Goodbye Sweetheart

by Lilian Harry

Genres: World War II; Sagas

Synopsis

From the outbreak of the Second World War to the evacuation of Dunkirk, GOODBYE SWEETHEART follows the fortunes of the people who live in a working-class street in Portsmouth. Like any street, April Grove in Portsmouth has its good and bad neighbours, its gossip, scandal and romance. But the outbreak of war in 1939 changes everything - especially for the children. Uprooted from their familiar urban existence they are evacuated (some happily, some not) to the country. Then there are the teenagers, whose first loves are accelerated and intensified by the threat of separation; and men and women, too old to fight, who hold the life of the street together. Based on the author's own childhood memories of growing up near Portsmouth, this is a novel which shows us what England was really like then - a story told with such nostalgia and charm that you leave the world it describes longing for the chance to return.

Release date: August 19, 2010

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 298

Sample

THE BUDD BROTHERS, Tim and Keith, came roaring up the garden path and in through the back door of number 14 April Grove as if the devil were after them. Their faces were grimy, their shirts hung half out of their short trousers and their socks were wrinkled round their ankles. They looked as if they had just fought in some historic battle and their eyes blazed with the triumph and delight of victors.

‘We won!’ Tim yelled as they burst into the small back room, jostling to be the first with the news. ‘We won! We beat ’em hollow.’

Jess Budd, pregnant at forty with her fourth child, put out a hand to save her teacup from being knocked over. Her sister Annie, who lived at the top of the street, tutted and grabbed at the plate of biscuits that were about to be sent flying.

‘Is that the way to come bursting in on your Ma of a Saturday afternoon?’ she demanded. ‘Can’t she get any rest? And look at your boots, covered in mud – what’ve you been doing, mudlarking?’ She touched her newly waved dark hair, cut to ear length in the latest fashion, and drew her skirt closer around her legs. She was wearing her new rayon frock today and wanted Jess to remark on it. So far, to her annoyance, she didn’t even seem to have noticed.

‘Certainly not,’ Jess said sharply. ‘Frank and me don’t allow any mudlarking.’ She looked at her sons. She knew quite well where they had been – down at the newspaper offices in Stamford Street, waiting for the football results, though how anyone could get that dirty just waiting in the street only boys would know. ‘Quieten down, the two of you, and tell us what you’re on about.’

‘We told you – we’ve won,’ Tim said impatiently. At almost ten years old, he was the elder of the two boys, though a childhood illness had left him the smaller. His curly hair was tousled and his hazel eyes sparkled. ‘We beat ’em four-one. Four-one.’ Forgetting his muddy boots, he began to dance a jig around the dining-table that took up most of the room, and chanted, ‘Pompey’s won the Cu-up, Pompey’s won the Cu-up.’

Keith, nearly two years younger but chubbier than his brother, with a round face and dark brown eyes like his mother’s, took up the chant too and Jess waved her hands at them for quiet.

‘The Cup? You mean that football cup? Is that what all this fuss is about?’ Annie asked, knowing very well that it was, and the boys stared at her as if she had just come down from the moon.

‘You must know it’s the Cup Final today, Auntie,’ Tim said. ‘It’s all people have been talking about. Portsmouth’s been playing against Wolverhampton, at Wembley. The King’s presenting it to the captain. You must know about it. Uncle Ted would know.’

‘Well, maybe I did hear something about it,’ Annie said offhandedly, and Jess smiled. It was one of Auntie’s habits to ignore football completely, mainly because she didn’t like the interest her husband took in it. ‘Just like little boys,’ she’d say scornfully when he and Jess’s husband Frank came home for their tea discussing the latest match. And she didn’t have much more patience with her nephews. ‘You’ll grow up just like your dad,’ she told them now. ‘Football mad.’ She watched as the two boys, unable to keep still, grabbed a biscuit each and clattered out into the garden again. ‘The whole town’s gone crackers,’ she went on, ‘and for what? Twenty-two grown men chasing a ball around a field. Don’t they have anything better to do?’

‘It’s not so much a question of have nothing better to do,’ Jess said quietly. ‘Seems to me too many people have got something worse to do these days.’ She looked out of the window at her sons, now capering up and down the garden path pretending to be footballers, but her brown eyes were abstracted. ‘And if the boys grow up to be like their dad, I’ll be more than pleased. He’s a good man, is my Frank, and so’s your Ted.’

She pushed back a tendril of hair, the colour of beechnuts and almost untouched as yet by grey. She’d washed it after dinner and it wasn’t properly dry yet. Perhaps Annie would do it up for her before she went.

