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ANNIE GROVES

Where the Heart Is

COPYRIGHT

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

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2009

Copyright © Annie Groves 2020

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

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

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

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

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

Source ISBN: 9780007265923

Ebook Edition © DECEMBER 2014 ISBN: 9780007353217

Version: 2017-09-12

DEDICATION

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

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Prologue

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-One

Twenty-Two

Twenty-Three

Twenty-Four

Twenty-Five

Twenty-Six

Twenty-Seven

Twenty-Eight

Twenty-Nine

Thirty

Thirty-One

Thirty-Two

Epilogue

Keep Reading

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Other Books By

About the Publisher

PROLOGUE

Christmas Day 1941

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

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

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

Mrs Luke Campion.

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

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

Oh, Luke …

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

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

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

Katie,

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

What? No! There must be some mistake.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Luke

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

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

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

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

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

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

ONE

Mid-February 1942

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘We’ll be lucky if they do,’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Perhaps it’s for the best.’

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

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

‘Then—’

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

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

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

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

‘Yes, it will.’

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

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

TWO

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They nodded silently.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Bye, Mum. I’m off to work now.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How wrong they had all been.

THREE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘No, I don’t think so.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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