t want you and Gavin to find somewhere else. Lena, I thought you knew me better than that.’ Bella gave Lena’s arm a loving shake. ‘Haven’t we both already agreed that we are the sisters to one another that neither of us ever had? And isn’t little Janette here my niece, my own flesh and blood, and Gavin so clever and kind about doing things around the house and here at the nursery that he saves me a small fortune?’

All of which was true, Bella thought, mentally running through all the small jobs that Gavin did so willingly, often noticing that they needed doing before Bella did herself, and not just at the house but here too at the nursery, fixing rattling windows, cleaning out gutters and downspouts.

But more important than any of that was the love Lena gave her, the kind of generous freely given love that Bella had never known before, and that Bella truly believed had changed her and her life for the better.

‘Do you really think I would want to lose any of that, and most especially you? No,’ Bella answered her own question, ‘what I have decided to do is to make you and Gavin my official tenants for my house. That way you’ll have a spare room for when Gavin’s mum wants to come and stay, and I will move in with my own mother.’

For a few seconds, as she struggled to take in the generosity of Bella’s offer, Lena couldn’t speak. When she could she protested, ‘Oh, Bella, no. You’ve always said as how you value your own independence and how you could never go back to living under your mum’s roof.’

‘That was before,’ Bella replied calmly. ‘Mummy can’t possibly be left on her own any more and I’d never forgive myself if … well, if anything happened.’

As Bella’s voice fell away she couldn’t bring herself to look at Lena, knowing what she would see in the younger girl’s eyes. But she had no choice, Bella reminded herself firmly.

Lena’s tenderly sympathetic, ‘Oh, Bella …’ prompted her to admit, ‘I haven’t said anything before, but to be honest, Lena, Mummy isn’t looking after herself or the house properly. When I went round the other day there wasn’t a clean cup anywhere, and Mummy was looking dreadfully untidy. When I think of how smart she was, and how house-proud.’ Bella bit her bottom lip. ‘I feel guilty, Lena, because I’ve been pretending not to know how bad things are, not to see how much Mummy needs me to be there with her. I’ve been trying to blame my father—’

‘And why not? It was his fault, after all,’ Lena defended her best friend fiercely.

‘Yes, but, well, I’ve made up my mind, Lena, and tonight when I come in I shall start packing up my things so that I can move in with Mummy. It is all for the best, for you and Gavin and Baby, as well as for Mummy. You are a newly married couple, after all, and you should have a home all to yourselves,’ she told Lena generously.

‘Oh, that is so typical of you, Bella – that you put everyone else before yourself,’ Lena told her emotionally. ‘I shall miss you dreadfully, you know.’

‘And I you,’ Bella admitted. ‘But we shall see one another every day here, and I dare say that you and Gavin will invite me round for tea some Sundays,’ she added teasingly.

Lena’s ‘Oh, Bella,’ was muffled as she reached out and hugged Bella tightly.

After Lena had gone Bella turned to go to her office and then stopped, unable to resist giving the nursery a swift look of pride. The air was filled with the hum of quiet industry and sounds of contented babies and children. Bella had even managed to expand the facilities modestly in order to provide simple little lessons for those children who were ready for them – just learning their letters and that kind of thing, Bella had explained earnestly to Mr Benson, the senior civil servant in charge of the Government administration of nursery care for the area, an initiative allowing young women to work to help the war effort.

He had been very generous in his praise for her expansion, and had even managed to find her nursery some little slates and an easel from somewhere.

It was Bella’s ambition to have ‘her’ little ones ready for school, with their letters and figures all learned by the time they were ready to leave the nursery.

Their small kitchen provided simple nourishing meals for the children, satisfying the Government’s stringent rules and directions on nutrition. There was no cost-cutting in Bella’s nursery so that those who worked there could benefit at the children’s expense, and in fact Bella had a growing number of little ones under her wing who by rights should not have been there, but who, Bella had learned, were in need in one way or another, and who she had felt compelled to help: little ones who might not otherwise have had a good hot meal, or a bath, or a clean bed, to sleep in.

She had been astonished, and more than a little wary at first, when her auntie Francine had turned up at the nursery with her young American husband during their visit to Liverpool to attend Bella’s cousin Grace’s wedding, and had shown such an interest in the children and their welfare. The Bella she now was had been acutely aware of the sadness in her aunt’s face when she had played with the children, knowing how terrible it must have been for her to lose her own little boy – not once but twice – the first time when she had given him up to her sister, Bella’s mother, to bring up, and the second time when he had been killed when the farmhouse to which he had been evacuated had been bombed.

Bella looked at her watch. Her mother’s neighbour, Muriel James, had agreed to keep an eye on her mother until Bella could move in herself later this evening. Privately Bella was dreading going back to her childhood home to live. It had taken Lena to show her how devoid of true family love and happiness that home had been, and now Bella’s heart was chilled by the very thought of that emptiness. How she would miss the happy, chatty atmosphere of her own kitchen with her and Lena cooking together; the evenings when they read their books and listened to the radio, or sometimes played cards.

It was selfish to feel so low, Bella warned herself. It would do Lena and Gavin good to have some time to themselves. Gavin was a really decent sort who loved Lena and little Janette, and who deserved to have his wife to himself. It wasn’t as though she was never going to see Lena and her baby again, was it?

‘Four kings.’

The young American was sweating with triumph as he placed his cards down on the rickety baize-covered table in the upstairs room of the Pig and Whistle pub. He and Con were the only ones left in the game now. The other four Americans, and two stagehands from the Royal Court Theatre to whom Con gave a few quid to join the game so that he wasn’t the only one at the table not in uniform, had dropped out. Con knew he must be careful. The last thing he wanted was to arouse anyone’s suspicions. Con might like winning at cards and might not mind cheating to do so, but he certainly didn’t like the kind of trouble that involved fists and accusations flying everywhere.

‘Sorry, mate.’ Shaking his head, Con spread his own four aces on the table, and then swept up the pot whilst the Americans were still grappling with their disappointment.

Not a bad evening’s work. The Yanks put down five-pound notes like they were ten-bob notes, and Con reckoned he’d got himself a good hundred pounds or so in tonight’s haul. Not that it was all profit, of course. He’d have to give that lazy good-for-nothing pair Stu and Paul a tenner apiece to keep them sweet, and then there’d have to be another tenner to Joe the landlord for the use of his upstairs room and no questions asked, seeing as gambling was illegal.

‘Look, lads,’ he told the Americans, putting his arm round the shoulder of the one his aces had just trumped in a false gesture of bonhomie, ‘seeing as you’ve been such good sports, I’ll treat you each to a drink. Show’s almost over at the Royal Court and there’ll be plenty of pretty girls wanting to be taken out for a bit of supper, so why don’t you all come back with us?’

It worked like a charm every time, Con congratulated himself as the young men immediately forgot about the money they had lost and accepted his offer with enthusiasm. Or at least all but one seemed to have accepted it. The soldier whose kings Con had just so cleverly trumped – with the aid of some trickery that had allowed him to remove the aces from the deck right at the beginning of the game and keep them concealed within his own hand of cards – was glowering at him.

‘You know what Ah reckon, boys?’ he announced in an accusatory voice. ‘Ah reckon that this guy here’s been cheating on us.’

‘Come on, Chip. Don’t be a sore looser,’ the first soldier to drop out of the game cautioned him. ‘It’s only a few bucks, after all. Let’s go and see these girls.’

‘That’s right, it’s only a few bucks,’ Con immediately agreed, smiling genially, urging them all towards the door. Once he’d had a couple of drinks and been introduced to the chorus line, the young soldier, who was still glaring at him, would soon forget about his ‘few bucks’. The last thing Con wanted to do was antagonise this new source of income he had discovered. What Con wanted was for these young soldiers to feel they’d had such a good time that they encouraged their friends to ask for an introduction to him for ‘a friendly game of cards’ and the chance to meet pretty girls.

Funny how things turned out. Who would have thought that those card tricks of old Marvo the Magician, who did the panto every Christmas, would come in so handy?

Oh, yes, Con was well pleased with himself. After he’d given Joe his tenner, Con gave the barmaid a wink and patted her on the bottom on his way past.

‘’Ere, get your hands off of that,’ she warned him, but the smile she was giving him told Con that she’d be more than willing if he wanted her to be.

He’d always had a way with women – had his way with them, and all, Con thought to himself, grinning at his own mental joke as he paused briefly as he left the pub to check his reflection in the glass partition that separated the entrance from the taproom, smoothing down his still thick and dark hair. When it came to women you either had it or you didn’t, Con acknowledged, and he had ‘it’ in spades.

Life had really been on the up and up for him since the Americans had started to arrive in Liverpool. It was only natural that they’d find their way to the Royal Court Theatre; Con prided himself on having the best-looking girls in the city in the Royal Court’s chorus. Then when he’d found out about their free-spending ways, of course he’d wanted to channel some of that money in his own direction.

