Home for Christmas

ANNIE GROVES

Copyright

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.

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

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Copyright © Annie Groves 2011

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

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 ebook 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 hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks

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

ISBN: 9780007361519

Ebook Edition © OCTOBER 2011 ISBN: 9780007419395

Version: 2017-09-12

Dedication

The memory of the late Tony Bosson.

Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Keep Reading

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also by Annie Groves

About the Publisher

Prologue

Just After Christmas 1936

‘Darling, oh, your face is so cold.’

Sally Johnson, eighteen years old and near the end of her first year as a probationer nurse at Liverpool’s Mill Street Hospital, laughed at her mother’s loving complaint as she reached up and kissed Sally’s face.

‘That could be because it’s trying to snow out there and my face is the only bit of me you can’t tell me to wrap up warmly,’ Sally teased her affectionately. Standing in the delicious beef-scented warmth of the family kitchen, she unwrapped herself from her gloves, scarf and hat, and then the good warm coat that her mother lovingly insisted on her wearing.

The kitchen table, with its blue-and-white-checked oilcloth, had already been set for their evening meal. Above it, the light from the blue and white glass ceiling light, burnished Sally’s dark red curls. She had inherited her hair colouring, so her father often said, from his own mother, whilst her oval-shaped face, with its high cheekbones and good skin, came from her petite fair-haired mother.

Sally knew how lucky she was to have grown up in such a close and loving family. Her parents – her tall, dark-haired, handsome father and her pretty mother, adored one another just as they did her, and she loved them both dearly in return. Life was pretty good in the Johnsons’ smart semidetached house in the middle-class Wavertree area of the city.

‘Morag said today how much she and Callum had enjoyed spending Christmas here with us,’ Sally told her mother as she went to hang up her outdoor clothes in the hallway, glad of the brief moment of privacy so as to conceal the soft blush that had burned her face just because she had spoken Callum’s name.

Callum. Sally would never forgot the kiss he had given her under the mistletoe on Boxing Day when they had been alone in her parents’ front room.

‘Morag’s always telling me how lucky I am to have you and dad as my parents,’ Sally added, as she returned to the kitchen. ‘Not that she needs to remind me.’

Morag and Sally had met when they were doing their initial three months’ training together at Mill Street Hospital. Morag and her brother, Callum, an assistant teacher, had lost their own parents in a boating accident on Loch Lomond two years before Callum’s work had brought them to Liverpool. The two girls had hit it off straight away, and once Sally had told her mother about Morag and Callum’s sad loss, Sally’s mother had made them both very welcome at number 28 Lilac Avenue.

Sally could still remember that dizzy breath-catching-in-her-throat feeling she had had when Morag had first introduced her to her brother. Callum had come to walk Morag home from the hospital after they had been on nights, and the minute she had seen her friend’s tall, good-looking brother, with his thick dark hair and his warm smile, Sally had been lost. Callum also was kind and considerate and, well, just everything Sally had ever imagined herself finding attractive in a man. She knew that her parents liked him, from the way her mother fussed over him, and her father took him off down to his garden shed to talk about whatever it was men did talk about in such male havens.

Callum, with his worn Harris tweed jacket with leather patches on the elbows, his tattersall shirts, and the warmth in his piercing blue eyes whenever he looked at her, had stolen Sally’s heart completely. And by kissing her as he had done on Boxing Day evening he had shown that he cared about her too, even if he had said afterwards that he hadn’t intended it to happen and that, as a poorly paid assistant teacher with a sister to support, ‘he was the worst kind of a cad for kissing her when he knew he had nothing to offer her.’ But then he had paused and looked at her and said huskily, ‘At least not at the moment.’ Sally had known then that those words, coming from Callum, were every bit as good as a request to go steady from another young man, and her heart had swelled with gratitude to whoever was responsible for her meeting him.

No one could possibly have a better friend than Morag. She and Sally were closer than sisters. They did everything together: worked; complained about their poor aching feet and their raw hands; went dancing together at Liverpool’s famous Grafton Ballroom, ‘oohed’ and ‘aahed’ over the newest pictures to be shown in the cinemas; and Morag even thought that Sally’s parents were every bit as special as Sally did herself.

One day they would be sisters, when she and Callum were . . . but no, Sally couldn’t even think the word ‘married’ because she knew if she did she would blush and then her mother would ask her why.

As Sally had discovered this Christmas, some things were too new to tell even the most loving of mothers and the closest of friends, some things were so special, so magical and so longed for that they could only be shared with one special person, and thought about in private.

‘That will be your father,’ her mother announced now, her face lighting up as she heard the sound of a key in the front door.

Sally’s father had a good job working as a senior clerk at the Town Hall. As always when he came home, he put an arm round his wife and his daughter, drawing them close, as he asked, ‘And how are my best girls?’

Oh yes, she was one of the luckiest girls in Liverpool, Sally acknowledged with so much to be thankful for.

And it had been the most wonderful Christmas, starting two days before Christmas Eve when she and Morag had decorated the Christmas tree her parents had brought home from St John’s Market, along with a large turkey and enough vegetables and treats, her father had teased her mother, to feed them all for a month. Whilst her mother had sat and watched, and her father had tested the pretty Christmas tree lights from the previous year, Sally had lovingly explained to Morag the family significance of each precious tree ornament. There had been the delicate tin candle holders that held the bright red wax candles, which were never lit in case they caused a fire. The candle holders had originally belonged to her grandparents, and it took a steady hand to clip them securely upright onto the tree’s branches. Then there had been the glass baubles, some of them predating Sally’s own birth, others bought new each year of her life, and with so many happy memories of previous Christmases that unpacking them was like rediscovering old friends.

As the afternoon light had faded into evening and her mother had switched on the lights in the comfortable sitting room – with its dark green damask-covered three-piece suite, its curtains and cushions made from paisley-patterned fabric, bought on special order from Lewis’s in Liverpool; the dark green and gold patterned fitted carpet that her father had insisted on, even though her mother protested that it was far too expensive – Sally had seen the tears in Morag’s eyes.

But it had been her mother who got up from her chair to come over to them and put her arm tenderly round Morag, telling Sally quietly, ‘Darling, go and put the kettle on, will you?’

When Sally had come back into the sitting room, Morag had been smiling, albeit somewhat tremulously, and later, when they were back at the hospital, Morag had told her emotionally, ‘You have the most wonderful parents, Sally, especially your mother.’

On Christmas Eve they had all gone together to the church where Sally had been christened and confirmed, and after Midnight Mass, with the crispness of frost in the air, neighbours and friends had been warmly welcomed back to number 28 Lilac Avenue for a glass of sherry and the mince pies that Sally and Morag had helped to bake. With Sally sharing her own room with Morag over Christmas, and Callum sleeping in the small box-room, the house had been full, but in the most wonderful way. Sally’s father and Callum insisting on cooking breakfast on Christmas Day after church, laughing and joking with one another, her mother keeping an eye on the turkey, before they had all settled down in the front room to open their presents.

Then there had been Christmas lunch itself. Her mother was a wonderful cook and, of course, Sally and Morag had been set to work helping with the veg, and decorating the table in the morning room, extended for the guests, and looking very bright and Christmassy with its white napery and the red and gold crackers purchased in Lewis’s Christmas department earlier in the month.

The house had been filled with the scents of Christmas, roasting turkey, the sharp smell of the sprouts grown in the Johnsons’ own garden, the scent of the pine needles from the tree, the hot smell of the multi-coloured tree lights, her mother’s lily of the valley perfume and the very grown-up Nights in Paris perfume both Sally and Morag were wearing in honour of the special occasion. The paper garlands her father and Callum had put up over the ceiling moved in the draught from the constant opening and closing of doors, and the sound of laughter and lively conversation filled the air.

Of course, Sally’s mother had been at the centre of all the activity, a commanding officer quietly managing her troops as they all worked to get the best lunch of the year onto the table.

Then on Boxing Day some of the neighbours had come over, and there had been a singsong round the piano, Sally listening with pride and love to Callum’s good strong baritone.

Oh, yes, it had been the very best of Christmases, though with even happier Christmases to come, Sally was sure of it.

December 1938

Sally couldn’t bear to look as she walked past the cemetery on her way home to Lilac Avenue, increasing her pace and turning her face from the place where her mother was buried. She could still hardly accept that her mother was dead.

It had been such a long hard road from those early days of hope that somehow the doctors were wrong, followed by the disbelief, despair and even anger that someone as special as her mother should be struck down by such a cruel illness, the long-drawn-out days, weeks and then months of her decline and the terrible pain she had suffered with that decline. Then – and Sally could still hardly bear to think about this – those last days when it had seemed impossible that the emaciated tiny human frame – tortured by pain and trying so bravely not to betray the extent of her suffering – lost in the bed that she and Morag kept immaculately hospital pristine and neat, could actually be her mother.

Her mother had tried so bravely not to distress those she loved by revealing how much pain she was in, but of course Sally had known. How could she, as a nurse, not know?

Morag had been so wonderful – the best of good friends, truly an angel – taking over the most intimate nursing of Sally’s mother as though she had been her own when Sally had needed to leave her mother’s bedside to give way to her tears. Sally’s heart lifted now with the knowledge that when she got home, having unexpectedly been told that she could finish her shift several hours early, she would probably find Morag already there.

‘You are so kind,’ Sally had told Morag.

‘It is a privilege to do this for your mother, Sally, after all she has done for me,’ Morag replied.

And Morag hadn’t just helped with the nursing. Whenever she was off duty, and Sally still working, she’d gone round to Lilac Avenue to cook a hot meal for Sally’s father, and take over some of the chores that Sally’s mother could no longer do. Just as though they had indeed been sisters they had worked together to nurse Sally’s mother and give her father what comfort they could. Callum had played his part too, sitting and talking with her father in the evenings.

Sally was past the cemetery now and could allow herself to breath normally again although that felt wrong when her beloved mother was no longer breathing. She and her father would never stop mourning her and missing her, Sally knew.

As she turned into Lilac Avenue through the windows of its houses she could see Christmas trees and Christmas decorations. Christmas was only a matter of days away but Sally couldn’t bear to think about it. She couldn’t imagine ever wanting to celebrate Christmas without her mother.

Rather than use her front door key Sally went round to the kitchen. As she put her hand on the door knob, what she saw through the frosted glass in the top half of the door froze her in shocked disbelief. The image of two people embracing might be fuzzy and distorted by the thick glass, their features obscured, but for Sally there was no mistaking what they were doing and who they were.

Morag and her father were in one another’s arms and Morag was kissing her father – not compassionately as the best friend of his daughter, but intimately on the mouth, in the manner of a lover.

Filled with revulsion, trembling with disbelief, Sally stepped into the kitchen as Morag and her father moved apart.

Sally looked at them both in silence. Morag’s face was white, her dark brown eyes shimmering with tears, her guilt plain for Sally to see. Behind her father’s sadness Sally realised that she could see a glint of another horrifying emotion in his eyes. He was happy. Happy that Morag had kissed him.

‘Sally, please don’t look like that. It isn’t what you—’ Morag was saying, trying to catch hold of her arm, but Sally moved back. She was trembling so much that she had to lean on the wall to support herself.

‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘No don’t touch me . . . don’t come anywhere near me. How could you? How could you do this?’

‘Sally.’ Now it was her father trying to reach for her, his familiar face – the kind loving face she had known all her life – creased in distress. ‘I’m sorry you had to find out about Morag and me like this. We were going to tell you . . .’

Sally felt as though her heart were being wrenched out of her body when her father reached for Morag’s hand and held it tightly, giving her the most tender and protective of looks.