‘Oh, I know,’ Annie said. ‘I was just teasing them, that’s all. You don’t want to take any notice of me.’

She reached over and poured more tea, and Jess watched her fondly. Annie was a bit sharp sometimes but she was good-hearted enough, and a good sister. And she was right, in a way. There was more to life than football, even if Pompey had won the coveted Football Association Cup. The news everywhere else was bad – countries all over the world at each other’s throats, it seemed, what with Italy invading Albania and Germany invading Czechoslovakia and now it looked as if Hitler was going to go back on his promise not to invade Poland. And only a few weeks ago, Britain and France had joined forces to protect Poland, so if he did . . .

Jess didn’t want to think about what might happen if Hitler went ahead with his plan. But it was impossible to ignore, for the reminders were everywhere – trenches being dug up in the parks, talk of air raids, gas attacks, invasion . . .

For people like her and Frank, who had already been through the Great War, it was frightening. And they said this time it’d be worse.

Unconsciously, she covered her stomach with her hands and Annie’s sharp eyes noticed the movement.

‘How’re you feeling today, Jess? Got over that heartburn?’

‘Not really. The baby’s riding too high – I had it right through with the others anyway.’ She sighed and shifted a little in her chair. ‘It’s the sciatica really gets me down. Sometimes I can hardly sit comfortably, it’s like toothache all down my leg. The doctor says the baby’s pressing on a nerve and there’s nothing he can do about it.’

‘Well, I suppose you can’t expect much else at your age,’ Annie remarked, and Jess sighed. She knew a good many people disapproved of her having another baby at forty, but she and Frank had talked about it and agreed that they wanted one, while there was still time. Another two or three years and it could be too late. And when Mr Chamberlain had come back from Munich at the end of September last year, waving a piece of paper and declaring that it was ‘peace in our time’ the omen had seemed too good to ignore.

Peace in our time! A phrase full of hope for a world that had, after all, averted catastrophe. Along with twenty thousand others, she and Frank had gone to the Peace Thanksgiving Service in the Guildhall Square and sung hymns to the accompaniment of the Royal Marine bands. The sound of rejoicing had filled the air, bringing tears to the eyes of almost all who stood there, and on the Guildhall steps the Lord Mayor and the Bishop of Portsmouth had given thanks with the rest.

Jess and Frank had strolled home arm in arm, Jess with eleven-year-old Rose clinging to her other arm and the two boys walking in front, quiet for once. The October air was mild, with a hint of smoke in the air from the first fires of the autumn, and that night they had lain in bed, relief drawing them close. The world which had been teetering on the brink of disaster was once again a safe place.

What better time to have a baby?

And by the time the bitter knowledge had dawned that the ‘peace’ was no more than an uneasy respite, that war loomed blacker and larger than ever, it was too late. Jess was pregnant and the world a dark and dangerous place to be born into.

The boys came dashing back through the door.

‘Mum! Mum! Can we go down the railway station, see the team come back? Bob Shaw next door says they’ll be bringing the Cup. Can we, Mum?’

‘Are you going to be with Bob?’ Jess asked, and they nodded vigorously. ‘All right, then, but mind you’re back before dark. I don’t want you roaming round the streets. And no mischief, mind.’

She watched as they tore away down the garden path. ‘Bob Shaw’s good to them. There’s not that many lads of nineteen will bother with two boys like Tim and Keith, taking them swimming and fishing when their father can’t spare the time. And Peggy and Bert are good neighbours too, always ready to give a hand.’

‘Hm.’ Annie pursed her mouth. Like Jess, she wore no make-up save for Pond’s vanishing cream and a dusting of powder. ‘I don’t know about the girls, though – that Diane’s altogether too flighty and knowing for a girl of fifteen, and Gladys thinks she’s grown up now she’s eighteen and been out at work a few years. And you know – ’ She broke off to pick up the brush and comb and start working on Jess’s hair. ‘I don’t know why you don’t get this lot cut off. It’d look ever so much smarter, it’s got a nice wave in it.’

Jess smiled. ‘Frank likes it this way. Go on, what were you going to say about Gladys?’

‘Oh, nothing at all. Only that she took a fancy to our Colin before he went off to sea, you knew that, didn’t you?’

Jess nodded. Her own daughter Rosemary was barely twelve and inclined to look up to the girls next door, and Jess had already had a few worries about what she might be learning from them. The Shaws weren’t quite so strict with their daughters as Ted and Annie.