It had been one of the girls who’d told him that an American had been asking her if she knew anywhere where they could join a poker game, and Con had immediately seen a golden opportunity to make some extra money.

Con whistled happily to himself as he shepherded his little group of newly fleeced lambs through the blackout’s darkness of the narrow back alleys towards the Royal Court Theatre.

FIVE

Katie had been surprised by how quickly her first day had passed. She’d accepted an invitation to go for lunch with several of the girls she was working with, queuing alongside young women both in and out of uniform, and men as well, in a nearby British Restaurant for a bowl of unexpectedly tasty soup and a cup of tea.

Now, having taken the Piccadilly Line from Holborn to Knightsbridge, she was walking a little uncertainly down Sloane Street towards her new billet.

She knew the area, of course, having lived in London most of her life before she had gone to work in Liverpool. Her mother had always loved going to Harrods and looking at the expensive clothes, but Katie, whose tastes were far more simple, had never imagined actually living in one of the elegant squares with their private gardens, which had looked very smart before Hitler’s bombs had caused so much damage to them and the city. It had shocked and hurt her to see just how much damage had been done.

The gardens belonging to Cadogan Place were split in two, bordered on one side by Sloane Street itself and on the three others by what she remembered as elegant four-storey properties, although it was impossible actually to see much of them in the dark and the blackout.

Her destination lay on the far side of the square and it was with some trepidation that, having found the house, she climbed the steps and knocked on the door.

She was still waiting for it to be opened when someone bumped into her from behind, almost knocking her over.

‘Oh crumbs, I’m most awfully sorry.’

‘It’s all right,’ Katie assured her. ‘No harm done.’

The other girl was wearing an ATS uniform, her cap rammed onto a mop of thick dark red curls.

‘Are you visiting someone?’ the small whirlwind of a figure, or so it seemed to Katie, asked as she produced a key to unlock the door.

‘Actually I’m supposed to be billeted here,’ Katie told her.

‘Oh, you’ve got poor Lottie’s room then. So dreadful for her when Singapore fell, with her parents both being out there. She was quite overcome by it, poor girl, and the medics have sent her on sick leave. I don’t think she’ll be coming back. Well, you wouldn’t, would you, not if you were her, and your parents had been killed – murdered, really – in such a shocking way? Her mother was at that hospital, you see, the one where the Japanese bayoneted those poor people.’

They were inside the house now, the front door closed, and a single gloomy light bulb illuminating what in happier times must have been a rather grand entrance, Katie suspected. Now, though, denuded of furniture, its walls bare of paintings and the stairs bare of carpet, the house looked very bleak indeed. But not as bleak, surely, as the outlook for the girl whose room she was taking, Katie thought soberly.

‘Oh, you haven’t got anyone out in Singapore, have you?’ the other girl asked, looking conscious-stricken.

‘No.’ Not Singapore, but Luke was fighting in the desert, even if he wasn’t hers any more, and the news from there was hardly much better than it was from Singapore.

‘You’re in luck with your room; it’s one of the best. Sarah Dawkins, one of the other ATS girls here, wanted to move into it but our billeting officer put her foot down. Jolly good show that she did as well, if you ask me, because Sarah gets a bit too big for her boots at times. Oh, no, now you’re going to think badly of us. We all get on terrifically well together, really.’

The front door suddenly opened and another girl in an ATS uniformed rushed in, exclaiming, ‘Oh, Gerry, there you are. I couldn’t remember where we said we’d meet those RAF boys tonight, Oh—’ she broke off and looked questioningly at Katie.

‘Katie Needham,’ Katie introduced herself. ‘I’m the new girl.’

‘Hilda Parker.’

The other girl shook Katie’s hand whilst ‘Gerry’ grinned and announced, ‘And I’m Geraldine – Gerry, for short – Smithers.’

‘There are six of us here in all, including you: me, Gerry here, Sarah, Peggy, and Alison. Peggy’s newly engaged to a corporal she met at Aldershot. She’s a darling but she tends to spend her time reading and knitting and writing to her chap—’

‘Whereas we spend ours looking for handsome men in uniform to take us out. If you are fancy-free then you’d be very welcome to come out with us. As far as chaps are concerned it’s the more the merrier where girls are concerned,’ Gerry added with a giggle.

‘Don’t pay too much attention to Gerry here,’ Hilda warned Katie. ‘The truth is that in a way we feel that it’s our duty not just to keep our own chins up but to try to bring a bit of cheer into other people’s lives as well, if we can. I think it comes from working at the War Office. One sees and hears so much about the importance of good morale, as well, I may add, Gerry,’ she punned, ‘as good morals.’

It seemed the most natural thing in the world for Katie to join in the laughter as Gerry herself laughed good-humouredly at the small joke against her.

Katie couldn’t help but feel her spirits lift a little. The ATS girls might initially have portrayed themselves as a fun-loving, slightly giddy bunch but Katie felt that Hilda’s comment was far more true of what they really felt, and that beneath their pretty hair, and the smart chat that matched their smart uniforms, they were all young women who took their responsibilities towards their country and the men fighting to protect it very seriously indeed.

Perhaps it would do her good to adopt a little of their outward attitude to life herself, Katie reflected. After all, the last thing she wanted to do was to cast a pall of self-pity over the house just because of her own heartache. There was a lot to be said for keeping up other people’s spirits in these dreadful times, the darkest times of the war in many ways, people were saying.

‘It’s a pretty decent billet really,’ Hilda continued, ‘although you have to watch out for the rules—’

‘No shaking of mats or cloths out of any of the windows, no hanging of laundry out of the windows, no spooning on the front step, definitely no bringing men into the house, and no gawping at Lord Cadogan when he’s on home leave and you see him walking past,’ Gerry broke in again, this time leaving Hilda to explain.

‘Lord Cadogan – Earl Cadogan, actually – owns the property. He owns most of the houses here, in fact, although the War Office has requisitioned some of them.’

‘I’ll take you up to your room, shall I?’ Gerry offered, leaving Katie to follow her as she started to climb the first flight of stairs.

Katie’s room was two flights up and was a very good size indeed, with a window overlooking the street and the garden beyond.

The room was furnished with a narrow single bed, a utilitarian dressing table and a wardrobe. It had a fireplace and, to Katie’s delight and astonishment, there was a door that led into her own personal bathroom. Luxury indeed, and yet after Gerry had left her to unpack, and despite her good intentions, Katie acknowledged that she was missing the cosiness of her room at Luke’s parents’ house quite dreadfully, and the loving kindness of Jean, and the company of Luke’s teenage sisters even more.

She must not think like that, she chided herself. She must put Liverpool and Luke behind her and get on with her life as it was now, doing all she could to play her own part in the war effort. perhaps right now this four-storey town house, with its cold air smelling of damp khaki and cigarettes, instead of being filled, as the Campion house had been, with the warmth of Jean’s cooking and her love for her family, might seem alien and lonely, but she must get used to it, and fit into it and with those living in it, and make a new life for herself. She was, after all, alive and in good health, and not suffering as so many people were in this war, and in so many different ways. All she had to live with was a broken heart. The newspapers were full of the most horrific stories of what was happening to others: the people taken prisoner by the Japanese, the Jewish people forcibly transported to Hitler’s death camps. She must put her whole effort into doing her bit instead of feeling sorry for herself.

Francine looked at her husband with some concern.

‘Are you sure you want to go to this reception at the American Embassy tonight, Brandon?’ she asked gently.

‘Sure I’m sure.’

They both knew that what she really meant was, was he well enough to attend the reception being given by the American Ambassador at the Embassy in Grosvenor Square, to mark the arrival of the first American troops on British soil?

Their marriage was an unconventional one in many people’s eyes: Francine was older than her husband by nearly a decade, and he was wealthier than her by several million dollars. What they did not see or know, however, was that Brandon was a young man living under a death sentence because of a rare incurable illness, and that their marriage was one between friends rather than lovers. Brandon had chosen Fran as the person he wanted to accompany him to the end of his personal road, and she had willingly taken on the responsibility of that role. She had lost so much in her life already: her son, Jack; Marcus, the man she loved, the major with whom she had fallen in love in Egypt and who she had lost thanks to the spitefulness of another member of the ENSA group they were both in. She knew and understood what loss was. What she felt for Brandon was a combination of womanly pity and a desire to offer him what comfort she could in memory of the child – the young son – who had died without the comfort of her presence and the warmth of her arms around him. She could not go back and change things where Jack, her son, was concerned. For him she could only grieve and bear the burden of her guilt. But in doing what she was for Brandon, she was, she felt, making some kind of atonement in her own small way.

‘Besides,’ Brandon continued, ‘you don’t think I’m going to miss out on celebrating the fact that America has finally officially joined this war of yours, do you?’

Francine knew better than to try to dissuade him.