‘I wanted to tell you,’ he continued, ‘but Morag wanted to wait until after Christmas. She thought it would be easier for you then.’

‘Easier for me to be told that my father and my supposed best friend were betraying my mother’s memory in the most grotesque and horrible way?’ Sally demanded on a choking breath of disbelief that was getting close to hysteria. ‘Dad, how can you think that? How can you do this, when Mum . . . She’s not even been dead two months yet. Two months and yet already Morag has somehow managed to worm her way into . . . into the place that should only ever belong to my mother.’

‘Sally, that’s enough!’ The stern note in her father’s voice shocked Sally into fresh despair. ‘I will not have you blaming Morag – for anything.’ The loving look her father gave Morag made Sally feel as though someone were squeezing her heart painfully hard. ‘If you must blame anyone, then blame me. I love Morag and I know that the love I have for her would have had your mother’s blessing.’

‘No!’

The denial was torn from Sally’s throat as she pulled open the back door and ran out of the house, ignoring her father’s plea for her to stop.

It was dark now and Sally didn’t know how long she’d been crouching here beside her mother’s grave, anger and grief spilling from her with the tears she had shed.

In two days it would be Christmas, but there was no place in Sally’s heart now to celebrate that special season.

‘Sally.’

The sound of a much-loved voice saying her name had her crying out in relief. She turned to him as he crouched down next to her, the scarf her mother had knitted for him last Christmas twisting in the ice-cold wind blowing across the bleak graveyard.

‘Oh, Callum . . .’

She was in his arms and he was holding her tight, the warmth of his embrace thawing her emotions, so that fresh tears fell.

‘I suppose you know what’s happened?’ she asked him when the tears had finally stopped and she was drying her face with the handkerchief he had offered her.

‘Yes. I’ve just come from the house.’

‘Callum, how could they betray my mother like that? My father and your sister my best friend – I still can’t believe it. I don’t want to believe it. I don’t want to see Morag ever again. I don’t want her coming to the house or having anything to do with my father. I blame her more than I do him. I—’

‘Sally, I know you’ve had a shock, and I can understand that right now you feel a certain amount of betrayal, but I promise you that the only reason they didn’t tell you about their feelings for one another was because they didn’t think you were ready. When they discussed it with me—’

Whilst he had been speaking to her Callum had stood up drawing Sally to her feet as he did so, and now he was holding her cold hands in the warmth of his, but for once she was barely aware of his touch.

‘You knew? You knew about this and you didn’t tell me?’ she demanded angrily.

‘They asked me not to, although . . . Sally, we all know how much you loved your mother, and how much her death has upset you, but you are an intelligent girl and, to be honest, I’m surprised that you didn’t see the love growing between them for yourself. I know that your mother did, and that she welcomed it, knowing that two people she loved so much would find happiness together.’

‘No, that’s not true. My mother would never have wanted . . . She loved my father.’

‘Yes, she did, and in my view it was because of the great love she had for both him and for Morag that she welcomed the knowledge that your father would not be left alone after her own death.’

‘You’re on their side, aren’t you?’ Sally accused him.

‘It isn’t a matter of taking sides.’

‘It is for me.’ Sally pulled away from him, adding bitterly, ‘And I know now whose side you’re on, Callum. I wish I’d never met either of you. I trusted Morag. I thought she was my friend, but I realise now that I never knew her at all. No one who was a true friend to me would have done what she’s done, betraying my mother, stealing my father, and you taking her side. I never want to see either of you again.’

‘Sally, please don’t be like this.’

‘Don’t be like this? How do you expect me to be? Am I supposed to be glad? Am I supposed to welcome the fact that my best friend has been making up to my father behind my back whilst my mother has been dying?’

‘Sally . . .’

Callum was reaching for her, his dark hair, tangled by the cold wind, flopping over his forehead, as he held out his arms. The pain she was feeling was more than she could bear. She had loved him so much, and she had thought that he loved her, just as she also believed that Morag was her friend and that her father was devoted to her mother. But all of them had deceived her, and betrayed her mother, and she would never be able to forgive them. Never. She stepped back from him.

‘Don’t touch me. Don’t come anywhere near me.’ Her furious words were raw with bitterness and pain.

Chapter One

12 September l940

Sally Johnson pushed back her mop of dark red curls, briefly freed from the constraint of her starched acting sister’s nursing cap, and slipping off her shoes, wriggled her toes luxuriously.

She was sitting in a small windowless room close to the sluice room of the operating theatre where she worked. In this small haven the nurses were unofficially allowed to have a kettle, tucked away, when not in use, in the cupboard above the sink along with a tin of cocoa and a caddy holding tea so that they could make themselves hot drinks. The place was more of a large cupboard than a room, the dark brown paint on the skirting boards like the dull green on the walls, rather faded, although, of course, both the floor and the walls were scrupulously clean. Staff nurse would have had forty fits if her juniors hadn’t scrubbed in here with every bit as much ferocity as they did the theatre itself.

When it had three nurses or more in it there was standing room only. Right now though as she was in here on her own, Sally had appropriated one of the two chairs for her tea break. Nurses always had aching feet when they were on duty. They’d had a busy shift in the operating theatre: a list of patients with all manner of injuries from Hitler’s relentless bombing raids on London.

Thinking of their patients brought home to Sally how much more responsibility she would have when she got her promised promotion to sister. She was very proud of the fact that Matron thought she was ready for it, even if there were times when she herself worried that she might not be. Sally loved her work, she was a dedicated and professional nurse who always put her patients first, but right now she couldn’t help thinking longingly of her digs in Article Row, Holborn, and the comfort of a hot bath. What a difference time could make – to some things. Article Row was her home now and the other occupants of number 13 as close to her as though they were family. Family . . . Sally’s expressive eyes grew shadowed. What she had left behind in Liverpool no longer had the power to hurt her. And besides, Sally reminded herself as she replaced her cap firmly over her curls, there was a war on and she had a job to do.

On Article Row another member of the household at number 13 was already on her way home, or rather she had been until she’d bumped into a neighbour.

‘Tilly, let me introduce you to Drew Coleman,’ said Ian Simpson. ‘He’s an American and he’s going to be my lodger.’

Tilly smiled politely as Ian turned from her to the tall, broad-shouldered, hatless young man, whose open raincoat was flapping in the breeze.

‘Tilly’s mother knows all about lodgers, Drew. She’s got three of them. All girls too,’ Ian grinned.

Article Row possessed only fifty houses, all built by the grateful eighteenth-century client of a firm of lawyers in the nearby Inns of Court, whose fortune had been saved by the prompt action of a young clerk articled there.

Number 13 had belonged to Tilly’s paternal grandparents originally. Tilly and her parents had moved in with them when Tilly had been a baby because of her father’s ill health. Tilly couldn’t remember her father. He had died when she was a few months old, his health destroyed by his time in the trenches during the Great War. Her mother had nursed first Tilly’s father, then later her mother-in-law, and then her father-in-law through their final illnesses. It had been after the death of Tilly’s grandfather, just before the start of the current war, that Tilly’s mother had decided to take in lodgers to bring in extra money.

‘Four girls all living under the same roof?’ the young American queried with a smile. ‘Oh, my. I’ve got four sisters at home, and they fight all the time.’

‘We don’t fight,’ Tilly informed him reprovingly, shaking her head so that her dark brown curls bounced, indignation emphasising the sea green of her eyes and bringing a pink flush to her skin. ‘We’re the best of friends. Sally – she’s the eldest, she works at Barts Hospital – St Bartholomew’s, the oldest hospital in London – like I do. Only she’s a nurse, and I work in administration for the hospital’s Lady Almoner. And Agnes, she . . .’ Tilly hesitated, not wanting to tell this stranger that poor Agnes was an orphan who had never known her parents. ‘Agnes works at Chancery Lane underground station, in the ticket department. Then there’s Dulcie, who works in the perfume and makeup department of Selfridges, the big department store on Oxford Street. She’s ever so stylish, although she’s got a broken ankle at the moment.’ A small shadow crossed Tilly’s face at the still raw and frightening memory of what had happened only a few nights earlier, on her own eighteenth birthday, when the four of them had been caught in a German bombing attack on the city on their way out to celebrate. Dulcie had caught her heel in the cobbles of the street and had fallen over, breaking her ankle and banging her head. As all of them had admitted to one another afterwards, they’d thought they were going to be killed, but they had stuck together, determined not to run for safety and leave Dulcie to her fate. Now, because of that, a bond had been formed between them that they all knew they would share all their lives. Tilly really felt that she had grown up that night.

‘Drew here has been sent over to London by the newspaper he works for in America to report on the war,’ Ian explained to Tilly.

Tilly nodded as she surreptitiously studied Ian’s lodger. He looked as though he was in his early twenties, his thick mid-brown hair slightly sun-bleached at the ends. He had warm brown eyes that crinkled at the corners when he smiled, his smile revealing white, even teeth. On his right hand he was wearing an impressive-looking gold ring with what looked like a crest on it. Not wanting to seem too curious, Tilly looked away politely.

Ian Simpson worked as a print setter on Fleet Street, for the Daily Express. His wife and their four young children had evacuated to Essex at the start of the war, and Tilly’s own mother had often said that it must be lonely for Ian living in the house on his own during the week.

Tilly had heard American accents before, but Drew was the first American she’d met in person. She gave him a friendly – but not too friendly – smile. At just eighteen, and with the experience of several months of war behind her, which had included her foolish crush on Dulcie’s handsome army brother, Rick, Tilly now considered herself wise enough not to pay too much attention to a good-looking young man, and Drew was good-looking, she had to admit.

Tilly glanced back in the direction from which she had come, at the pall of dust hanging on the air, the result of nightly bombing raids on London’s East End by the German Luftwaffe.

‘Well, you’ll certainly have had plenty to write about for your newspaper, with the bombings we’ve had these last few nights,’ she told the young American gravely.

‘Yes.’ Drew’s voice was equally grave. ‘I went over to Stepney in the East End this morning. I thought I had the makings of a good journalist, but finding the words to describe the devastation and horror of what’s happened there so that the folks back home will understand . . .’ He shook his head, and Tilly knew exactly what he meant. As they talked Tilly resisted the temptation to look up at the sky. These last few days of relentless air raids had left everyone’s nerves on edge, but she certainly wasn’t going to give in to her fear in front of this young American.

‘I’ve heard there were over four hundred killed on Saturday night, and three hundred and seventy on Sunday in the East End with over sixteen hundred injured,’ Ian told them. ‘And I’ve lost count of the number of air-raid alarms there’s been. Three times this afternoon we heard the air-raid warning go off, and had to leave the printing presses to get down to the shelter.’

‘It was the same with us at the hospital,’ Tilly agreed. ‘Our shelter is down in the basement of the hospital, and they’ve got the operating theatres down there as well. We can hear the bombers, even down in the shelters, though.’

‘I think you British are being magnificently brave,’ Drew told her with great sincerity.

‘It’s all very well being brave, but what I don’t understand is why we don’t hear our own anti-aircraft guns firing at the Germans,’ Tilly said with some concern.

‘Well, I might be able to answer that question for you,’ Drew told her. ‘You’ll have heard of Ed Murrow?’

Tilly nodded. Ed Murrow was a well-known American radio broadcaster.

‘Yes,’ she confirmed. ‘He does the nightly “This is London” wireless programme to America doesn’t he?’

Drew beamed her a smile of approval. ‘That’s right,’ he agreed. ‘Well, I heard him talking to some other journalists last night in the American Bar, and he was saying that the Government has left the skies open for your own fighter planes to blow the Germans out of the air.’