Annie was eight years older than Jess and had married at twenty. To Jess, she had always been ‘grown up’, more like a mother than a sister, and it was only when Jess had had her own family that they had drawn closer as friends. But Jess had always been a welcome visitor at Annie’s home, and had helped with her sister’s children from the time they were born. Olive and Betty and their brother Colin, now twenty-five and the pride of Annie’s heart when he came swaggering down the street in his bell-bottoms, meant almost as much to Jess as her own three did.

‘How’s your Olive getting on with her Derek?’ she asked. ‘He seems a nice enough young chap.’

‘He is.’ Annie’s mouth was full of hair-grips. ‘She’s asked him to tea a few times. Got good manners and no side to him, for all his dad’s her boss.’

Jess leaned away for a moment to pour more tea. ‘Think anything’ll come of it? It’d be a good match for her.’

Annie pursed her lips again. ‘Who can tell? They seem fond enough of each other, and I suppose she’s old enough to get engaged. But you know what Ted’s like. He won’t have either of the girls getting serious too young. He didn’t even like them going out with boys till they’d turned eighteen and I must say I think he was right. You don’t know what they might get up to these days, not like when we were young.’

Jess nodded. Annie had had her share of suitors as a girl, but chose to forget them now. None of them had been ‘serious’ she would declare. And Jess had had no other boyfriends before she met Frank. If she had, she knew their father would have been every bit as strict as Ted. Home by ten o’clock unless they’d asked permission to be out later, and no string of boys knocking at the door. One at a time was the way he and their mother had believed in, anything else made a girl look ‘cheap’ and ‘common’, and got her a bad name.

That was the trouble with Peggy Shaw’s two. Gladys was always out somewhere, often not getting home till gone eleven, and Diane spent far too much time on street corners, talking to boys. Jess was surprised at Peggy for allowing it, especially when they had the example of Nancy Baxter at number 10 before them . . .

‘And what about Betty?’ Betty had been a tomboy, wanting nothing more than to shadow her brother Colin whenever he was home on leave from the Navy, and had usually been found playing cricket and football with the boys in the street rather than joining the girls with their dolls and skipping. It was all right when she was a child but Ted and Annie had been worried that she might be turning into a flirt.

‘Betty? I don’t know – she doesn’t let on much. Ted reckons she’s getting too saucy, but I tell him she can’t get up to much mischief working in the dairy at the top of the street. She keeps talking about getting something else – something more exciting, if you please!’ Annie sniffed. ‘Exciting! I asked her what she meant by that and she said she didn’t know. She’s all mixed up, that’s her trouble. Doesn’t want to be a boy any more and doesn’t know how to be a girl.’ She put down the brush and fixed the last grip in the knot on Jess’s neck.

‘Still, I daresay she’ll sort herself out,’ Jess said. ‘Most girls are a bit here and there at her age.’

Annie nodded. ‘Well, I’d better be going. I promised Mum and Dad I’d slip down and see them this afternoon. And then Ted’ll be in for his tea, full of this Cup Final win, I daresay. I wouldn’t be surprised if they’ve dressed the ferryboat overall in honour of the occasion!’

Jess laughed. Ted was a skipper on one of the boats which plied between Portsmouth and Gosport and as proud of his little craft as an admiral of his fleet.

‘It’ll be all over the front page of the Evening News too,’ Annie went on. ‘Well, I suppose it’s better than talking about war, which is all we seem to get these days. Gas attacks, digging trenches in the parks – it’s enough to turn you cold. Trenches! What good are they going to do us if war breaks out?’

‘We’re supposed to be getting shelters,’ Jess said. ‘Anderson shelters for the garden. And they’ll be digging big ones in the streets for people who haven’t got gardens.’

‘And do you suppose they’ll be any good if a bomb hits ’em?’ Annie asked scornfully. ‘They’re expecting hundreds, thousands, every night. What use will a few tin huts be then?’

Jess was silent. Like her sister, she could remember the air raids over London in the last war – and they said this lot would be far, far worse.

That time, the Germans had used mostly Zeppelins, huge airships that looked terrifying as they loomed overhead but didn’t do very much damage. This time, they had hundreds – perhaps thousands – of aircraft, able to fly faster and farther than ever before, carrying huge loads of bombs.

Their navy had ships such as had never been seen at sea before and their army had been training for years, before they’d even begun to invade the other countries of Europe.

They want to take us all over, she thought with a jab of fear. And what can we do to stop them?