Neither of his divorced parents knew of his condition. His father, according to Brandon, would simply refuse to accept that his son could suffer ill health, and his mother would threaten to have a nervous breakdown.

‘Poor little rich boy,’ Francine had sometimes teased him when they’d first met, but now that she knew how apt the description was she no longer used it.

They had met the previous autumn when Fran, as the lead singer in a London theatre revue, had been invited to attend a diplomatic event to help entertain some visiting American top brass.

She knew that her sister Jean had been worried by the speed with which they had married – until Francine had taken Brandon home to Liverpool with her to attend Jean’s daughter Grace’s Christmas wedding and had had a chance to explain the situation honestly to her older sister. Her family might know that Brandon was poorly, but only Jean knew the reality of Francine’s marriage.

Francine had stopped working for ENSA. Brandon’s needs came before anything else now. And for that same reason she had felt that it was wiser for them to live in a service flat at the Dorchester rather than rent a flat of their own. As an entertainer she was used to living in hotels, and Brandon’s service flat was positively palatial compared with some of the accommodation she had had. Not only did it have two double bedrooms, each with its own bathroom and sitting room, there was also a dining room, a small kitchen and a maid’s room. Not that they had or needed a maid, but they both knew that the time would come when the services of a full-time nurse would be required.

Francine was determined that Brandon would be nursed ‘at home’ and amongst the benefits of being at the Dorchester was that, along with room service meals, there was a doctor on twenty-four hour call.

Brandon was insistent that no one outside Fran’s family was to know about his condition unless they absolutely had to.

Tonight was a very special occasion for Brandon, as an American, and Francine could almost feel his pride a couple of hours later when they were waiting in line inside the American Embassy to shake hands with the line up of American military top brass standing with the Ambassador.

The double doors to the room in which the reception was being held were guarded by American servicemen looking far smarter than their war-weary British counterparts. Just the sight of British Army uniforms, though, was enough to remind Francine of Marcus. So silly of her when it was all over between them …

The guests being, in the main, American airmen – commanding officers waiting impatiently for the agricultural land of Norfolk and the South East to be turned into the hard surface airfields on which their huge bombers could land and take off, – there were far more men in uniform than there were female guests, although the Ambassador had obviously done his best to even up the numbers by inviting several women whom Francine recognised as senior members of the American Red Cross, as well as a sprinkling of women in uniform, along with other women such as Mollie Panter-Downes, the London correspondent for the New Yorker.

Eventually it was Francine and Brandon’s turn to shake hands, the Ambassador discreetly stressing Brandon’s name, or so Francine, with her trained ear, felt, as though wanting to underline for the benefit of the Military top brass just who he was.

As an American billionaire, Brandon’s father was a hugely influential political figure, but Francine knew that despite his obvious pride in his country’s decision to join the war, later, when they were on their own, Brandon would be cast down by the sense of personal worthlessness he often felt, that came from being ‘the son of’ his father rather than being valued for his own achievements, however modest.

The American Embassy had originally been owned by the Woolworth heiress, who had given it to the American Government, and was an elegant backdrop for tonight’s well-dressed gathering. Not wanting to let Brandon down, Fran had decided to wear one of the outfits she had had made in Egypt: a beautiful full-length gown in palest blue slipper satin, which followed the curves of her body without clinging vulgarly. High in the neck at the front, at the back the dress dipped down to below her waist, where it was embellished with embroidery in the shape of a butterfly sewn with tiny seed pearls, blue and green beads, and diamanté. A wrap of sheer silk organza dyed the same colour as the dress and sprinkled with seed pearls and diamanté covered her bare arms and back, and Francine carried with her an evening bag made from the same fabric as her dress.

She knew that her appearance – and no doubt her lovely dress, she thought with rueful amusement – was attracting a good deal of attention as they circulated amongst the other guests, but Francine was more concerned about Brandon. She was trying to keep a subtly careful eye on him, whilst at the same time concealing her concern for him beneath the ‘public’ cloak of charm and her well-honed ability to put other people at their ease, which she had acquired during the years of her singing career. Francine was not someone who would ever compromise her own principles or cultivate anyone’s friendship to aid her own prospects. She had far too much staunchly Liverpudlian independence and spirit to do that, along with a Liverpudlian sense of humour, but she did feel that easing the wheels of social discourse was an asset that it made good sense to acquire. Old-fashioned good manners, her own mother and her sister Jean would have called it, she reflected, as she listened politely whilst a general, smelling richly of bourbon, boasted to her about how the Americans were going to ‘show you Brits how to bomb the hell out of Hitler’.

‘Stands to reason you ain’t gonna hit much with them little toy planes of yours,’ he told her with a self-satisfied grin, ‘especially at night. Why, we’ve got bombers ten times their size, with a hundred times their accuracy, that we can send out in daylight raids to hit an exact spot.’

Francine had worked in Hollywood for a while and was familiar with a certain type of bombastically overconfident American attitude, so she held her peace.

Not so, though, Brandon, who immediately swallowed back his own drink and then announced grimly, ‘Sir, we might be able to outdo the Brits with the technical abilities of our bombers, but when it comes to sheer guts and bravery, we’ve yet to prove we’re one hundredth as good as the RAF.’

There was a small uncomfortable silence before someone, Francine couldn’t see who, started to clap their hands in agreement and then within a very few seconds the whole room was clapping, causing the general to propose a toast to ‘The brave men of the RAF’.

‘That was so good of you,’ she whispered to Brandon, her own eyes filming with silly tears. ‘As a British woman, I thank you; and as your wife, I am so very proud of you.’

‘Nowhere near as proud as I am of you,’ Brandon whispered back.

A pianist hired for the occasion had started to play some popular American numbers, and what with all the American accents, the music, and the bottles of Coca Cola that a Marine behind the bar was swiftly opening and handing out, the Embassy felt very much like a small part of America, right in the heart of London.

Francine made a point of joining in the banter and bonhomie.

‘This is exactly the kind of homey American atmosphere we want to create for our boys here in England. After all, it’s the least we can do for them,’ one of the American Red Cross women told her enthusiastically, only to break off with an anxious exclamation that had Francine turning round to see what was happening.

Brandon had semi-collapsed and was being supported by the anxious-looking lieutenant he had obviously lurched into.

Excusing herself, Francine went immediately to his aid, her concern on his behalf not helped by the careless, ‘Damn fool boy obviously can’t take his drink,’ she overheard from a cigar-chomping Texan.

White-faced, with beads of sweat standing out on his pallid forehead, Brandon was making a tremendous effort to brush off the incident, and tears of pity and pride stung Francine’s eyes as she saw the looks of disapproval he was attracting as he tried to straighten up and then swayed as he made to reach her.

Her whispered, ‘Don’t worry, darling, I’ve got you,’ was for his ears only, her seemingly light touch on his arm, in reality a protective supportive grip that was straining her muscles.

As he leaned into her she could see that he was trying to say something, but his voice was so changed by his weakness that it took her several seconds to recognise that he was saying, ‘I’m sorry.’

As he spoke he tried to straighten up but somehow instead he lost his balance and crashed to the floor, his flailing arms sending glasses flying from a nearby table as he did so.

In the silence that followed it was possible to hear the sound of liquid from the broken glasses dripping onto the floor, accompanied by the occasional nervous clearing of a throat. These small sparse sounds gradually gathered volume and pace as they were joined by hushed whispers and speedy footsteps; then the Ambassador’s voice reaching down to Francine as she kneeled on the floor at Brandon’s side, asking curtly, ‘Is he all right?’

Knowing exactly how Brandon felt about his condition, and his determination that no one else was to know about it, Francine could only say shakily, ‘He hasn’t been very well,’

Above her she could hear other voices: ‘He must be drunk …’ ‘How dreadful …’ ‘Shameful …’ ‘But what do you expect? I mean, he’s married that showgirl …’

Ignore them, Francine told herself. They know nothing, mean nothing. Brandon was what mattered.

He wasn’t unconscious, thank heavens, but she could see how shocked and humiliated he felt from his expression. She reached for his hand and held it tightly in her own. His doctor had warned them about this happening: a sudden weakness that would rob him of the ability to move, and perhaps even speak, that would come out of nowhere and then pass – at first – a sign that his illness was advancing.

‘I’ll get you some help,’ the Ambassador was saying and within seconds two burly Marines had appeared and were helping Brandon to his feet, their expressions wooden but their manner faultlessly correct and polite as they went either side of Brandon to support him.

‘It’s the bourbon, I guess. It’s a mite too strong after London’s watered-down whisky,’ one wit was suggesting as Francine made their apologies to the Ambassador and explained that they would have to leave.

‘But I still don’t understand what you’re doing here, Bella. After all, you do have a house of your own.’

Bella tried not to feel too low as she sat with her mother in the kitchen of Vi’s house. It wasn’t just her mother’s attitude that made her feel so unwilling to be here, Bella acknowledged, it was the house itself. Her mother might have insisted on Bella’s father fitting out the whole house with everything that was new and up to date when they had first moved into it a couple of years before Bella had married, but now that she knew what really made a house a home, Bella could see how cold and barren of loving warmth her mother’s house was. Somehow the house was cold and unwelcoming – just like her mother?