Tilly gave him a wan smile. She knew he had wanted to cheer her up, but as far as she could see from the terrible damage being inflicted on the city, their own fighter planes didn’t seem to be doing very much to stop London being blitzed by German bombers. Not that she was going to say so, of course. She was far too patriotic to do that.

Being patriotic, though, did not mean that there were times when she didn’t feel afraid.

All the occupants of number 13, with the exception of Sally, who was on duty, had spent the last two nights in their Anderson shelter in the garden, all of them pretending to sleep but none of them actually doing so, Tilly was sure. They had lain in their narrow bunk beds, listening to the dreadful noises of the assault on the city. The worst, in Tilly’s opinion, were those heart-stopping few minutes when all you could hear was the approaching relentless menacing purring sound made by the engines of the German bombers coming in over the city. Your stomach tensed terribly against what you knew was going to happen when the bombs started to fall. She could feel herself holding her breath now, just as she did at night when she lay there waiting for the full horror she knew was imminent: the whistle of falling bombs; the dull boom of huge explosions, which shook the ground. Somewhere in the city houses were being destroyed and people were being killed and injured. In Article Row they had been lucky – so far – but she had seen at work what was happening to those whose families and homes had been blown apart by the bombs: numbed, disbelieving white-faced people visiting their injured relatives; or even worse, those poor, poor people who came to Barts hoping against hope that the loved one who was missing might be there and alive.

Tilly, like everyone else in the department, had had to put her normal routine to one side because of the work involved in recording the details of the patients now flooding into the hospital.

You could see the tension in people’s faces. When you were out on London’s streets, crunching through the broken glass littering the pavements, you hardly dared to look at the fearful shapes of the destroyed buildings – and certainly not towards the river, where the docks had been bombed night after night and where, in the morning, some of the fires were still burning. If you heard a loud sound fear automatically gripped you, but you pushed it aside because you had to, because you didn’t want Hitler thinking he was beating down your spirit, knowing how afraid you really were.

‘Oh ho,’ Ian warned, interrupting Tilly’s thoughts, ‘here comes Nancy. Nancy likes to keep us all in order,’ he told the American. ‘She’s a bit of a stickler for making sure that none of us does anything that might lower the tone of the Row. Isn’t that right, Tilly?’

‘Yes, I’m afraid it is.’ Tilly was forced to admit ruefully. ‘Nancy likes to disapprove of things. She’s also a bit of a gossip,’ she felt obliged to warn Drew.

‘She certainly is.’ Ian pulled a face. ‘When I brought my cousin home with me the night she’d been bombed out, Nancy was on the doorstep first thing the next morning wanting to know who she was and if Barb knew she’d stayed the night. Lena soon put her right and told her what was what.’

‘I’d better go,’ Tilly told Ian. ‘Mum will be wondering where I am.’

‘It sure was nice to get to meet you,’ Drew told her with another smile.

He seemed a decent sort, Tilly acknowledged as she hurried towards number 13. Not that she was remotely interested in young men, not since Dulcie’s elder brother, Rick, had taught her the danger of giving her heart too readily. That had simply been a silly crush, but it had taught her a valuable lesson and now she intended to remain heart free.

In the kitchen of number 13, Olive, Tilly’s mother, was trying desperately not to give in to her anxiety and go to look out of the front window to check if she could see her daughter.

Although it was unlike Tilly to be late home from work, normally Olive would not have been clock-watching and worrying, but these were not normal times. When the Germans had started bombing London night and day almost a week ago, they had bombed normality out of the lives of its people, especially those poor souls who lived in the East End near the docks.

As a member of the Women’s Voluntary Service Olive had already been to the East End with the rest of her local group under the management of their local vicar’s wife, Mrs Windle, to do whatever they could to help out.

What they had seen there had made Olive want to weep for the occupants of what was the poorest part of the city, but of course one must not do that. Cups of hot tea; the kind but firm arm around the shaking shoulders of the homeless and the bereaved; giving directions to the nearest rest centre; noting down details of missing relatives to relay to the authorities, the simple physical act of kneeling down in the rubble of bombed-out houses to help shaking fingers extract what looked like filthy rags from the carnage, but which to those pulling desperately at them were precious belongings – those were the things that mattered, not giving in to tears of pity for the suffering.

From the window of her pretty bright kitchen with its duck-egg-blue walls, and its blue-and-cream-checked curtains, Olive could see out into the long narrow garden, most of which Sally had converted into a vegetable patch. But it was their earth-covered Anderson shelter that drew her attention. They had spent the last four nights inside it, and would probably be inside it again tonight, unless by some miracle the Germans stopped dropping their bombs on London.

Where was Tilly? No air-raid sirens had gone off during the last couple of hours, so she should have been able to get home by now, even given the delays in public transport the bombing had caused. Perhaps she should go and check the street outside again?

Olive had just walked into the hall when she heard the back door opening. Quickly she hurried back to the kitchen, relief flooding through her when she saw Tilly standing there.

‘Oh, Tilly, there you are.’

‘I’m sorry I’m a bit late, Mum,’ Tilly apologised immediately, seeing her mother’s expression.

The resemblance between mother and daughter was obvious. They both had the same thick dark brown curls, the same sea-green eyes and lovely Celtic skin, and even the same heart-shaped faces, although Tilly was already nearly an inch taller than her mother.

‘I was just walking into the Row when Ian Simpson called me over to introduce me to an American reporter he’s got lodging with him.’

‘An American?’ Olive’s voice held a hint of wariness. America was a neutral country and had not taken sides in the war, unlike the British Dominions, such as Canada, Australia and New Zealand, who were all offering ‘the mother country’ support in their fight against Hitler.

‘Yes,’ Tilly confirmed as she went to give her mother a hug.

Olive put down the knife with which she’d been about to resume scraping the thinnest possible covering of butter onto some slices of bread.

‘I thought I’d make up some sandwiches to take down to the Anderson with us later, unless Hitler gives us a night off.’

‘Huh, fat chance of that,’ Tilly responded. ‘We’ve had three air-raid warnings already this afternoon, but at least we’ve got the hospital basement to go to. We’re ever so busy, Mum,’ she added, ‘and if you could see some of the poor souls we’ve had come up to our office, looking for family they’ve lost . . .’

Tilly’s voice broke, and Olive hugged her tightly, smoothing Tilly’s curls with a loving hand.

‘I know, Tilly. Our WVS group went over to the East End today. Everyone’s doing their best, but no one expected that there’d be so many made homeless so quickly. All the rest centres that haven’t been bombed have been overwhelmed. They’re trying to get more opened as quickly as they can, but the conditions in some of the shelters people are using are so squalid and unhealthy . . .’ Olive released her daughter to look at her. ‘I should have sent you away out of London, Tilly. It would have been much safer for you.’

‘I’m glad you didn’t,’ Tilly told her determinedly, adding when she saw her mother’s expression, ‘I’m not a child any more, Mum. I want to be here, doing my bit. It wouldn’t feel right, running away and leaving it to others. Only this morning Miss Moss, the office manager, said how hard we were working and how proud she was of us. And, anyway, where would I go? We haven’t got any family I could go to. Besides, I want to be here with you, and I know that you wouldn’t leave.’

It was true, Olive was forced to admit. She would never leave London whilst her house was still standing. Olive was very proud of her home and of living on the Row, in the small area that took such a pride in its respectability and its standards. People who lived on the Row felt they had made something of themselves and their lives, and those were things that no one gave up lightly. But much as she loved her home, Olive loved her daughter more, and she knew there was nothing she wouldn’t do to keep Tilly safe.

‘Where are Agnes and Dulcie?’ Tilly asked, wanting to divert her mother’s anxious thoughts.

Of the three lodgers, Agnes was the closest in age to Tilly, though her start in life had been very different. Abandoned on the doorstep of the small orphanage close to the church, Agnes had no mother that the authorities had ever been able to trace, nor any other family. Because of that, and because of Agnes’s timid nature, the kindly matron of the orphanage had allowed Agnes to stay on well beyond the age of fourteen when most of the orphans were considered old enough to go out into the world, employing her to help out with the younger children in order to ‘earn her keep’. When it had become obvious that the country could be going to be at war and the orphanage had had to evacuate to the country, Matron had managed to get Agnes a job with the Underground, and Olive had been asked to take Agnes in as one of her lodgers. By the time Agnes had plucked up the courage to come to see Olive, because of a mix-up Olive had already let the room to Dulcie. Olive had felt terrible when she had realised how vulnerable and alone Agnes was, and very proud of Tilly when she had insisted on sharing her room with the girl.

When Agnes had been taken under the wing of a young underground train driver, both she, and then romance, had bloomed, and the young couple were now going steady.

Olive smiled as she reflected on Agnes’s quiet happiness now, compared with her despair the first time she had seen her.

‘Agnes said this morning that she had volunteered to stay on at work this evening now that London Transport has agreed to open Charing Cross underground station as a shelter if there’s an air raid.’

Tilly nodded. There had been a good deal of pressure from people, especially those who were suffering heavy bombing raids, to be allowed to take shelter in the underground where they felt they would be safer than in some of the other shelters. After initially refusing, the authorities had changed their mind when Winston Churchill had agreed with the public, and certain stations were to be opened for that purpose.

‘What about Dulcie?’ Tilly asked.

‘She’s been dreadfully worried about her family, especially with her sister being missing, and them living in Stepney, although she’s pretended that she isn’t. She went over to the East End this afternoon.’

‘With that ankle of hers in plaster, and her on crutches?’ Tilly protested, horrified. ‘Especially now that she’s been told she’s got to keep the plaster on for an extra two weeks.’

Dulcie hadn’t liked that at all, Olive acknowledged ruefully, although when the hospital doctor she had seen before she had been discharged into Olive’s care had told them both that it was because Dulcie’s ankles were so slender and fine-boned that they wanted to take extra care, Dulcie, being Dulcie and so inclined to vanity, had preened herself a little.

‘It’s all right,’ Olive assured her daughter. ‘She hasn’t gone on her own. Sergeant Dawson has gone with her. He’s got a friend who’s a policeman over there who he wanted to look up, so he said that he’d go with Dulcie and make sure that she can manage. She should be back soon, but you and I might as well go ahead and have our tea.’

As she spoke Olive glanced towards the clock, betraying to Tilly her concern for the lodger whom initially Olive had not been keen on at all.

‘She’ll be all right,’ Tilly comforted her mother. Olive smiled and nodded in agreement.

What Tilly didn’t know was that Olive’s concern for Dulcie wasn’t just because of the threat of the Luftwaffe’s bombs, and her broken ankle. It had shocked and disconcerted Olive when she had visited the small untidy house in Stepney to tell Dulcie’s mother that Dulcie had broke her ankle after being caught in a bomb blast, to recognise that Dulcie was not being sharp or mean when she had said that her mother preferred her younger sister, but that that was the truth. Olive knew that, as the mother of an only and beloved child, she wasn’t in a position to sit in judgement on a mother of three, but she had understood in an instant, listening to Dulcie’s mother, that the deep-rooted cause of Dulcie’s chippiness and sometimes downright meanness to others was because she had grown up feeling unloved by her mother.

And yet despite that, since the bombing had started and in spite of Dulcie’s attempts to conceal it, Olive had seen how anxious the girl secretly was about her family, living as they did near the docks, which were the target of Hitler’s bombing campaign.