She felt the baby kick inside her and clasped her fingers together, as if in prayer, over the heaving bulge. Stay there, she begged it silently, just stay there inside me where you’ll be safe. Don’t get born.

But she knew that if war came, nowhere in Portsmouth would be safe. With one of the naval dockyards and harbours as target, she and Frank and the children would be in the front line.

Annie was watching her with concern.

‘Are you all right, our Jess? You’ve gone dead white.’ An expression of self-annoyance creased her face. ‘That’s me, I suppose, opening my big mouth and putting my foot in it as usual. Look, you don’t want to take no notice of me. I don’t suppose there’ll be a war anyway, not when it comes down to it. The King can’t be expecting it, after all – he wouldn’t be going to Canada next week if he thought we were going to be at war.’ She picked up yesterday’s edition of the Evening News, which had been lying on a chair. ‘Here – it tells you about their itinerary in Portsmouth on their way to the ship – arriving by train, they’ll be, him and and the Queen, and then walking through to the Guildhall and driving down to the Southern Railway Jetty. They reckon there’ll be two thousand children lining the route. And the Princesses will be with them.’ Annie looked down at Jess. ‘Why don’t we go and see them?’

Jess puckered her face. ‘I don’t know, Annie. Not in all those crowds, the way I am.’

‘No, you’re right, better not. But I might go. I could tell you all about it, what they were wearing and that. Be something to cheer us up a bit.’

‘That’s right,’ Jess said, ‘you do that.’

She took back the paper. Annie was easily enough cheered up. But she hadn’t read the rest of the news. The mention of compulsory military training for all men over twenty years old. The plans for evacuating the city’s children.

It all made war seem very close.

Annie was still watching her face. She put out a hand and touched her sister’s knee.

‘Hitler’ll back off – sure to. You don’t want to worry, Jess.’

Jess smiled at her. That was Annie all over, first letting fly and then remembering that Jess was her baby sister – even at forty! –and had to be petted and soothed. But no amount of petting and soothing was going to stop this war coming, and they both knew it, even though until it was properly declared everyone had to put on a pretence of hoping.

‘I’m all right,’ Jess said. ‘Just a bit of a twinge . . . Thanks for popping in, Annie. Give Mum and Dad my love and tell them I’ll be in on Tuesday, when I’ve been to the doctor’s . . . And I like your new frock. It suits you. And the hairdo.’

Annie looked at her for a moment, then smiled. ‘And I thought you hadn’t noticed.’

‘Go on with you,’ Jess said, rising clumsily to her feet and gathering up the cups. ‘Of course I noticed, the minute you walked in. I was just teasing you – like you teased Tim and Keith. Football, new frocks – we’re all the same when it comes down to it, aren’t we?’

Olive Chapman was spending Saturday afternoon walking along Southsea seafront with her young man, Derek Harker. They had gone out in one of the vans belonging to Derek’s father, who ran the building business where Olive worked. She had been in the office for six months now, having moved there from her previous office job at a garage, and had been going out with Derek for three of those months.

She still couldn’t quite believe her luck. Derek was one of the best-looking boys in the Copnor area, a good six foot tall with dark gold hair carefully combed into waves and shiny with Brylcreem. He dressed well too, with a suit for weekdays and a Fair Isle pullover and grey slacks for weekends. And he had a good job with a local firm of accountants as well as helping his father with the business.

‘Of course, I’ll take over one of these days,’ he said carelessly as they strolled along. ‘The old man’s bound to want to retire before too long. And he deserves a rest – he’s worked hard, building it up. There’s not another builder in Portsmouth can touch him, you know.’

‘I know.’ Olive hugged his arm. It was cool today, with a wind blowing straight up the beach from the sea and whipping her chestnut hair around her face. She was glad she’d worn her new spring jacket. It was a light green tweed with a big collar and a wide belt and she’d put on a dark green skirt to go with it. It looked unconventional but Derek had given a little whistle when he saw her, and that was enough for Olive.

They stopped for a while to look across the Solent at the Isle of Wight. It was very clear, the buildings of Ryde and Seaview showing up sharply on the horizon, and the wind was tossing the sea into a thousand dancing white horses. Between Southsea and the island could be seen the Spithead Forts, the three grim-looking bastions that had been built there over a century ago to protect England’s southern shores from invasion. Olive stared at them and shivered.

‘Cold?’ Derek slipped his arm round her waist and Olive felt a sudden thrill of excitement. Derek often put his arm round her, especially when he was walking her home at night, and sometimes in the pictures though she was always nervous of who might see them, but they’d had an unspoken agreement that he wouldn’t do it in public in the daytime. But this afternoon, Olive felt reckless. They’d been going out together for three months, after all, and who was going to see them anyway?