‘I have to say that I think it very selfish of you not to have made such a dreadful fuss about it that your poor brother and dearest Daphne felt unable to move into it. It’s your fault that they aren’t living up here, you know. Daphne would have been such a comfort to me, and of course if Charlie had been here working with your father, as he should have been, then that wretched woman would never have got her claws into him. It’s all your fault, Bella. You do realise that, don’t you?’

Her mother’s voice had risen with every imagined injustice she was relaying, causing Bella’s heart to sink even further. There was no point trying to reason with her mother when she was in this frame of mind, Bella knew. Although her mother’s neighbour, Muriel, had assured Bella in a conspiratorial whisper as she had left that ‘Your dear mother hasn’t had any you-know-what whilst I’ve been here, dear,’ Bella suspected that her mother’s current overemotional mood had its roots in alcohol.

‘Did you hear me, Bella?’ Vi demanded. ‘It is your fault that I’m in this wretched state, and that your father has left.’

Bella wanted to be patient but her mother’s selfishness and the injustice of her accusations, never mind their inaccuracies, tried her temper to its limits.

‘I don’t want to hear another word about Charlie or Daphne, if you don’t mind, Mummy,’ she began firmly, but once again her mother overruled her.

‘Well, that’s just typical of your selfishness, isn’t it, Bella, not wanting a poor mother to talk about her beloved son? Isn’t it enough for you that you practically drove poor Charlie away with your selfishness is not giving him that house? That poor boy, forced to stay in the army – and live apart from dearest Daphne when they could have been living up here, and all because of you.’

Bella put down with some force the kettle she had been just about to fill and turned to her mother.

‘Mummy, that is ridiculous. You know perfectly well that why Charlie is still in the army and not up here working for Father is because he tried and failed to get himself dismissed from the army on the grounds of ill health and they very sensibly, in my opinion, saw through him and have insisted that he must do his duty, like all the other young men who have had to enlist. As for Daphne, it seems to me that she was only too pleased to have an excuse to go home to her own parents.’

‘You are a very unkind sister and daughter, Bella. And it’s all because of that dreadful … that person.’

Even now her mother could not bring herself to mention Lena by name, and blamed her and not Charlie for the fact that Lena had had Charlie’s baby.

Bella felt angry on Lena’s behalf, but she also felt that now that Lena was so happily married to Gavin it could do more harm than good to keep reminding her mother that Charlie was the baby’s father and not Gavin, who was, after all, being a far better father to the little girl than Charlie, married to someone else, and who had refused point-blank to accept his responsibility towards Lena, could ever have been.

‘I think you should go home now, Bella. I’ve got an awful headache, I really must go and lie down.’

Her mother’s voice was thin and fretful, and Bella could see that she was plucking at the edge of the stained tablecloth, a habit Bella had noticed she had developed. A wave of pity and defeat washed out Bella’s earlier anger. She lit the gas under the kettle, then went over to her mother and said lightly, ‘I am home, Mummy. Remember, we talked about it this morning and I said that I would come and live here with you for a little while so that you wouldn’t feel as lonely.’

‘Did we? I don’t remember.’ For a moment her mother looked so lost and confused that Bella’s heart ached for her.

‘Why don’t I make us both a nice cup of cocoa, Mummy, and then we can listen to the news together?’

‘The news? Is it that time already?’

Bella had a particular reason to want to listen to the news today.

Half an hour later, on the pretext of going upstairs to unpack her suitcase, Bella made a quick inspection of her mother’s bedroom. Its general untidiness, along with the unmade bed, was upsetting, all the more so because her mother had always been so fastidious.

At least she wasn’t drinking any more like she had been when Bella’s father had first left. It had been such a terrible shock for Bella to discover her mother drunk, buying gin from a criminal selling it on the black market.

Bella was so grateful to her mother’s doctor for the help he had given, sending Vi to a nursing home where she could be probably looked after. But she was not the person she had been, Bella knew, although whether that was because of her drinking or because her husband had left her, or a combination of both, Bella did not know. It was impossible to imagine Bella’s auntie Jean or her auntie Francine behaving as her mother had done. They were both so much stronger in their different ways, women to be admired, not pitied. Bella now felt so much closer to her auntie Jean, who had been such a rock and so very kind to her since Bella had taken her courage in both hands and gone to tell her what had happened. She didn’t feel she deserved the love and kindness Auntie Jean had shown her, but she was very grateful for it.

Her aunt had been coming over from Liverpool to visit her mother at least once a week all through the winter and the bad weather, but Bella had no intention of allowing Auntie Jean to be put upon. It wouldn’t be right.

Automatically she picked up the clothes her mother had left scattered around the room, putting those that needed washing aside, pulling back the bedclothes and remaking the bed. The furniture – bought new when her parents had first moved to the house, and of which her mother had been so very proud – like the rest of the house had an air of neglect about it.

The Bella who had lived in this house, spoiled and selfish, wouldn’t have had the first idea about how to keep house or cook, or do anything that the Bella she was now did with such accomplishment and pride, and all the more so because they were lessons hard-learned and self-taught.

She and Lena had had such fun learning to cook together. Her own kitchen had been filled with the sound of laughter as well as the smell of food, both seasoned with love.

Her poor mother. Bella couldn’t think of anything worse than being married to a man like her own father, a cold-hearted bully who thought of no one but himself, but her mother continually made it plain that she would rather be married to him than deserted by him.

Back downstairs Bella filled two hot-water bottles, one for mother’s bed and one for her own.

It was eleven o’clock before she finally went to bed herself, having seen her mother safely up, and then having gone back downstairs to make a start on cleaning the kitchen. Now physically tired, she should have been ready to sleep but instead, as though it sensed her weakness and that her guard was down, the news of Bomber Command’s continuing raids on enemy targets allowed her thoughts to slide towards Jan, who was a fighter pilot and not a bomber pilot, but whose life was still in danger with every mission he flew, and who she had no right to be thinking of at all. They might have admitted their love for one another and shared a little precious time together, but Bella had told him then that there must be no future meetings, no letters, and even no thinking of one another in their most private thoughts because Jan was married. She had meant what she said.

Bella knew she had made the right, indeed the only possible, decision but there were times when the temptation to let Jan into her thoughts betrayed her. As she knew all too well, letting him into her thoughts was only a heartbeat away from letting him into her imagination – and her memory – and that once there, in no time at all she would be remembering how it felt to be held in his arms, and to hold him back. How it felt to be kissed by him and to kiss him back. How it felt to be loved by him and to love him back, and then the pain would begin all over again. A double-edged pain – for herself and for the woman Bella believed she was betraying with her thoughts. She loved Jan beyond any shadow of doubt, and loving him surely meant wanting the best for him, and the very best future happiness for Jan would be for him to be happy with his wife. That was what she must pray for and hope for him, no matter what the cost to herself, because any other kind of lesser, more selfish love was not the love Bella believed her wonderful Jan deserved.

SIX

‘I can’t believe we’ve been here over a month already,’ Lou announced as they all lined up outside their hut, ready for morning inspection, blinking in the late March bright morning light.

‘A month? It feels more like a year,’ Betty groaned, shivering in the cold wind that seemed to whistle round the base. ‘It’s all right for you, Lou,’ she complained. ‘You’re so good at what we’re supposed to be doing, but I just can’t seem to get the hang of it.’

‘Watch out, Corp’s on her way,’ Ellen, always the cautious one, warned them. They all stiffened into a dutiful silence as their corporal started to walk down the line of uniformed young women in her charge, checking the cap angles, hair length, shoe and button shines.

She was finding that she had a natural aptitude for what they were being taught, Lou admitted as she stood to attention. Perhaps it came from the fact that her father was, as they said, ‘good with his hands’ and worked for Liverpool’s Salvage Corp, although her father had never in Lou’s memory suggested that his daughters understand what a plane or a vice or a file was, never mind try to use one. The very thought was enough to make Lou grin.

‘Something funny, is there, Campion?’

Oh Lord. She’d been so lost in her thoughts that hadn’t realised that the corp had reached her.

Somehow managing not to make any retort but instead to stand to attention and look straight ahead, Lou cursed herself inwardly. Their corp – Corporal Carter, to give her her full name – was a real tartar, and had seemed to take a dislike to her after she had made the mistake, during her first week, of mentioning that her brother was also a corporal in the army. She’d only been making conversation but obviously the corporal had thought she was trying to be clever or, even worse, to curry favour, and since then she’d been coming down hard on her, finding fault as often as she could, or so it seemed to Lou.

If it wasn’t the shine on her shoes that wasn’t bright enough, then it was the curl in her hair, or – on one occasion – the length of her eyelashes, which the corporal had accused her of darkening with either mascara or shoe blacking, both of which were banned whilst the women were on duty.