Being the loving, kind-hearted person she was, Olive was now concerned that Dulcie might be hurt by her visit to her old home. Olive had seen for herself when she had gone there on Sunday that Dulcie’s mother was beside herself with anxiety for her younger daughter, whilst in contrast she had hardly shown any concern at all for Dulcie.

Not that Olive would discuss any of this with Tilly. Dulcie’s home situation was her private business until such time as she chose to air it with the other girls in the house. She hadn’t said anything about her concern for Dulcie to Sergeant Dawson either, their neighbour at number 1 Article Row, though he would have understood that concern, Olive knew. He and his wife had, after all, had more than their fair share of personal unhappiness through the loss of the son who had died as a child. Mrs Dawson had never really recovered from the loss and was now something of a recluse. Olive felt rather sorry for Sergeant Dawson, who was by nature a friendly and sociable man – kind, as well, as his offer to escort Dulcie on her visit to see her mother had proved. Dulcie might insist that she could manage perfectly well on her crutches, but Olive had had awful mental images of the air-raid siren going off and Dulcie, all alone, being knocked over in the rush to reach the nearest shelter.

‘I saw Sally just before I left work today,’ Tilly informed her mother once they were seated at the kitchen table, with its fresh-looking duck-egg-blue, pale green and cream gingham tablecloth, trimmed with a border of daisies, eating the simple but nourishing meal of rissoles made from the leftovers of the special Sunday roast Olive had cooked in celebration of Tilly’s birthday, and flavoured with some of the onions Sally had grown in their garden, served with boiled potatoes and the last of the summer’s crop of beans.

‘She said to tell you that she doesn’t know when she’ll be home as she’s offered to sleep over at the hospital whilst they are so busy. They’ve had to bring back some of the staff who were evacuated to the temporary out-of-London hospital Barts organised when war was announced.’

Tilly put down her knife and fork, and told her mother quietly, ‘Sally said to tell everyone that we should all sleep face down and with a pillow over our heads. That’s what all the nurses are doing, because of the kind of injuries people have been brought in with.’

Olive could see that Tilly was reluctant to elaborate, but she didn’t need to. Olive too had heard dreadful tales of the kind of injuries people had suffered.

Picking up her knife and fork again, Tilly wished that Sally’s advice hadn’t popped into her head whilst she was eating, stifling her appetite; no one with anything about them even thought of not clearing their plate of food, thanks to rationing.

As though she had read her thoughts Olive told her firmly, ‘Come on, love, eat up. We can’t afford to waste good food. There’s plenty from the East End right now that are homeless and with nothing but the clothes they’re standing up in who would give an awful lot to be safe in their homes and eating a decent meal.’

Olive’s familiar maternal firmness, reminiscent as it was of the days when Tilly had been much younger, made the girl smile, although the truth was that right now there wasn’t very much to smile about for any of them.

Chapter Two

‘Suture, please, Nurse.’

The surgeon operating on the young child lying motionless on the operating table didn’t need to tell Sally what he required. She already had everything ready for him to sew up the wounds to the little boy’s body, from which he had just removed several pieces of shrapnel.

Having evacuated most of its staff out of London and closed down all but two operating theatres, which had been moved down to the basement for safety, Barts, like all London hospitals, was now having to cope with a huge influx of patients, many of whom, like this little boy, had very serious injuries indeed.

Those patients who could be moved were being sent out to Barts in the country for treatment, but those whose injuries were too severe, too life-threatening for treatment to be delayed or a long journey undertaken, were having to be operated on here, despite the bombs falling all around.

Down here in the basement, in the focused quiet of the operating theatre, the sound of bombs and anti-aircraft guns had to be ignored.

The operation was over. The consultant surgeon had gone to scrub up for the next one. The young patient was being wheeled out of the operating theatre ready for the porters to take him back to the ward where he would be nursed until – and if – he recovered sufficiently to be transferred to the country.

Sister had disappeared – no doubt to make sure that someone brought a cup of tea for Mr Ward the surgeon.

Sally’s boyfriend, George Laidlaw, was one of Mr Ward’s housemen, as the junior doctors were called. George was currently on duty in Casualty, where the flood of patients arriving seemed to increase with every bombing raid.

‘What have we got up next?’ Johnny MacDonald, the anaesthetist, a Scot, asked Sally, tiredly pushing his hand through his thinning ginger hair. Johnny was only in his mid-thirties but tonight he looked closer to fifty, Sally thought, and no wonder. They had almost lost the little boy twice during the op, only Johnny’s skill had kept him going.

‘Amputation that needs cleaning up,’ Sally answered without looking at him. No one liked amputations, and they liked them even less when someone or something else had done the amputating for them – in this case a falling roof slate that had sliced a fireman’s leg off just above his knee as he fought to save a burning building down on the docks.

‘I thought we were going to lose that wee laddie back there,’ the anaesthetist told Sally without saying anything about the next patient.

Sally didn’t reply. The reality was that they would probably lose the little boy anyway, and they all knew it. His little body had been pierced with so much shrapnel that it had left him, in the surgeon’s own words, ‘looking like a sieve’.

Somewhere in the hospital the boy’s mother would be waiting and praying, but there was only so much that even the best surgeon could do, and they did have the best here at Barts, Sally thought proudly, as she made her way to the sluice room to scrub up ready for the next operation. However, no matter how hard she scrubbed her hands Sally couldn’t rid her nostrils of the smell of blood, nor her mind of images of mangled, maimed bodies. The surgeons had been operating non-stop and suddenly, for no reason that she could think of, to her the smell of blood had become the stench of death. She leaned forward and closed her eyes as a surge of nausea gripped her.

The voice of one of the more senior theatre nurses who had already been in the sluice room, a short, stocky girl called Mavis Burton, reached her.

‘Bear up, Johnson,’ she said bracingly. ‘The theatre porters will be bringing the next patient along any minute.’

Immediately Sally snapped out of her uncharacteristic weakness. ‘Sorry about that,’ she apologised. ‘I don’t know what came over me. I’m not normally squeamish.’

The other nurse shook her head. ‘It would be hard to be anything else, given what we’ve been seeing. We all know that nurses are supposed to keep their distance and remember that they’ve got a job to do, and that weeping and wailing over injured patients doesn’t help anyone, but I’ve got to admit I’ve seen some things these last few days . . .’ She paused before continuing, ‘Mind you, with St Thomas’ being bombed on the first night of the blitz and its doctors and nurses risking their own lives in the damage to save patients, they’ve rather stolen a march on us in terms of showing the Germans what British medical staff are made of.’

St Thomas’ was the second oldest hospital in London, and there was a degree of professional rivalry between the two renowned establishments. On Sunday night a bomb had destroyed Medical Out Patients and most of college house, where the doctors were housed, killing two of them.

Only the bravery of three doctors, Mr Frewer, Dr Norman and Mr Maling, had saved two of their colleagues, who had been trapped by falling debris and ignited dispensary stores. Of course, no one working at Barts wanted their own hospital to be bombed, but Mavis was right: the bravery shown by St Thomas’ staff had naturally made everyone at Barts feel they had something to live up to.

Two hours later, when Sister Theatre had dispatched her to get herself a cup of tea and have a short break, Sally made her way tiredly to the canteen, almost walking right past George, her boyfriend, who was striding purposefully the other way, his white coat flapping open and his stethoscope round his neck.

‘Oh, George, I’m sorry.’

‘No need to apologise.’ His smile creased his kind face, but he looked as weary as she felt, Sally acknowledged, as he pushed his thick light brown hair back off his face.

George might not be movie-star handsome but there was something about him that was very attractive. He had a kindness and a concern for others, combined with his warm smile and the twinkle in his eyes, that made him popular. Tall and rangy, George had the kind of slight stoop that came from bending over patients’ beds, but like all of those who worked with people whose health and lives had been blighted by the blitz of bombing on London, there were shadows at the backs of his eyes now from witnessing such suffering.

‘Sister’s just sent me to grab something to eat. We’ve got an impossibly full list. I’ve never seen anyone operate with the skill and the speed Mr Ward has shown these last few days. We had this little boy in earlier, peppered with shrapnel . . .’

‘I know. I saw him when he was brought in to Casualty earlier.’ George rubbed his face with both hands. In common with many of the other medics at the hospital, his jaw was showing the signs of stubble that came from working hours that were far too long and then falling into bed, only to be roused within a couple of hours to deal with another crisis.

They exchanged tired smiles, then both of them stiffened in response to a particularly loud explosion.

George reached out to grab hold of Sally protectively, saying when the building didn’t move, ‘Not us this time.’ But his words were inaudible above the pound of the ack-ack guns.

George was still holding onto her, and Sally looked up at him. She had seen those lean, long-fingered hands of his holding patients with such compassion and kindness. That thought brought a lump to her throat. George was such a good man.

‘This so-and-so war,’ he groaned. ‘More than anything else I want to have the time to court you properly, Sally, as you deserve to be courted, but we haven’t got that time. There isn’t time to even kiss you any more never mind court you. I’ve got to get back: Casualty is bursting at the seams with patients we haven’t got beds for already, and by the sound of what’s going on we’re going to have a hell of a lot more to deal with before tonight’s over.’

He lifted one of her hands to his lips and kissed it gently.

Her skin should smell of roses, not carbolic soap, Sally thought sadly, but the look she could see in George’s eyes said that he hadn’t even noticed the carbolic.

‘You’d better go and get your tea and I’d better get back to my patients,’ he said, releasing her.

Sally nodded and hurried down the corridor, pausing to look back when she reached the end. George was still standing where she had left him, watching her.

She was so lucky to have met him. He was kind and loving and fun to be with. He was also a good doctor who one day would be a first-rate doctor. And a first-rate husband?

It was far too soon to be thinking along those lines, Sally knew, even though she also knew that George himself would love to progress their relationship. There had, after all, been another man in her life she had once hoped to marry. Callum.

She was over Callum now. Callum’s refusal to understand the hurt and sense of betrayal she had suffered on discovering that her supposed best friend and her father were involved with one another, had destroyed the feelings she had once had for him. He might have followed her to London after she had fled here, unable to bear to stay in Liverpool and witness the relationship between Morag and her father, but he had not sought her out to beg her forgiveness. No, he had sought her out to tell her that, following their marriage, Morag was expecting a child.

Would she have weakened if he hadn’t told her that his sister and her father were expecting a child? No! She wouldn’t.

She was happy now, Sally reminded herself. Far, far happier than she had ever expected to be when she had left Liverpool. Where she had had one best friend she now had three very good close friends. Where she had loved a man whose loyalty to her above all others she had not been able to rely on, she was now loved by a man who she knew instinctively would always put her first. There was no going back, nor did she want to do so.

Chapter Three

‘But, Mum, you can’t just up and leave London.’

As she spoke Dulcie couldn’t help looking at the firmly tied and bulging sacks of household goods in the middle of the floor of the main room of her family home, the bed linen tied up in a sheet. The family didn’t possess the luxury of proper suitcases. Very few of those living in Stepney did, unless they were the sort that, for one reason or another were constantly on the move. The sort her own parents had always kept clear of and thought were beneath them. The sort that couldn’t go to church unless they’d got enough money to get their good clothes out of hock at the pawnshop.

For Dulcie, seeing her parents’ possessions gathered together came far too close for comfort to the images from the newspapers she had inside her head: the dispossessed of the East End wandering helplessly and hopelessly through the streets of London clutching their sad bundles of whatever they had managed to rescue from their bombed homes.

The last thing Dulcie had expected when Sergeant Dawson had delivered her to the door of her parents’ home, before checking his watch and telling her that she’d got an hour before he came back for her, was that she would find her mother on the verge of leaving London. But her mother’s nerves were so shattered by the relentless bombing that her hands had been shaking too much for her to fill the kettle and make them a cup of tea.