The last thing Lou wanted now, with Easter only ten days away, was to provoke the corporal into putting her on a charge, as she had threatened to do the last time she had given her a telling-off. The pettiness of the rules and the discipline irked her at times, Lou admitted, but on the other hand she was enjoying what she was learning, even if she still felt disappointed about the fact that she was never going to get to learn to fly.

All the recruits were looking forward to their promised long weekend off over Easter, and Lou had already written to her family telling them that she would be coming home. She’d even got Sasha to promise that the two of them would go out together to the Grafton Dance Hall on Easter Saturday – just the two of them.

Lou had missed Sasha, but she still felt a bit on edge at the thought of being reunited with her twin.

She’d have so much to tell her family and, of course, so much that she couldn’t tell them. Halton was a busy base with, if the grapevine was to be relied on, any number of top brass being flown in and then out of it almost daily.

‘They’ve got some American military top bass coming down today, so I’ve heard,’ Betty whispered excitedly to Lou a bit later whilst they were queuing for their breakfast. ‘Bomber Harris is going to be here as well.’

A fully fledged leading aircraftwoman in the queue ahead of them had obviously overheard and turned round to give them each a reproving look. ‘It’s Air Marshal Harris to you, and we don’t make a fuss about Yanks here. This is an RAF base, remember?’

Lou and Betty exchanged rueful grimaces, whilst Ruby, cheeky as always, pulled a face behind the other Waaf’s back.

‘I’m surprised she didn’t start reminding us that walls have ears,’ Betty grumbled, when they were sitting down with their breakfasts. ‘Anyway, everyone knows that the American military are here and that they’re going to be flying those enormous bombers of theirs out of all those airfields that are being built for them. I’ve got a cousin who’s based in London. She’s been out with one of them already – one of the Yanks, I mean. She says they really know how to treat a girl.’

‘A lot of people think it’s fearfully bad form to step out with one of them when our own boys are overseas fighting,’ was all Lou felt able to say, remembering how anti the Americans her own brother, Luke, had been when they had first arrived in Liverpool the previous year.

‘I’m really looking forward to Easter. It seems ages since I saw my family – or wore civvies,’ Betty complained. She heaved a heavy sigh. ‘I can’t wait to go to a dance wearing a dress and decent shoes. My ankles were black and blue the other Sunday, from being kicked accidentally by chaps in uniform, after we’d all been to that dance in the mess.’

‘Well, at least the RAF boys get to wear a pretty decent uniform,’ Ellen reminded them, coming to sit down with them just in time to catch what had been said. ‘Not like the poor army boys.’

The table was full now and whilst the other girls embarked on an intense discussion about the merits and demerits of various service uniforms, Lou let her thoughts slip to their Easter weekend break.

Easter was quite late this year, which meant that her dad would already have been busy in his allotment, and although there wouldn’t be any chocolate eggs because of rationing, Lou suspected that there would be wonderfully fresh eggs from the hens the allotment keepers had clubbed together to keep. Her mother was a wonderful cook. Naafi food had been an eye-opener for Lou, but she had made herself get used to it; she didn’t want the others thinking she was a softie, after all.

It would be heaven to sleep in her own bed again in the room she shared with Sasha. Her sister Grace had written to tell her that although she would be on duty at the hospital in Whitchurch, where she was now working, for most of the Easter holiday, she had got Easter Monday off, when she and Seb would be coming over to Liverpool to see everyone.

There would be no Luke there, of course. He was fighting in the desert with the British Army, and there would be no Katie either, because she and Luke weren’t engaged any more.

They were all upset about that, but especially her mother, Lou knew. She was never going to let herself get daft about a lad. It only led to problems and misery. She had made enough of a fool of herself over Kieran Mallory to know not to do the same thing ever again. Just look at the way it had changed Sasha. Lou just hoped that her twin would keep to her promise about just the two of them going out together on Easter Saturday, she really did.

‘Auntie Jean!’ Bella exclaimed with genuine delight when she stepped into the kitchen to find her aunt sitting there with her mother.

Although Vi and Jean were identical twins, the way they had lived their lives now showed in their faces so that, in their mid-forties, Jean Campion’s expression was one of warmth and happiness, whilst Vi Firth’s was one of dissatisfaction and irritation. Vi’s hair might be iron neat in the scalloped rigid permanent wave she favoured, her twinset cashmere and her skirt expensive Scottish tweed – like her twinset, dating from before the war – but it was her auntie Jean, with her slightly untidy soft brown curls, and the kindness that shone from her hazel eyes who looked the prettier and happier of the two, Bella thought. Not that her auntie didn’t look every bit as smart as her twin sister, and a good bit slimmer. Unlike Vi, Jean had kept her neat waist, and if her jumper and skirt weren’t the exclusive models worn by Bella’s mother they were still of good quality. The pretty lilac of the jumper her auntie was wearing with her navy serge suit enhanced her colouring. But it was the quality of her auntie’s lovely smile that really showed the difference between them. Her own mother rarely smiled properly, which was why her mouth turned down, giving her a permanently dissatisfied and cross look, whilst her twin’s mouth turned upwards, drawing attention to her smile and the kindness in her eyes.

Her mother might once have enjoyed showing off to her twin and boasting about the way she had moved up in the world but it was Auntie Jean who was truly the happier of the two of them and, bless her, she hadn’t said so much as a single unkind word about how her twin might have brought some of her unhappiness on herself, Bella acknowledged as she hugged her aunt affectionately.

‘I’m really glad now that I delayed having my lunch so that I could pop home this afternoon to remind Mummy that it’s our WVS night tonight,’ Bella told her aunt, ‘otherwise I’d have missed you. It’s so good of you to come all this way, Auntie Jean.’

‘Nonsense. It’s only a matter of coming over on the ferry and then catching the bus,’ Bella’s mother objected immediately.

‘I’ll put on the kettle, shall I, Bella love?’ Jean asked, giving her niece a motherly look. It meant ever such a lot to her to have this new relationship with her niece and to feel that Bella was now within the fold, so to speak, and a real part of her own family. Her own mother would have been that pleased. She’d always felt strongly about family sticking together.

Watching her aunt busy herself, Bella admitted to a small sad stab of loneliness. Living here with her mother wasn’t easy, and she desperately missed her own house and Lena’s company, even though she knew that in coming home she had done the right thing – for Lena as well as for her mother.

‘I had a letter from Grace the other day saying that she and Seb are hoping to come up to Liverpool over Easter,’ Bella told her aunt.

‘That’s one of the reasons why I’m here,’ Jean said. ‘I was wondering if you and Vi would like to come to us for your tea on Easter Monday. It won’t be anything much, what with the war and everything, but Grace and Seb will be there, and Lou’s got leave as well.’

‘Well, I don’t know about that, Jean,’ Vi began before Bella could say anything. ‘I don’t know what Charlie and Daphne’s plans are yet.’

‘We’d love to come, Auntie Jean,’ Bella overrode her mother.

‘But what if Charles and Daphne are here?’ Vi asked.

‘Well, they’d be very welcome too,’ Jean hurried to assure her sister.

‘I thought you said that when you wrote and asked Charlie what they were doing for Easter, he wrote back that Daphne’s parents were having some friends to stay, and that he didn’t even know if he would get leave,’ Bella reminded her mother.

Personally the last thing Bella wanted was for Charlie to come home. There was the matter of Lena and the baby, for one thing, and there was no way she wanted her young friend upset or embarrassed in any way by Charlie’s presence.

After they had drunk their tea, and Bella and Jean had finalised the arrangements for Easter Monday, Bella offered to travel back to the ferry terminal with her aunt.

‘Oh, Bella, that’s kind of you but there’s really no need,’ Jean protested.

‘No need at all,’ Vi agreed. ‘I can’t for the life of me think why Jean would need you to go with her, Bella, especially when she knows that I’m here on my own day in and day out with no one to speak to until you come home from that nursery. I don’t know why you work there, I really don’t. Not when you could have been working for your father, and if you had …’

Her mother was working herself up to one of her angry outbursts, during which she’d blame her for Pauline’s presence in her father’s life, Bella recognised, stepping in quickly to deflect it by saying calmly, ‘It was Charlie Daddy wanted to have working for him, Mummy, not me. Now, why don’t you go and start getting ready for the WVS tonight?’

‘Oh, the WVS. I don’t think I want to go, Bella. Mrs Forbes Brown cut me at church last Sunday.’

‘Don’t be silly, Mummy. She just didn’t see you, that’s all.’

‘Bella, you are such a good daughter to your mother,’ Jean praised her niece later as they walked to the bus stop together, Jean now wearing a neat little navy hat she had trimmed up last year with a scrap of cream petersham ribbon.

Jean thought approvingly that Bella’s businesslike dark green suit and a matching beret had a bit of a look of a uniform about it and certainly suited her niece’s trim figure. A pair of court shoes showed off her dainty ankles, and Jean thought how well that style would suit Grace, who had to wear such ugly shoes for her work.

‘There’s really no need for you to come all the way down to the terminal with me, Bella,’ Jean insisted. ‘I know how busy you must be.’

‘We are,’ Bella agreed with a smile, ‘but not so busy that I’m prepared to give up the opportunity to spend time with you, Auntie Jean.’

As Jean said to Sam later, once she had returned home and the two of them were sharing a cup of tea in the warmth of the kitchen before Sam went out to take advantage of the last of the daylight to work on his allotment, ‘You’d never know our Bella for the same girl. She’s changed so much, and for the better. I feel sorry for her too having to put up with Vi, the way she is, always finding fault. I know that Vi’s my own sister, my twin, and heaven knows I feel sorry for her after what she’s been through with Edwin treating her like he has, but she doesn’t make things easy for herself, Sam, or for those around her.’

‘Well, you know what I think,’ Sam responded. ‘Your Vi and her Edwin were a perfect match for one another, both of them as selfish as bedamned, but I know you, with that soft heart of yours, never able to resist helping others even when they don’t deserve it.’

Jean gave her husband a tender smile. They’d had a good marriage, her and Sam, a happy marriage, but she knew how uncomfortable ‘soppy’ talk made him feel so instead of telling him how much she loved him and how glad she was that she had married him, she asked him anxiously, ‘Do you think those Jersey potatoes of yours will be ready for Easter, Sam? Only there’s nothing quite like your Jerseys with Easter Sunday lamb, and any that’s left over will do nicely cold on Easter Monday.’

As she had known he would, Sam puffed himself up slightly with male pride and assured her, ‘I reckon they will be ready, but I’m not promising,’ he warned her, ‘and I’m not having my Jerseys pulled up before they’re ready, no matter what.’

Which Jean knew from experience meant that she could relax and they could all look forward to the delicious treat of home-grown new potatoes with their Easter Sunday lamb.

‘It will be a funny Easter this year, Sam, what with Grace married and Lou in uniform. We won’t be having our Luke dropping by either.’

As she reached for her handkerchief Sam leaned across the table and took hold of her hand in his.

‘Aye, love, I know.’

‘It’s not as bad as if he’d been in Singapore, but …’

Sam’s hand tightened over hers.

‘What do you think will happen, Sam? I thought that we were winning in Egypt, but now …’ Anxiety thickened Jean’s voice. The news from the desert – or rather, what they were allowed to know was going on – was increasingly worrying. In January Rommel’s tanks had started to push back the British Eighth Army with which Luke was fighting, and which had been doing so well the previous year.

‘They don’t call Rommel the Desert Fox for nothing,’ Sam acknowledged. ‘If you ask me, Churchill should have recalled Ritchie.’ Lieutenant-General Ritchie was in charge of the war in the Western Desert, and there was growing criticism of him, blaming him for the Eighth Army’s current plight.

Jean knew from the sombre tone of Sam’s voice that she had good cause to worry for Luke, but being the woman she was, instead of giving way to her tears, she withdrew her hand from Sam’s and blew her nose very firmly.

Changing the subject she said, ‘Sasha’s told me that Lou has written to her suggesting that they go out dancing together, just the two of them, when she comes home at Easter. As luck would have it young Bobby has got leave over Easter himself, but seemingly he’s told Sasha that he’s going to go home to Newcastle to see his family. He’s ever such a nice lad,’ Jean concluded approvingly.

The other person who was in her thoughts was her younger sister, Francine. Fran wrote regularly, funny, witty letters – she had always had that gift – but although she mentioned Brandon she didn’t say anything that gave Jean any clue as to how the young American’s health was.

At Christmas Fran had promised that she would let Jean ‘know when there is anything you need to know’, and since she had not done so Jean could only hope that Brandon was holding his own.

‘Dr Forbes is admitting a new patient today, Nurse, a German POW suffering from blood poisoning.’

Grace nodded briskly as she listened to what Sister O’Reilly was telling her. She was enjoying working at her new hospital. They dealt with a variety of cases, some military and some civilian. Matron had made her feel very welcome and had told her how pleased she was to have her, and Grace was glad she was able to put her training to good use.

‘In the circumstances I think perhaps he should go in the private room at the end of the ward. To us a patient is a patient, and that is exactly how it should be, but some of our other patients may have other views.’

Grace knew exactly what sister meant. The new admission was one of their enemy, and some of the other men on the ward might either be upset by his presence or antagonistic toward him.

As a nurse, however, Grace couldn’t help but feel sympathy for the German when he was eventually brought in. His lower right leg was swollen to double the size of his left leg, the flesh red and hot to the touch and drawn tight over the swollen limb. A bandage had been wrapped around what Grace guessed must be the site of the wound, but above it she could see quite plainly the telltale red line of infection.

Her heart gave a flurry of beats, the sight taking her back to the time when she had been training and Seb had been admitted to her hospital with a shoulder wound that had threatened to give him blood poisoning. She had been so afraid for him, so determined to do everything she could to help him, cleaning the wound and packing it with hot kaolin paste, making sure that he took his M & B tablets regularly.

The guard who had come in with the POW, an army squaddie, stationed himself outside the small room, telling Grace, ‘You won’t have much trouble with Wilhelm here. He speaks English.’

Summoning a junior nurse, Grace began to remove the dressing from the German’s leg. He was a pleasant-looking man with unexpectedly nice eyes, and if she hadn’t known he was a German she’d probably have thought of him as a decent sort.

The wound, once she’d removed the bandage, might not look much – a single small puncture wound that had healed over – but Grace knew how serious it was. It would have to be opened and drained of the poison inside it, the rotting flesh removed, and that telltale red line brought down because if it wasn’t, well then at best the POW could lose his leg and at worse, his life. His ‘Thank you’ as she made him as comfortable as she could to wait for the doctor surprised her and caught her off guard. A little guardedly she smiled at him. He may be ‘the enemy’ but as a nurse it was her duty to take care of him.

Why doesn’t Wilhelm come any more?’ Tommy asked Emily when they were sitting having their tea.

‘I dare say he’s got better things to do. Now how about you and me starting to read A Tale of Two Cities tonight?’ she suggested, wanting to change the subject.

Not for the world did she want anyone, including Tommy, guessing how upset she was over Wilhelm.

‘We could ask the farmer, and tell him that we want Wilhelm to come back,’ Tommy continued, ignoring her suggestion about the book.

‘We’ll do no such thing.’

‘But I liked him,’ Tommy protested.

‘That’s as maybe, but Mr Churchill’s got better things to do with POWs than send them to places because little boys want him to,’ was all that Emily could come up with to bring an end to the conversation. After all, Mr Churchill’s decisions carried a lot of weight with Tommy, as they did with the whole country, and were not to be questioned.

SEVEN

‘Come on, Lou, don’t let her get away with it,’ Ruby called out mischievously and challengingly, as a sponge filled with water hit Lou on the side of her face.

‘Yes, come on, Lou,’ Betty, who had thrown the sponge, teased her.

‘I’m going to get you for that,’ Lou warned mock threateningly as water ran down her face.

They were in the showers, in their bathing suits, having just been put through their paces in the gym by the PT instructor, and were in high spirits knowing that their Easter weekend break was only a handful of days away, especially Lou, who only the previous day had been praised by their instructor for her riveting skill, an essential component of their training to become aircraft repair mechanics.

Still laughing, Betty threw another water-laden sponge at her, mocking, ‘You’ll have to catch me first,’ as she did a triumphant dance on the tiled floor outside her shower cubicle.

Spluttering and laughing herself, Lou set to work soaking both sponges, along with her own and a fourth she quickly grabbed from Ellen, who was standing just outside the shower adjoining her own, Lou’s back to the room as she worked to gain her revenge, knowing that Betty would be working equally hard to beat her.

The silence that now filled the room as the others obviously waited for her return attack only added to her determination to score a hit so, when she turned round, a dripping sponge in each hand, she was already raising her arm to let fly, only realising when it was far too late that the reason for the silence was the presence of a sergeant between her and her intended victim, watching her, a sergeant whose face and uniform was now soaked in the water from the two sponges. Betty was now standing white-faced behind the dripping sergeant with a mixture of guilt and shock. It might seem a small offence and nothing more than a silly prank, the kind of thing that Lou herself would have shrugged off dismissively in her old pre-WAAF life, but, as she had quickly learned, Forces life was very different from civvy life. Once you were in uniform very strict and rigid rules controlled every aspect of your life, right down to the smallest detail. That breaking the rules was a serious crime had been dinned into them all from the moment they joined, and now Lou felt sick with the same shocked horror she could see so strongly in the faces of her pals. No one was laughing now. What Lou had done, no matter how innocently inspired, and despite the fact that her sponges had been intended for someone else, was tantamount to an assault on an NCO. And for that she could be drummed out of the service in absolute disgrace.