Having taken over that task for her, Dulcie had waited for her mother to say something about her accident and to express maternal concern, but she might as well have not bothered because, despite the fact that Dulcie was on crutches with her ankle in plaster, her mother hadn’t said a word about her injury, merely greeting her with a blunt, ‘Oh, it’s you, is it?’

‘You can’t just leave,’ Dulcie reiterated now.

‘Oh, can’t I? We’ll just see about that. It’s all right for you, Dulcie, living in Holborn. That hasn’t been touched. You’re safe. You should have tried living down here since Hitler started bombing us.’

Mary Simmonds’ hand shook so much that she had to put her teacup back in its saucer, spilling some of the tea as she did so.

‘I didn’t get this running for a bus,’ Dulcie felt justified in pointing out smartly as she held out her plastered leg, ‘and I’m going to have to keep this ruddy plaster on for longer than normal on account of me having such delicate ankles.’

When her mother still didn’t say anything Dulcie was unable to prevent herself from adding bitterly, ‘Not that you seem to care that much.’

‘Oh, that’s typical of you, Dulcie. You’ve always been selfish and thinking only of yourself. Not one word have you said about poor Edith. I can’t sleep at night for thinking about what might have happened to your sister, and how she might have suffered. I can’t stay here in London, knowing them Germans have taken her life.’

Tears filled Dulcie’s mother’s eyes, her hands now shaking so badly that she folded them together in her lap as she and Dulcie sat opposite one another on the two hard dining chairs either side of the battered oak table, which had to be pushed up against the wall to make space for people to walk past it. The fire that heated the room was, for once, unlit, the September sunshine cruelly bright on the faded striped wallpaper. The three plaster ducks, which had adorned the wall opposite the fireplace, and of which her mother had been so proud, had been removed, leaving brighter patches of paper. Even the curtains had been taken down, allowing the sunlight to highlight the shabbiness of the room.

It had been in here, on the rag rug in front of the fire, that Dulcie and Edith has squabbled and, indeed, fought, pulling one another’s hair and screaming over the possession of some toy; fights that Edith had always won, of course, because she had had their mother to take her side. Now any sisterly sense of loss was stamped out by Dulcie’s knowledge that her sister had always been their mother’s favourite.

‘You don’t know that she is dead yet,’ she reminded her mother.

Dulcie had never got on with her sister, but deep down, although she wasn’t willing to admit it, there was a small scratchy sore place, an unhappy feeling, because several bombs had fallen on the area where Edith had been.

‘There’s not been any official notice, or anything . . .’ A body, Dulcie meant; concrete evidence that Edith was in fact dead, but she couldn’t say that to her mother. ‘She might just be missing.’ But she offered these words more dismissively than comfortingly.

‘Missing?’ Mary retorted. ‘Of course she isn’t missing. Me and your dad have been to all the hospitals and all the rest centres. I know my Edith: the first thing she would have done once the air raid was over, if she’d been all right, was come home to let me know that she was safe.’ Her voice shook, tears filling her already swollen eyes. ‘No. She’s gone. Killed by Hitler when she was singing her heart out trying to do her best for other people. The theatre she was in took a direct hit, after all. She didn’t have a selfish bone in her body, Edith didn’t. Always thinking of others, she was.’

Always thinking of herself, more like, Dulcie thought, but she knew there was no point in saying that to her mother, who had thought that the sun shone out of Edith’s backside. It felt odd to think that Edith had gone, that they’d never quarrel with one another again, that she’d never see her sister again. Dulcie’s heart started to beat faster, a lump of emotion clogging her throat as unexpected feelings gripped her. There had been no love lost between her and Edith, after all, so there was no cause for her to go all soft about her now. It was a shock, though, to think of her being dead.

Unsettled by her own emotions, Dulcie reached for her mother’s hand but immediately her mother shrugged her off, saying despairingly, ‘I don’t know how I’m supposed to go on without Edith. She was the best daughter any mother could want.’

A far better daughter than she was, Dulcie knew her mother meant, the brief moment of sadness and loss she had been feeling overtaken by the bitterness their mother’s favouritism always aroused in her.

‘There’s nothing to keep me here now,’ her mother continued bleakly.

‘What about Dad?’

‘Your dad’s leaving as well. Dunham’s that he works for had their yard bombed and everything in it destroyed, and so Paul Dunham has decided to get out of London and go into business with a cousin he’s got who’s a builder down in Kent. He’s offered your dad a job with him, and there’s a couple of rooms we can have with a chap who’s already working for this cousin of his. We’re going down in Dunham’s lorry tomorrow morning.’

For once in her life Dulcie was silent, struggling to take in everything that her mother had told her and all that she hadn’t said as well.

‘And what about Rick and the Dunhams’ son, John?’ she finally demanded in a sharp voice. ‘What about them when they get leave from the army and find that they haven’t got a home to come to any more?’

‘Your dad wrote to Rick last night to tell him about Edith and what we’re doing.’

‘And I suppose you were going to send me a letter as well, were you?’ Dulcie asked sarcastically, causing a dull flush of colour to spread up under her mother’s previously pale face.

‘Don’t you take that tone with me, my girl. You were the one who chose to move out and go and live somewhere else.’

‘I only moved to Holborn, not Kent, and I came back every Sunday for church,’ Dulcie pointed out, using her anger to conceal the pain burning inside her.

‘Your dad was going to arrange to send a message round to Holborn to let you know that we’re leaving. ‘

‘But you weren’t going to take the trouble to come and see me,’ Dulcie accused her mother, ‘even though you knew I’d got a broken ankle.’

‘Trust you to make a fuss about yourself, Dulcie. Your dad and me knew that you were all right and, after all, a broken ankle’s nothing compared with what’s happened to your poor sister.’

Dulcie didn’t know what she might have said to her mother if there hadn’t been a knock on the door. She looked at her watch.

‘That will be Sergeant Dawson, come to help me get back to Holborn. Luckily for me at least some folk think enough of me to worry about me,’ was her parting accusation as she stood up and reached for her crutches, making her way along the narrow hallway to open the front door.

Despite the justification she felt for simply walking away with Sergeant Dawson and slamming the door behind her without another word, somehow Dulcie couldn’t stop herself turning back into the house and hobbling down the hall.

‘You’d better write and let me know where you’re staying,’ she told her mother in a curt voice, ‘just in case Rick doesn’t get his letter from you and turns up in Holborn, wanting to know where you are.’ She paused, whilst her mother wrote down their new address for her and then, against her will and awkwardly, Dulcie leaned forward and kissed her on the cheek. She smelled of dust and tiredness mingled with despair.

If she had hoped to feel her mother’s arms coming round her in a maternal hug then Dulcie had hoped in vain because her mother sat rigidly, not kissing Dulcie back or even looking properly at her, staring straight ahead.

It was her mother’s lookout if she was too wrapped up in ruddy Edith to remember that she had another daughter, Dulcie told herself fiercely as she rejoined Sergeant Dawson, pulling the door, with its peeling paint, sharply closed behind her, then carefully negotiating the front step. She certainly didn’t care!

Wearing her London Transport uniform of grey worsted fabric piped in blue, and trying to look as official as she possibly could, Agnes stood at the top of the stairs leading down into Chancery Lane underground station where she worked, watching the crowd of people making their way down to take refuge in the underground in case the night brought yet another attack from the German Luftwaffe.

When Mr Smith, who managed the ticket office, had asked for volunteers to help organise and keep an eye on things in anticipation of the number of people who would want to use the underground to shelter in, Agnes had been the first to shoot up her hand, but not just because she wanted to do her bit. Ted, the young underground train driver with whom she was walking out, and to whom she was going to become officially engaged at Christmas, had told her that he intended to bring his widowed mother and his two young sisters down to Chancery Lane for protection. This would be Agnes’s first opportunity to meet them. Ted had hoped to arrange for them all to meet up at the small café close to the station where Ted and Agnes often went, as Ted had explained to her that his mother was reluctant to invite Agnes round to their home. They lived in a tiny two-roomed flat owned by the Guinness Trust, which provided rented accommodation to respectable but poor working-class families in London.

‘The truth is that there isn’t room for the four of us to sit down together at the table all at the same time, never mind five of us,’ Ted had explained to her, and Agnes had understood. She might have been abandoned at birth by her mother and raised in the orphanage attached to the Row’s local church, but Agnes had seen how proud Olive, her landlady, was of her home and she had quickly grasped what Ted was not saying, which was that his mother felt embarrassed about inviting her to their small home. Or at least that was what Agnes hoped Ted had meant. She couldn’t quite stop worrying that Ted’s mother might think an orphaned girl who didn’t know where she came from was not be the kind she wanted her son to get involved with. Agnes didn’t like thinking about the circumstances of her birth and subsequent abandonment. Doing so made her feel all prickly and upset inside.

Now that the children and staff from the orphanage had been evacuated to the country, the building was used as a drill hall, and potential rest centre, should the unthinkable happen and the area be bombed, making people homeless.

Of course there was no question of her and Ted getting married any time soon. Not with Ted being the only breadwinner in the family and having his mother and two sisters to support. Ted had been honest with her about that, and Agnes fully understood what he had said to her. He wouldn’t have been her good kind Ted if he hadn’t looked after his family.

Ted was off duty at the moment and he’d told her that he would bring his family down early in the evening to make sure they got settled in a good spot before he went back to work, but the stream of people approaching the station was getting heavier now, and Agnes was worried that she might somehow miss them in the crush.

Predictably, of course, Mr Smith had initially thoroughly disapproved of and objected to the public more or less ‘taking it upon themselves’, as he had put it, to have the right to sleep in the underground. But once Winston Churchill himself, of whom Mr Smith was a great admirer, had sanctioned this, his objections had slowed to muttered grumbles about the mess people were making, especially those who had no homes to go to any more, and who brought with them what belongings they had been able to salvage.

Agnes, on the other hand, felt sorry for them. She was so lucky to have her lovely room at number 13 Article Row, her kind landlady Mrs Robbins, and her wonderful friends there, especially Tilly. She didn’t want to think of how it would make her feel if she were to lose any of that.

She scanned the growing crowd of people approaching the steps to the underground, searching for Ted’s familiar face, feeling both excited and nervous at the prospect of meeting his family – and especially his mother – at last.

However, when they did arrive Agnes almost missed them. An elderly woman was so laden with the weight of her possessions that her slow progress was holding other people up. Some were losing patience and starting to mutter complaints so Agnes stepped in to help her.

Once she got her down the stairs, though, the woman refused to let go of her, and Agnes tried not to react to the musty smell of stale sweat and bad breath coming off her as she dragged the girl closer with one grimy hand to insist, ‘I ain’t done with you yet, missie. I want you to find me somewhere comfy to put me bed. I’ve got it rolled up in here.’ She patted the bundle Agnes had taken from her. ‘Sleep in ’yde Park normally, I do.’ She tapped the side of her nose. ‘I knows all the ways of avoiding the park keepers, an’ all. They won’t catch me, they won’t, and neither will ruddy Hitler.’

As Agnes guided the woman along the platform one small boy protested to his mother, ‘I don’t want her near me, Ma. She stinks.’

It was true, and Agnes was glad to escape from her. She was almost at the top of the steps, struggling to pick her way through the mass of people coming down, when she heard Ted’s voice calling her name. He stood at the top, beaming her a smile.