Where the old Lou would have had to fight back laughter at the sight of her unintended victim, her hair and the shoulders of her uniform wet, the new Lou was instead filled with stomach-curdling dread, and a very deep sense of regret.

The sergeant – not one Lou knew – looked so implacably stony-faced that Lou didn’t even dare try to stammer an apology in case it was interpreted as an attempt on her part to cheek her unintended victim. The atmosphere in the showers, so light-hearted and filled with laughter only a few minutes ago, was now thick with apprehension, and no one, Lou knew, felt that more strongly than she.

Easter was only a matter of a few days away. Katie had volunteered to work over the holiday, feeling that she would far rather one of her colleagues enjoyed a well-deserved break than that she herself was off with time on her hands and nothing to do but think about last year when Luke had loved her.

She was on her way for her morning tea break when Gina Vincent, who had been so friendly since Katie’s first day, called out to her to wait.

‘Look, I know we’re both down to work over Easter, and that we’re getting a long weekend leave to make up for it later in the month. I was thinking of going away then for a bit of a break. I’ve always wanted to visit Bath – I’m a Jane Austen fan – and I wondered if you’d like to come along. No offence taken if you don’t, mind, but it’s always more jolly if you’ve got a pal to share things with.’

‘I’d love to,’ was Katie’s immediate and genuinely delighted response.

It was the way of things now with the war: friendships were often quickly made, people seizing the moment because time was precious; people, especially young women working together, finding that they were making friends with a speed they might never normally have done and with girls from a wide variety of backgrounds. Katie was by nature solitary, enjoying her own company and hesitant about ‘putting herself forward’, but the warmth she had found within the Campion household had shown her how much happiness there was in being close to like-minded others.

She might only have known Gina for a few short weeks but what she did know of her she liked.

Tall, with mid-brown wavy hair and a calm manner, Gina was friendly to everyone, but not the kind of girl anyone would ever describe as ‘bubbly’ – not like Carole, whom Katie had once thought was her best friend.

‘Good show,’ Gina smiled, putting her arm through Katie’s. ‘We’ll have tea at Joe Lyons one evening, shall we, and make plans? I have a pal in the navy – we grew up in the same village. He recommended an hotel in Bath to me that he says is pretty good.’

Katie nodded.

Living and working in London as a single young woman, as the ATS girls were keen on proving, meant that one need never be short of a date. The city was constantly full of men in uniform on leave, determined to enjoy themselves.

Katie had quite got used now to being stopped in the street and asked for a date by some young man eager for female company on his precious time off. One learned to accept that eagerness and not be offended by it, whilst determinedly checking it – or not, if you happened to be the kind of girl who was as keen to enjoy all the fun that came your way, just in case there was no tomorrow. ‘Good-time girls’, some people referred to them disparagingly, but not Katie. She felt she understood what lay behind their sometimes desperate gaiety, and she sympathised with them.

Not that the number of testosterone-fuelled young men visiting the city was without its problems. Already there had been ‘words’ and a distinctly frosty atmosphere in the billet because Gerry had been dating an American serviceman.

The six of them – Sarah, Alison, Hilda, Gerry and Peggy as well as Katie herself – had been in the small dark basement back kitchen at the time, and Peggy Groves, who had been making tea for them all, had been unusually outspoken on the matter, making it plain that she disapproved, and asking pointedly, ‘What about that Royal Navy chap you’ve been writing to, Gerry?’

‘What about him?’ Gerry had responded with a defiant toss of her head.

‘Peggy’s right,’ Hilda had stepped in. ‘He isn’t going to be very happy when he finds out that you’re dating someone else, especially an American.’

‘Who says he’s going to find out?’ Gerry had challenged. ‘A girl has to have some fun, and Minton is fun.’

There the matter rested, for now, but privately Katie agreed with Peggy and Hilda.

As a result of the sponge incident Lou had been put on a charge and had been marched out to the guardroom, which was a small room in the admin building, in which she had been locked for twenty-four hours before being taken in front of the WAAF commander to have her case heard and punishment handed down.

She had been left in no doubt how serious her assault on an officer was, even if it had merely been a prank and its intended victim not the NCO but her pal. Now she wouldn’t be going home for Easter. Lou felt sick with misery and close to tears, but of course she wasn’t going to show that. Not when she was standing in front of a grim-looking commanding officer and about to be marched back to the guardhouse.

Not only was she on a charge but her hut had also had twenty points removed from it because of her behaviour, and she herself was going to have to do ‘jankers’ as punishment for seven days.

Lou had learned enough about being in uniform to know that there would have been no point in her protesting that she had simply been retaliating to another’s deliberate provocation, no matter how strongly she had been tempted to speak the hot words in her own defence. The Forces didn’t care about the whys and wherefores that might prompt an offence, only the offence itself. Not, of course, that Lou would have given Betty away anyway; that was simply not done. No, it was her own fault for not realising what the silence meant and checking before she had thrown those sponges. Her fault. How many times when she and Sasha had been growing up had she been told off for being ‘too impetuous’ and ‘not thinking’ through the consequences of her actions? Then she had shrugged off those criticisms because there had always been Sasha to share the blame with her, the two of them together against everyone else. Now, though, Lou was beginning to see that she had always been the one to institute things, dragging Sasha along with her whether or not her twin shared her desire to be rebellious. Then she had hated and resented rules of any kind, and having to do what other people did because someone else said so, but now that she was in uniform she was beginning to understand that discipline was necessary in order to achieve goals. Even something simple, such as parade ground marching, had a purpose to it. How would it be if they all marched in their own way and to their own tune? What a muddle it would cause. More important, though, than enforced discipline was, Lou recognised, learning the virtue of self-discipline, and of thinking for oneself – knowing one had to think beyond one’s own immediate wishes and look to what was right for everyone in a group. Lou had a great deal of respect for the manner in which the services’ way of doing things made a person feel different about themselves. For the first time in her life she was actually enjoying working for praise, and aware of how horrid it felt to be criticised and told off. Poor Sasha, was that how she had sometimes felt when she, Lou, had got them both into trouble? She’d make it up to her, tell her how much she had learned and how sorry she was for the way she knew her own past rebelliousness had sometimes upset her twin.

Sasha. Only now could Lou admit how desperately she had been longing to see her twin. But now she wasn’t going to. She’d been thinking about her parents too. Her mother had been upset over Christmas when she’d told them out of the blue that she’d joined up, and her father had been angry. Then she’d shrugged aside their reaction, but even though she’d written to them telling them how happy she was, and had received loving letters back from them, Lou felt that she owed them an apology for not discussing her plans with them first and for not being grown up enough to explain how stifling and depressing she had found the telephone exchange, instead of going off like that and joining up behind their backs.

‘Halt.’

Obediently Lou stopped walking. They were outside the WAAF guardhouse again. Her stomach was churning with misery in a way that reminded her of being a little girl and wanting to cling to her mother and Sash on the first day at school, but there was no Sasha here now to share that feeling with her, and no mother either to hold them both tight for a few precious extra seconds of comfort.

Her mother would be disappointed and upset when she learned that Lou wasn’t going to be home at Easter. For a few desperate seconds Lou tried to think of some suitable excuse she could make that would enable her to conceal the truth from everyone, but there was no story she could tell that her mother would accept. She had felt so proud about being able to go home and tell them how well she was doing, but now that wasn’t going to happen.

At least Sasha’s boyfriend would be pleased, Lou reflected bitterly, as she heard the guardhouse door being locked with her inside it.

Doing jankers would no doubt mean that she’d be set to work in the mess, peeling potatoes, washing up and scrubbing dirty floors, and of course everyone who saw her there would know that she was being punished.

Now that she was finally on her own, a solitary tear was allowed to escape.

‘Oh, Mum, it’s so good to see you,’ Grace greeted Jean as they exchanged hugs in the Campion kitchen.

‘Here, let me have a look at you,’ Jean demanded, holding her eldest daughter at arm’s length. ‘Your face looks thinner.’

‘Well, if it is it isn’t for any lack of food,’ Grace assured her, as Jean turned to hug Seb. ‘You’d never guess what a difference it makes living in the country, Mum. I had a farmer’s wife come round the other day and bring me some of her own butter as a thank you for me bandaging up her little boy’s leg after he had fallen almost outside our front door. I suppose I should have refused, but, well, with me coming home I thought that you could use it.’

‘I dare say you should have said “no”,’ Jean agreed, her eyes widening as she saw the good half-pound of butter Grace was handing over to her. Two ounces was the ration, that was all. ‘But I have to admit that I’m glad you didn’t. Best not say anything to your dad, though, love. He’s just gone down to the allotment to water his lettuces but he should be back any minute. He’s been asking me since first thing what time you were due.

‘I hope she’s feeding you properly, Seb,’ she smiled warmly at her son-in-law.