To other people Ted might be a relatively ordinary-looking young man of middling height, with a wiry frame, mouse-brown hair and ears that stuck out, but to Agnes he was a hero and his bright blue eyes were the kindest she had ever seen.

Immediately she made her way towards him, until he could reach out, grab her hand and haul her onto the top step where he was standing,

‘I was getting worried that I must have missed you,’ Agnes said breathlessly.

‘As if I’d let that happen,’ Ted replied with a grin, giving her that special look that made her heart do a somersault.

‘Come on, you two,’ he called out, reaching into the shadows behind him. ‘Come and say hello to Agnes.’

The two small girls who emerged to stand beside him had Ted’s brown hair and blue eyes. Their hair was neatly plaited and their eyes filled with apprehension as they pressed closer to their brother, whilst staring saucer-eyed at the crowd which was now pouring down the stairs in front of them.

‘Marie, Sonia, you hold tight to your brother’s hand. Ted, you just make sure you don’t let go of them.’

The small thin woman, who had now materialised on Ted’s other side, and who it was obvious from her looks was Ted’s mother, hadn’t looked at Agnes yet, but Agnes could understand that her first concern must be for her younger children, just as she understood the bashful shyness that kept the two girls themselves silent as they looked swiftly at her, then away again.

‘Don’t fret, Mum, I’ve got them both safe.’

The sound of the calm loving reassurance in Ted’s voice made Agnes’s heart swell with pride. He was so very much the man of the family, the one they all relied on, just as she had known he must be.

‘This is Agnes, Mum,’ Ted was saying, putting an arm protectively round his sisters’ shoulders as he reached for Agnes’s hand to pull her gently closer.

But although Ted had drawn them altogether like a proper family, and although he was saying with pride in his voice, ‘Come on, girls, give Agnes a smile. After all, she’s going to be your sister,’ neither of the girls would look at her, and Ted’s mother didn’t speak to her at all.

Agnes had been used to dealing with girls younger than she was at the orphanage, and she guessed that the girls’ reluctance to look at her sprang mainly from shyness, but Ted’s mother’s refusal to smile or extend her hand to her was another matter.

Instead of responding welcomingly to her, there was coldness and disapproval in Ted’s mother’s eyes when she looked at her, and hostility too, Agnes feared. But now wasn’t the time to do anything about that because suddenly the air was filled with the shrieking rise and fall of the air-raid siren, causing panic to descend on those still at the top of the steps.

‘Come on,’ Ted instructed his sisters, grabbing each of them by the hand. ‘Mum, you take Sonia’s hand, and, Agnes, you take Marie’s. Don’t let go, either of you,’ he warned his sisters as he hurried them down the steps. ‘Stay close to me, all of you.’

The crowd pressed in on them from all sides, and Agnes felt it was more by good luck than anything else that she managed to keep her feet on the steps. She was sure that she would have panicked herself, worried that she’d fall and be trampled underfoot, if she hadn’t had the role of looking after the elder of Ted’s two sisters. But she kept hold of the little girl’s hand and tried to protect her by keeping as close to her as she could.

They could already hear the planes and they weren’t even down at the bottom of the stairs. The dull menacing thrum of their engines became louder with every breath Agnes took, and she tried to ignore the sounds of panic behind her from those who had yet to make it inside, and the angry protests from those already safely installed, objecting to having to make room for more people.

‘Come on, this way,’ Ted urged his family and Agnes, hurrying them towards a doorway in the wall that led, Agnes knew, to a small storeroom.

‘It will be locked,’ Agnes told him, breathless with anxiety.

‘I’ve got the key,’ Ted responded with a grin. ‘Got it off Smithy this morning, only you’d better not let on to anyone else, otherwise we’ll be crammed in here like sardines in a tin. Do you fancy that, girls,’ he teased his sisters, keeping them in front of him as he let go of their hands to remove the key from his pocket, ‘being squashed like sardines?’

Agnes was very conscious of the fact that right now she was squashed up very close to Ted. It made her feel warm and safe and somehow very grown up to be this close to him in this kind of situation. The intimacy between their bodies was that of a couple bonded together by their need to protect the young lives of Ted’s sisters, just as one day they would protect their own children.

‘In you go, all of you,’ Ted told them once he’d got the door open just enough for them to slip in.

‘It’s dark inside, and I don’t like the dark,’ little Sonia piped up unhappily.

‘There’s a light inside, love, but I don’t want to switch it on until you’re all safely in there,’ Ted tried to reassure her.

Agnes guessed that he didn’t want to put the light on straight away and alert others to the existence of the small hideaway, so she smiled at the little girl and told her, ‘I’ve got my torch, look . . .’ She flashed it briefly ahead of her so that she could see inside what was little more than a large cupboard. About six feet square, with a washbasin inside, it had some hooks on the wall and three battered-looking bentwood chairs.

‘Come on, you two.’ Taking charge, Ted’s mother went into the storeroom, dragging her daughters with her, but still ignoring Agnes.

‘I’d better get back to the office,’ Agnes told Ted. ‘They’ll be expecting me there, seeing as I’m supposed to be volunteering to help out.’

‘I’ll walk you back there,’ Ted told her.

But as he reached for her hand his mother said sharply, ‘Ted, the girls are getting upset. You’d better get in here and help me calm them down.’

Agnes could see how torn he was, so she touched his arm and smiled reassuringly. ‘I’ll be all right You stay here.’

She could tell that he didn’t like letting her go on her own, so she added firmly, ‘When people see that I’m in uniform they’ll let me through.’

‘Ted, your sisters need you,’ Mrs Jackson announced in an even sharper tone.

‘Mum’s a bit on edge and not herself with all this bombing going on,’ Ted whispered apologetically to Agnes, giving her hand a little squeeze.

Agnes nodded. She hoped so much that he was right, she thought, as she made her way slowly and with great difficulty through the mass of people filling the platform and back towards the ticket office. She hoped so much that it was only because Ted’s mother was worried for her children that she had been so off with her, and not because she didn’t like her.

Sergeant Dawson and Dulcie were four houses away from number 13 when they heard the air-raid siren. Without a word the policeman took Dulcie’s crutches from her and, wrapping one strong arm around her waist half carried and half dragged her as he ran with her in the direction of her landlady’s front door.

Dulcie wasn’t the sort to show fear – of anything or anyone – not even to herself. It was a matter of pride, something she had set out to teach herself from the very first minute she had seen her mother gazing into the basket that contained her new baby sister, Edith, with a look of such love in her eyes. So she told herself now that the hammering of her heart was caused by her exertion and not by anything else.

‘I hope that they aren’t in their Anderson already,’ Sergeant Dawson muttered half under his breath as he made to knock on the door, but Dulcie shook her head.

‘It’s all right, I’ve got a key.’

However, the door was already being opened by Olive, who exclaimed, ‘Thank heavens! I was beginning to worry that you’d be caught out in the open somewhere.’

‘Not twice in less than seven days I’m not going to be,’ Dulcie grimaced as she took her crutches from Sergeant Dawson, thanked him and hobbled inside. She had to raise her voice to make herself heard over the sound of the sirens, yelling as though in warning to the oncoming bombers: ‘You aren’t getting a second chance to get me.’

‘Come on. I’ll help you both down to the Anderson,’ Sergeant Dawson told them, also raising his voice, as the noise of the planes’ engines vied for dominance with that of the siren.

‘You should be getting yourself to safety,’ Olive, who had her arm around Dulcie and was guiding her down the hall, protested as he stepped inside and closed the door behind him.

‘I’m on ARP duty. I’ll have to check the street and make sure that everyone’s left their houses, so I may as well start here.’

‘Where’s Tilly?’ Dulcie demanded when they reached the empty kitchen; the anxiety sharpening her voice touched Olive’s heart and reminded her of just how much her opinion of this young woman had changed in a year.

‘I sent her to the Anderson the minute we heard the siren,’ Olive told her.

Meaning that Olive had waited for her, Dulcie recognised. The tears she hadn’t allowed herself to cry with her mother now filled her eyes and made her blink determinedly to hide her emotion. Dulcie didn’t believe in having emotions, never mind giving in to them. Or at least she hadn’t done until the other girls living at number 13 had risked their lives to save hers when they had been caught in the open in the city’s first big bombing raid.

That night had bonded them together for ever and had completely changed how Dulcie felt about them and about living at number 13. But most especially it had changed how Dulcie felt about Olive.

Olive was glad of the carefully shielded beam of Sergeant Dawson’s torch after they had left the blacked-out house behind and were making their way down the unlit garden path to the Anderson, where, against all the rules, Tilly had the door open, the lit oil lamp glowing out from inside.

There was just time for her to thank Sergeant Dawson yet again before the sound of their voices was drowned out by the incoming bombers, so close now, surely, that Olive didn’t dare risk glancing up at the sky as she shooed Dulcie into the shelter ahead of her and then pulled the door closed behind herself.

‘Mum said that you’d make it back,’ Tilly greeted their lodger. ‘She’s made you some sandwiches in case you didn’t get round to having your tea, and there’s a flask here as well.’ She held up the flask to show Dulcie, who nodded her head.

It was not in Dulcie’s nature to thank others effusively for anything, but there was something in the smile she gave Olive that sent its own special message of all that she now felt for her landlady and her kindness.

‘How was your mother, Dulcie?’ Olive asked as they all settled themselves on the three bottom bunk beds that formed a U shape at the far end of the shelter. ‘Has there been any news about your sister?’

‘No. Mum’s convinced that Edith’s dead, though, and I suppose she must be. She and Dad have been round all the hospitals and the rest centres, and Mum reckons that as Edith would have let her know if she’s all right, she must be dead. She says she doesn’t want to stay in London any longer. Her and Dad are off to Kent in the morning. Dad’s got the promise of a job and somewhere to stay from Paul Dunham. He’s the builder Dad already works for, and he’s got contacts in Kent. We all used to go to Kent hop picking when I was a kid. Hard work it was as well.’

There was a wealth of bitterness in Dulcie’s voice when she talked about her mother that gave away her real feelings, but Olive felt it tactful not to say anything.

The increasing noise of the incoming bombers was now making conversation all but impossible. Tilly covered her ears, and they all looked upwards at the dark roof of the shelter.

‘It will be the docks they’ll be after again, not us,’ Dulcie mouthed.

‘At least we’ve got the ack-ack guns defending us now,’ Tilly mouthed back against the fierce pounding noise from the British gun batteries.

Of course, it was impossible for them to see what was happening as they daren’t risk breaking the blackout by opening the door, but they could hear a second wave of bombers directly overhead, whilst the shrill whistle of bombs falling from the first wave could be heard mingled with the dull heavy ‘whoomf’ sound of the explosions.

‘They were saying at work this morning that the docks were burning so fiercely the other night, the wood was reigniting even though the firemen had soaked it and put the fire out once,’ Tilly said. ‘I never thought before of fire being so dangerous. A fire used to be something I’d look forward to coming home to on a cold winter’s day, something that warmed you, not killed you, but now . . .’

‘At least the RAF are giving the Germans a taste of their own medicine,’ Dulcie replied, trying to lift Tilly’s spirits by reminding her of what they’d heard on the wireless of a night time raid Bomber Command had made on German cities earlier in the week in retaliation for the Luftwaffe’s attack on London.

‘Time we had those sandwiches, I think,’ Olive decided when a fresh crescendo of explosions had both girls looking noticeably pale-faced in the glow of the oil lamp. Olive couldn’t forget the danger they had already faced and from which, miraculously, they had escaped safely. They had made light of the experience since, but Olive wouldn’t have blamed them if they had shown far more fear now than they were doing.