‘Impossible for Gracie not to be a good cook with a mum like you,’ Seb assured her.

‘Where are the twins?’ Grace asked, as she took off her coat and the pretty, rather gay little hat that had been perched on top of her curls – both 1939 buys, but Grace had a good eye and was now learning to be clever with her needle, thanks to treasured copies of Good Housekeeping that one enterprising member of the WVS had organised to be handed on to those who put their name down on the requisite list and paid a penny for the privilege of reading it.

Jean’s expression changed immediately to one of disquiet. ‘We got a letter from Lou on Thursday telling us that she’s been put on a charge, ‘she began as she went to light the gas under the kettle she had filled earlier. She was using her special tea set, the one that Grace had given her for Christmas the year she and Seb had got engaged.

Grace and Seb exchanged glances.

‘You can imagine how your dad reacted to that, Grace. I’m just glad in a way that Lou wasn’t here, because he’d have torn a strip off her and no mistake.’

‘What did she do? To get put on a charge, I mean?’ Grace asked as she went to get the milk from the cold slab in the larder to fill the milk jug, mother and daughter working harmoniously together. Grace was a housewife herself now, after all.

‘Well, as to that, from what she wrote – and of course the letter had been censored – it seems she was involved in some sort of prank that went wrong. It’s like your dad said, that’s Lou all over, acting first, without thinking, being too high-spirited. I don’t know, Grace. I just wished she’d talked to us first before going and joining the WAAF. She’s never taken kindly to rules and regulations and I’ve been dreading something like this happening. I just wish …’ Jean looked out of the kitchen window, her hand still on the handle of the teapot she had just filled.

Grace knew what her mother wished: that Lou had stayed at the telephone exchange with Sasha.

‘It’s not the end of the world,’ Seb tried to reassure Jean, stepping in in a calm reassuring way that made Grace smile gratefully at him. ‘The services are tough on sticking to the rules, but they aren’t the place for people with no back bone, and Lou has plenty of that.’

‘Yes, Mum,’ Grace agreed quickly, picking up on Seb’s attempt to cheer her mother up. ‘And from what Lou wrote to me in the letter I got the other week, she’s taken to this course she’s on like a duck to water.’

Jean had begun to lift the teapot but now she put it down again, smoothing her hand absently over the scarlet poppy embroidered on the starched white linen tray cloth. The tray cloth and its matching napkins had been a Christmas present from the twins before the war.

‘Oh, well, yes, but that’s another thing. Your dad isn’t happy at all about this business of her training to mend aircraft. He doesn’t think it’s women’s work at all.’

Grace pulled a face, setting about buttering the bread her mother had already cut and covered with a cloth.

‘Well, you know Dad, Mum, but the fact is that women are having to do men’s work because the men are fighting for this country, and I dare say that the pilots and crews are glad enough to have their aircraft working properly not to turn up their noses at a woman doing that work.’

‘You’re right, of course, love, but it might not be a good idea to say too much to your dad.’

Grace had been married less than four months but already she seemed to have grown up so much, no longer a girl, but a woman with her own opinions and ready to state them, Jean thought, torn between a sense of loss and pride.

‘Your dad’s temper’s a bit on the end at the moment, with all this bad news from the desert,’ she warned Grace.

‘Have you heard from Luke recently?’ Grace asked immediately.

‘We had a letter in March saying not to worry and that he’s well, but of course we do worry.’ A look at both Seb and Grace’s sombre faces confirmed to Jean that they shared her feelings.

‘Rommel’s a first-rate commander,’ Seb said at length, ‘but our lads are good fighters, good men.’

Jean nodded. Of course they were good men – her Luke was one of them – but being ‘good men’ wasn’t going to keep them safe from Rommel’s tanks, was it?

‘I’ve got to admit that I’m still ever so sad about Luke and Katie splitting up,’ Jean told them in a valiant attempt to take their attention away from the desert and the fact that the British Army was being beaten back by Rommel and his tanks. ‘I’d have liked to keep in touch with her but, bless her, being the thoughtful girl she is she said that it wouldn’t be right or fair to Luke …

‘Oh, we’ve got Vi and Bella coming round for tea. Vi’s running poor Bella ragged, and her with that nursery to run. Not that I don’t feel for Vi, I do, but she doesn’t make it easy for herself or for anyone else. Anyway, Grace, love, tell me your news. Are you liking it at the hospital in Whitchurch?’

‘Yes, I love it,’ Grace answered her truthfully. ‘I wasn’t so sure at first, because it’s so much smaller than here, but you do get to see a bit more variety. Mind you, I had ever such a moment a few weeks back, Mum. We had a POW in, a German – a nice chap,’ she emphasised when Jean frowned. ‘Speaks good English and seemingly was one of those forced to enlist. Anyway, he was sent in by a local doctor because he’d got a puncture wound to his leg that had gone bad. The POWs are sent out to work for the local farmers and this chap had had a pitchfork in his leg – an accident. I really thought he was going to lose his leg and it brought it all back to me how Seb had been so poorly with his own wound.’

‘So what happened to the POW?’ Jean asked, concerned on the man’s behalf in spite of herself.

‘Oh, he’s made a full recovery. The doctor is a friend of a friend of someone who wanted to try out this new stuff. Penicillin, it’s called. It’s like a miracle, Mum, but it’s all a bit hush-hush at the moment.’

‘Well, I dare say it’s all right giving him something like that, since he’s got better, but I wouldn’t have wanted them trying it out on one of my own. Say it hadn’t worked?’

Grace exchanged looks with Seb. She loved her mother dearly, but Jean could be a bit old-fashioned about some things.

Emily could hardly believe what had happened. It was like something out of a book, or a film – well, almost – and she was still all aflutter over it. She’d hardly slept last night and now here she was, all fingers and thumbs over her knitting, as she set about making socks for Wilhelm, who had come round yesterday afternoon to say especially to her how much he appreciated the pair she had already knitted for him, and asking her if she would let him come back to work on the garden. If she minded! A pink glow warmed her face, a slightly dazed but very happy smile curving her mouth.

Who would have thought yesterday morning, when she and Tommy had set out for church together, what the day would bring?

Of course, there’d been a good turnout for the eleven o’clock service, it being Easter Sunday, and not just from the congregations. All the scouts and guides and the like had been there, along with the Boys’ Brigade and a band. Those members of the WVS who had wanted to do so marched into church in their uniforms. Emily had chosen instead to wear her own clothes and stay with Tommy, but she had still felt a thrill of pride seeing her fellow WVS members looking so smart and businesslike.

There’d been a handful of young men and women in uniform, those lucky enough to have leave, and of course there’d not been a dry eye in the church when, after the service, their vicar had read out the names of the newly fallen from the parish.

It hadn’t been until after the service, when people were chatting outside the church, that Emily had allowed herself to look discreetly in the direction of the POWs with their uniformed escort. Wilhelm hadn’t been to church since she’d given him the socks, and she had known why. It was because he hadn’t wanted to see her.

But then yesterday he’d been there, and she’d been so taken by surprise to see him that she’d flushed up like a fool and looked the other way, wanting to get Tommy away before he noticed and said something or, worse, wanted to go over and talk to Wilhelm.

Shamefully she hadn’t even noticed that Wilhelm was using a crutch until Ivy from next door had commented on it, saying, ‘Well, I never. There’s that POW that used to come and do your garden, Emily, and he’s been in some kind of accident, by the looks of it.’

Of course, that had her forgetting her own feelings and turning round immediately to look anxiously at Wilhelm. And sure enough, there he’d been, standing with the other men.

She’d seen often enough at the pictures what she had thought of as daft scenes in which a couple would look at one another in silence whilst some soppy music played and you’d just know that this was IT, but she’d thought it was all so much nonsense, especially after her experience with her own husband. A right one for giving those kind of looks, he was, and to any pretty girl who took his eye. But then Wilhelm had looked right at her, and she’d looked back, and then he was saying something to the soldier guarding them, who had looked across at her and nodded, and then Wilhelm had come towards her, and Ivy had given her a bit of a nudge in the back and said, ‘Go on, he wants to say something to you and you surely aren’t going to make him walk all the way with that bad leg?’ And somehow they had met in the middle of the lane, still thronged with churchgoers, and he had explained to her about having had a nasty accident and being too poorly to come to work, and she had been so concerned that she had asked him a lot of anxious questions and then she had been jolted by someone by accident and Wilhelm had reached out to steady her – he had ever such a lovely touch – the feel of his hand on her arm warm and steady and kind.

Of course, when he had asked if he could come back to continue doing her garden she couldn’t have said ‘no’ even if she had wanted to, could she, as she had said to Ivy, not with him having that bad leg, and her worrying about Tommy missing out on his fresh veggies.

And it had been then that he had said them, the most wonderful words, just as though somehow he had known, which of course he couldn’t have done, and right in front of Bridget, who being the busybody she was had made sure that she got close to them to find out what was going on.

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