‘Some East Enders we’ve had at the hospital have been saying that Hitler is only bombing the East End because he wants to get rid of it before he sets himself up in London,’ Tilly told her mother. ‘He doesn’t care how many people he kills and hurts.’

‘It’s the docks the Germans have been aiming for,’ Olive pointed out, ‘because they know how important they are for bringing in supplies to keep the country running.’

‘They’re bombing more than just the docks and the East End now,’ said Dulcie ‘although it’s true that the East End has been the worst hit. There’s whole streets gone; nothing left at all except half a house here and there. I saw one when I went to see my mother, where the whole side of the house had been taken off and you could see right into every room. Of course, the downstairs rooms had been cleared. There’s looters everywhere, Sergeant Dawson said, nabbing everything they can. But upstairs you could see the bed and all the furniture with a rag rug half hanging off the floor where the wall had gone. I’m glad it wasn’t my bedroom. Horrible, it was, with a really nasty green bedspread on the bed. I’d have been ashamed to call it mine.’

Olive reached for the sandwiches, carefully wrapped in a piece of precious greaseproof paper – precious because it was virtually impossible to buy it any more, thanks to the war – and then almost dropped them when the sound of a bomb exploding somewhere close at hand was so loud that both girls immediately clapped their hands over their ears. Putting the sandwiches aside, Olive opened her arms and immediately the girls came to sit one on either side of her so that she could hold them both close. The warmth of them nestling close to her reminded her of something she needed to say to Dulcie.

Olive placed her lips close to Dulcie’s ear and told her, ‘Dulcie, I’ve decided that whilst you’re off work with your ankle, you don’t have to pay me any rent.’

Dulcie opened her mouth and then closed it again. She had been worrying about paying her rent whilst she was off sick and on short wages, but she was a thrifty young woman and she’d worked out that if she was careful she’d got enough in her Post Office book to pay her rent for the six weeks she’d be in plaster. To have Olive tell her that she didn’t need to pay her anything for those six weeks wasn’t just kind, it was generosity the like of which Dulcie had never previously known.

For a few seconds she was too surprised to say anything, able only to stare at Olive with wide disbelieving eyes, before replying, ‘That’s ever so good of you, but I’d like to pay half of my rent. I can afford to, and it doesn’t seem right you letting me stay for nothing.’

Her offer touched Olive’s heart. She knew how difficult it was for Dulcie to be gracious and grateful to anyone, but especially to her own sex, so she gave her an extra hug and shook her head.

‘No, Dulcie. I’ve made up my mind.’

To Dulcie’s horror her eyes had filled with tears and now one rolled down her cheek to splash on Olive’s hand.

‘I’ve never known anyone as kind as you . . .’ Dulcie began, but what she wanted to say was silenced by the sound of more planes overhead.

There was no need for any of them to speak. They all knew what they were feeling. There were bombs dropping all around them, even though the docks, and not Holborn, were the bombers’ targets. Everyone knew that the planes dropped whatever they had left before turning homewards, and if you just happened to be underneath that bomb then too bad.

The night stretched ahead of them, filled with danger and the prospect of death. There was nothing they could do, certainly nowhere for them to run to. They could only sit it out together, wait and pray.

Chapter Four

When the sound of the all clear brought the three occupants of number 13’s Anderson shelter out of their fitful light sleep and Olive opened the door, the sight of the house still standing – and with it, as far as they could see, the rest of Article Row – was a huge relief. They trooped wearily and thankfully back indoors, ignoring the smell of burning in the air, the taste of brick dust, and the sight of the red glare lighting up the sky to the east.

‘Nearly four o’clock,’ Olive commented, seeing Tilly stifle a yawn. ‘That means we can have three hours’ decent sleep before we need to get up again.’

Olive had been intending to have a bed put up in the front room for Dulcie because of her broken ankle, but her lodger had insisted that she could and would manage the stairs, and she had been as good as her word. Secretly Olive had been relieved by Dulcie’s insistence about this. Olive was very proud of her front room. Upstairs in the bedrooms she still had the dark wood furniture she had inherited, with the house, from her in-laws, but in the front room she had replaced everything.

Olive had redecorated the room herself, painting the walls cream, and the picture rail green to match the smart, shaped plain pelmet, and curtains in a lighter green pattern of fern leaves. During the winter months, drawn over the blackout fabric, the curtains gave the room an air of cosy warmth, whilst in the summer they let in the light. Olive had made the curtains herself using a sewing machine borrowed from the vicar’s wife.

A stylish stepped mirror hung over the gas fire. The linoleum was patterned to look like parquet flooring, and over it was a patterned carpet in green, dark red and cream to match the dark green damask-covered three-piece suite. On the glass and light wood coffee table, which was Olive’s pride and joy, stood a pretty crystal bowl, which she’d bought in an antique shop just off the Strand. Against the back wall, behind the sofa, was a radiogram in the same light wood as the coffee table.

Olive had been perfectly prepared to push her precious furniture to one side to put a bed up in the room for Dulcie, but Dulcie had gone up in her esteem for insisting on not ‘putting her out’, as she had called it.

In the ticket office Agnes heard the all clear with great relief. She hadn’t really slept at all, partly because of the bombs and partly because of her anxiety about Ted’s mother. Now she had to get up and get back to her voluntary duties. Not that she minded. Her truckle bed wasn’t very comfortable, and Miss Wood, who also worked in the office and had volunteered to come in overnight, had snored dreadfully.

People were already starting to make their way out of the underground, a small stream of yawning, tired-looking humanity: mothers carrying babies, fathers with children, on their shoulders, families with older children, their silence punctuated by the laughing and whistling of several men who staggered past the ticket office carrying bottles of beer.

Mr Smith, who had emerged from his office looking, Agnes noticed, every bit as spruce as though he had only just arrived at work and not spent the night there, glared after them disapprovingly.

‘Disgraceful, carrying on like that. And at a time like this,’ he told Agnes.

‘Perhaps they were trying to cheer themselves up,’ she replied.

‘Make a nuisance of themselves, more like.’

‘I’ve heard that at some of the undergrounds they’ve had people organising singsongs,’ Miss Wood confided to Agnes, when Mr Smith had gone ‘up top’ to see ‘what was what’. ‘I can’t see Mr Smith encouraging that here.’

Agnes didn’t like to think of how much more damage the bombs must have done overnight. The noise had been dreadful.

Would Ted have time to come into the office to see her? He’d want to see his family safely home, of course, and then he’d have to come back to work himself. She wasn’t going to think about Ted’s mother not speaking to her. Agnes swallowed hard against the lump in her throat. Ted was her hero and she wanted so very much for his family to like her. There was no getting away from her shaming background, though. As one of the other children at the orphanage had told her, ‘If your ma leaves you outside the orphanage and then scarpers, that means that you’re a bastard and that you’ve got bad blood in you ’cos your pa didn’t want to marry your ma.’

Agnes had known from the way that Ted talked about his mother and their family life that being respectable was important to her. This thought brought another lump to Agnes’s throat, and her eyes began to sting.

It was daylight when Sally left the hospital, with the kind of misty smoke haze hanging over the city that September mornings could bring. But this was a different kind of haze: small black smuts and even hot cinders were floating down from the sky. She could smell burning in the air, a smell with which all Londoners were becoming familiar. This morning’s smoky haze smelled unpleasantly of tallow fat. In the direction of the docks a red glow lay on the sky like a painful raised weal on a patient’s flesh, betraying the savagery of the wound they had suffered.

Just as Sally had left, one of the theatre porters, also going off duty, had told her with real shock in his voice, ‘St Paul’s nearly got it last night. Dropped an eight-hundred-pound bomb on it, Jerry did. Landed right in front of the steps and would have blown the whole front to bits, but someone up there,’ he had gestured towards the heavens, ‘wasn’t going to let Hitler get away with that.’

Now Sally felt impelled to go and view the cathedral herself – just to make sure it wasn’t damaged.

Of course, the area around it had been cordoned off, and a crowd had gathered at a safe distance. From what she could see, soldiers, the Home Guard, policemen and fire fighters were all busy working by the steps.

‘Got to dig the bomb out, and that will take some doing,’ a man standing next to Sally informed her.

‘They’ll have the bomb disposal lot in, of course,’ another man put in, older and possibly ex-military himself, from his upright bearing.

As comments and opinions flew back and forth – East End accents mingling with upper class and the falsely ‘refined’ tones adopted by those who wanted to ‘better themselves’ – the fate of Sir Christopher Wren’s cathedral drew the people of the city together in a common cause.

Once she had assured herself that St Paul’s was undamaged, Sally started to make her way back to Article Row. At least working nights meant that she was avoiding the sleeplessness of night raids. She’d never thought it lucky to be doing night shifts before, she smiled to herself ruefully, acknowledging the shouted, ‘Watch out for the hoses,’ from a fireman with a nod of her head, as she stepped carefully over them.

From the evidence of the large basket on the other side of the street, incendiaries had obviously been dropped. These bombs were easy enough to put out if one was swift to collect them on a shovel and douse them in water or sand before the chemicals inside them exploded, but the baskets in which they were dropped contained hundreds, and even the most fleet-footed fire watcher couldn’t possibly extinguish them all. Once the fires took hold, no building was safe. Apart from shattered windows, the buildings either side of the road seemed to be intact, although from the evidence of so many hoses, their interiors would now be soaked and damaged, Sally thought sympathetically.

A flat-bed lorry was parked at the end of the street, a salvage team working busily to clear up the mess of roof slates, and broken glass. Sally could see two men removing broken glass from one of the windows, one of them giving a warning shout to the other as a large piece from higher up fell towards him.

As though she was watching it in horrific slow motion Sally saw the man giving the warning putting out his hand towards his workmate; saw this man looking up and then stepping back and stumbling; the glass catching the morning light; the sticky tape that had once secured the edges rolled back in pale brown ringlets. She saw the glass slicing into the first man’s arm; the bright plume of arterial blood shooting upwards; the silence and then the frantic surge of men towards their injured comrade.

Sally ran to the men. ‘Don’t try to remove the glass,’ she said quickly. ‘I’m a nurse. Barts.’

The men immediately fell back respectfully, except the one supporting the injured man.

‘He needs to get to hospital,’ he told her unnecessarily, his voice gruff with shock.

‘Yes,’ Sally agreed, kneeling down beside the injured man, who was now looking, to her, that familiar shade of grey-green white that came with shock and loss of blood. ‘But first we need to tourniquet his arm.’ Because if they didn’t he wouldn’t get there at all, at least not alive, Sally recognised, although she didn’t say that to the men.

‘There’s a first-aid kit in the cab of the fire engine,’ a fireman who had come to offer help told her. ‘Do you want it?’

‘Yes, please.’ Sally gave a small silent prayer of thanks for the insistence of the powers that be that first-aid kits were carried, whilst she applied what pressure she could to the artery still pumping out blood.

‘Pity we can’t get the Thames to give us that kind of pressure for our pumps,’ another of the firemen who had now gathered around joked in that way that men do when they are desperately concerned.

‘I’ll be all right, Nurse, if you can just take this glass out of me arm,’ the injured man assured her in a thready thin voice.

‘I’m sorry, I’m not allowed to do that. Doctors all over London will go on strike if a mere nurse takes over their duties,’ Sally responded. ‘We need an ambulance or, failing that, stretcher,’ she told the other men without turning her head.

She was already concerned that her patient might lose his arm, and she dare not risk trying to remove the glass in case she caused even more damage. Her comment about doctors, though, seemed to reassure them because they started telling her that they’d rather have a nurse treating them than a doctor any day. Meanwhile Sally had seen some men hurrying away in search of an ambulance, and the nearest ARP post.

Two of the firemen were back, one carrying the fire engine’s first-aid kit, which was placed on the ground and opened for her.

‘I’ll need a nice short straight piece of wood for the tourniquet,’ she told them, and almost before she had got the tourniquet bandage in place, exactly what she needed had been produced.

It was a relief to get the tourniquet on. The man had already lost a serious amount of blood, and was now unconscious. Sally didn’t like the colour of him, or the weakness of his pulse, now that his body had gone into shock from the accident. She hoped that an ambulance turned up soon, because she didn’t hold out much hope of his surviving for very much longer without proper medical attention.

‘Here comes the stretcher.’

Sally turned to see two ARP wardens hurrying towards her with it.

‘It’s going to be a while before we can get an ambulance to you. The ambulance service has been overwhelmed with calls,’ one of the wardens told her.

How long was ‘a while’? The man desperately needed hospital attention. Sally looked towards the empty flat-bed lorry belonging to the salvage crew and made up her mind.

‘We can get him onto the stretcher and then, provided he wasn’t the driver of the lorry . . . ?’ She paused.

‘He wasn’t, miss, I mean, Nurse,’ one of the men told her. ‘John here is the driver.’

John, bashful and very young, removed his cloth cap as he was pushed forward by the others, and rubbed a hand over his dust-covered face before confirming that he was indeed the driver.

The main problem, as far as Sally could see, was going to be the piece of glass firmly embedded in her ‘patient’s’ arm and which must stay there.

‘I’ll need enough men to get . . .’ she paused and John the driver supplied her patient’s name, as ‘Eric’, revealing two missing teeth as he did so.

‘. . . We need to get Eric onto the stretcher and then into the lorry as carefully as possible. I’ll stay with him and hold onto his arm and the glass. We need to keep both as still as we can,’ she explained to the men.

If one of the many newspaper photographers recording the devastation left by the bombs had been around, he would have got a photograph like no other, Sally thought ruefully when, in order to carry out her instructions, the salvage men, along with the firemen, formed a group to lift not only their workmate, but Sally herself, bodily into the back of the flat-bed truck.

Not that any of the men took advantage of that intimacy – far from it; their reluctance to look at Sally as they lifted her assured her of their respect.

Instead of an ambulance siren to speed their progress, an ARP warden rode with Sally and the four men who were holding down the stretcher, and the warden blew his regulation whistle to clear the way.

The only time they were stopped was when a policeman stepped out into the road in front of them, tilting back his helmet as he demanded to know why the warden was blowing his whistle when there wasn’t an air raid on. However, as soon as the situation was explained to him they were waved on their way with great alacrity.

Although Sally’s amateur stretcher-bearers had made a Herculean effort to keep the stretcher steady, when she could see the entrance to Bart’s casualty department ahead of them Sally felt very relieved. Eric was still unconscious and his breathing had become worryingly shallow and fast. Her own fingers were practically numb from holding his arm with one hand and the glass with the other, and she was praying that she could continue to keep hold. At least he wasn’t losing blood any more, thanks to the tourniquet.

The very moment they came to a halt an indignant ambulance driver came rushing over to the lorry.

‘You can’t park here, mate. This is for ambulances only.’

‘This is an emergency,’ Sally could hear the ARP warden telling him from the passenger window of the driver’s cab. ‘Take a look in the back and see for yourself.’

The next minute an ambulance driver’s head appeared over the side of the lorry, his eyes widening as he took in the scene at a glance.

‘Cor blimey,’ he exclaimed, then called out to his partner, ‘Frank, get some porters here, will you, mate?’

Once again all the men studiously avoided looking at Sally as she was lifted out of the lorry along with her patient, and it was with great relief that she found Sister Casualty waiting to take over the minute they got inside the hospital.

Sister Casualty’s sharp knowledgeable eyes took in the situation at a glance, her voice calm and modulated into the tone that Sally remembered being taught to use in extreme emergencies so as not to frighten the patients, as she instructed the porters, ‘Straight to the top of the queue for this one, I think, please,’ before giving Sally a brisk nod of her head and asking almost casually, ‘Would you like someone else to take over there for you, Nurse?’

‘I’ll hang on, if that’s all right, Sister. Might as well see it through,’ Sally responded in the same almost off-hand tone, as though there were no emergency at all.

Despite the heaviness of the Casualty staff’s workload, within seconds – or so it seemed to Sally, who was beginning to feel slightly light-headed – Eric was in a hospital bed with her still holding both his arm and the piece of glass, the curtains had been pulled round the bed and the senior registrar was bending over Eric’s arm.

‘Did you see what happened, and if so, any idea how deep it’s gone in, Nurse?’ he asked her.

‘At least as far as the bone, I think,’ Sally responded. ‘Definitely deep enough to cut an arterial vein.’

‘Mmm. If you can hang on we’ll give him a shot of morphine and then take a proper look.’

Sally nodded.

‘Not one of these nurses that is likely to faint on me are you?’

‘Nurse Johnson is a theatre nurse, Mr Pargiter. I doubt anything is likely to make her faint,’ Sister Casualty’s voice came to Sally’s rescue, leaving Sally to marvel at Sister Casualty’s knowledge – until she caught a glimpse of George standing behind her.

‘Come and have a look at this, Laidlaw,’ the senior registrar told George. ‘Damn near sliced the whole arm off, by the looks of it. But for the quick thinking of this nurse, the chap wouldn’t be here now.’

‘It was nothing. I just happened to be passing when the glass fell. He and some other men were demolishing a burned-out building.’

Sister Casualty herself administered the morphine. She had arrived accompanied by a slightly green and very round-eyed nurse – still a probationer, Sally saw from her uniform – and a more senior nurse pushing an instrument trolley.

‘Heart’s beating a bit too fast for my liking,’ the senior registrar told George. ‘What we’ve got to hope is that we can get the glass out without it breaking. Didn’t happen to see what it looked like before it went in, did you, Nurse?’

‘Long and sharply pointed V-shape,’ Sally responded.

‘Mmm, well, at least that means that it isn’t likely to have splintered already on impact with the bone, but we’ll be lucky if the tip doesn’t break off when we remove it. What I want you to do, Nurse, is to keep holding the glass steady but move your hands up a little so that I can get hold of it.’

Sally could see the look Sister Casualty was giving her. A look that said she would be letting all Barts’ nurses down if she misjudged things. George, on the other hand, was giving her a look of total reassurance. She just hoped his faith in her was justified. She could almost feel the silence in the small curtain-enclosed area as she very slowly and carefully moved one hand and then the other further up the glass. Her whole body felt as though it were trembling inside, but she knew she must not allow that tremor to get into her hands.

Even when Mr Pargiter had placed his hands on the glass below her own, Sally hardly dare so much as exhale in case she jarred the glass.

‘Come over here, Laidlaw, and see if you can tell just what we’re dealing with,’ the senior registrar instructed George.

Watching her boyfriend carefully exploring the site of the wound with one of the instruments from the trolley, his whole concentration on his task and the patient, Sally was filled with fresh admiration and respect, not just for George but for the hospital that had trained him.

‘One side’s pressed up close to the bone. Hitting it must have deflected the glass.’

‘What I want you to do now is get under the tip of the glass and support it, but first we’ll need you and Nurse Johnson to hold his forearms steady, if you please, Sister.’

At a brief nod from Sister Casualty, Sally went to Eric’s injured arm whilst Sister Casualty took the other arm.

Now Sally really was holding her breath. Eric was still unconscious, now thanks to the morphine, but it was still possible that he might jerk his body – with potentially fatal consequences – under the exploration George had to carry out unless they held him still.

George leaned over the patient. Sally clenched her teeth when she heard the sound of the metal instrument grating against the glass.

‘Got it?’ Mr Pargiter asked.

‘Yes,’ George confirmed.

‘Right.’

Slowly and carefully the senior registrar started to lift the glass from Eric’s arm, the involuntary flinch Sally could feel gripping the muscles of his upper arm automatically causing her to press down on it more firmly.

‘Got it.’

There was a note of quiet satisfaction in the senior registrar’s voice, and a good deal of pride in Sally’s heart when he added, ‘Nice work, Laidlaw. Now we need to get him cleaned up. Not sure whether or not he’ll be able to keep his arm, mind you. Still, he’s a lucky blighter that you were around, Nurse.’

A little later, setting off for the second time in one morning for number 13 and her bed, Sally promised herself that this time she would go straight back without taking any diversions. She was so tired that she dare not even blink in case she fell asleep.

Chapter Five

‘Hello, Kit. I haven’t seen you all week. Are you going to St John Ambulance tonight?’ Tilly asked Christopher Long, catching up with him when she saw him walking down the Row in front of her, no doubt making his way to work.

Kit, who lived with his recently widowed mother at number 49, was in the civil service. He was also a conscientious objector, something that Nancy in particular was inclined to make disparaging remarks about. Tilly felt sorry for Mrs Long, but more so for Kit, with his awkward uncoordinated walk, and his introverted nature.

‘I won’t be there tonight,’ he answered her. ‘I won’t be able to make it.’

‘You aren’t not, not coming because one of the girls was so silly and mean the other week, are you?’ Tilly asked, remembering how unkind another member of their group had been to Kit when he had first joined.

‘No,’ he answered her shortly, increasing his pace.

‘Then why aren’t you coming?’ Tilly persisted, hurrying to keep up with him. ‘I wanted to practise my bandaging on you,’ she teased him, hoping to bring a smile to his face, but, if anything, he looked even more miserable.

‘If you must know, I can’t come. You’ll have to find someone else to bandage, because I’ve got to go to enlist for bomb disposal training.’

Tilly couldn’t contain either her gasp of shock or her disbelief. ‘But you’re a conscientious objector,’ she protested.

‘That means I don’t believe in wounding or killing other people. According to the Government, that doesn’t include not wanting to be wounded or killed myself,’ he informed her bitterly, ‘which is why I have to report tonight to enlist. Enlistment, medical check, uniform collection . . .’ he ticked them off on thin trembling fingers, ‘. . . and then I’ll be off somewhere to be trained in how ultimately to kill myself, seeing as that’s what seems to happen to bomb disposal men.’

He was right, Tilly knew. It had been in the papers how many men were killed when the bombs they were trying to make safe exploded.

‘I don’t understand. Why are you doing it if you don’t want to? You’re in a reserved occupation,’ Tilly pointed out.

‘You mean I was. We’ve got a new boss in our department. He doesn’t like me and he’s moved me to a non-reserved job, just because his own son has joined up and he thinks everyone else should do the same.’

Tilly didn’t know what to say. It was plain to her that Kit was very upset. His Adam’s apple wobbled when he spoke and his naturally pale face looked whiter than ever.

‘It might be better than you think,’ she tried to console him, biting her lip when he turned to her with a burning look in his eyes and demanded, ‘How?’ before walking away at a speed that told her that he didn’t want her to catch up with him.

‘Dulcie, you’ve got a visitor,’ Olive told her lodger. ‘A Lizzie Walters. She said she’s come from Selfridges to see how you are. I’ve put her in the front room. You go in and I’ll bring you each a cup of tea.’

It was half-past two, just about an hour since the all clear had sounded after a daylight air raid, during which Olive, Dulcie and Sally had all had to take refuge in the garden shelter.

‘Another blinking raid, that’s all we need,’ Dulcie had huffed in complaint, before adding darkly, ‘Mind you, it is Friday the thirteenth.’

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