‘A bit. But I was just thinking about – you know. About the war. And those forts. D’you think they’d be any good, Derek? D’you think there is going to be a war?’

‘Well, I reckon they’d stop most ships getting through. We’ve got better guns now than we had when they first built them, after all.’ He frowned, remembering how his father and other men talked when they discussed the possibility of war. ‘It all depends on what Hitler does next. If he goes into Poland – ’

Olive shuddered and he held her more tightly. She leaned against him.

‘Would you – would you go and fight, Derek?’

‘If I had to. We’d all have to do our bit.’

‘Even if it meant going away?’

‘Well, it’d be bound to mean that, wouldn’t it? We don’t want Hitler coming here, do we?’

Olive pouted a little. ‘You don’t seem too bothered. P’raps you want to go away.’

‘No, I don’t.’ Derek still had his arm round her. She felt his hand move a little on her waist, the fingers straying under her arm. ‘I don’t want to go away at all. It’d interfere with my plans.’

‘Oh? What plans?’ Olive felt another small tremor of excitement. She was very much aware of those fingers and glanced around, wondering if there was anyone about that she knew, but most of the other people on the beach that afternoon were children or young couples like themselves.

‘Well, I want to buy a sports car. One of those little MG two-seaters. Red, if I can get hold of it. I know a bloke who’s got one he’s thinking of selling and he’d let me have it for fifty quid.’ Derek’s eyes gleamed. ‘Think of it, Livvy – whizzing round the roads in a red sports car! Wouldn’t it be fine? We could go anywhere – Brighton, Dover, even London.’ His blue eyes gleamed and he hugged her close against him.

Olive gasped and giggled a little. At first she’d felt piqued and disappointed, but the idea of dashing about the countryside at Derek’s side in a red sports car was too dazzling for her to continue to feel hurt. And Derek was obviously including her in his plans, which was the main thing.

‘And have you got any other plans, Derek?’ she asked coquettishly, her head on one side as she looked up at him. The sun was gleaming on his hair and his skin was already tanned. Just like a film star, she thought.

Derek looked into her eyes. His lids half-closed and he pursed his lips very slightly in the way that always made her heart turn over. Slowly, he smiled and drew her closer. He bent his head so that their lips were almost touching.

‘Any other plans?’ he murmured, and she could feel the warmth of his breath against her mouth. ‘Well, I might have. But that’d be telling, now, wouldn’t it?’

Frank and Jess Budd had lived in April Grove for nearly eight years. It was their first real house – before that, they’d lived in a couple of rooms in Frank’s aunt’s house, half a dozen streets away. Aunt Nell and Uncle Fred had been good to them, letting them stop while they saved up the money for a deposit on the little two-up, two-down terraced house, but it had been a relief to them all when Frank and Jess, together with Rosemary and Tim, had been able to move out at last with the few bits of furniture they’d collected, and set up in their own home.

Jess had been expecting Keith then, and Mrs Seddon, who ran the little corner shop just across the road, often said how she’d pitied the young woman moving into number 14.

‘Two little ones under three and another on the way,’ she would say to Jess as she weighed out sugar and biscuits, ‘and only two bedrooms in that little house. I didn’t know how you were going to manage.’

Well, we managed well enough, Jess thought as she moved heavily about getting tea ready, after Annie had gone. It was like a palace after living in two rooms, after all. It was the first time since Rose was born that she and Frank had had a bedroom to themselves, and the two children were still small enough to share the back bedroom. Later on, when the baby – as Keith continued to be called, even after he was long out of nappies – moved into the back bedroom, Rose was put downstairs in the front room on a camp bed. It wasn’t ideal, but since they only used the front room on Sundays and when visitors came to tea, it didn’t make much difference. And they’d always meant to move somewhere a bit bigger, once Frank was earning a bit more in the Dockyard.

But somehow the move never happened. Frank’s wage went up a bit and they were able to afford a few more treats for the children –a bag of sweets on Saturday night, coloured ribbons for Rose’s hair, a cap gun for the boys. But with war looming like a black cloud over everything, it didn’t seem the right time to be thinking of moving.

Once ‘peace in our time’ had been declared, however, the idea cropped up again, and they began to look about for somewhere else to live.

‘It needs to be near the allotments,’ Frank said. ‘I’ve just got that patch into good shape now, and there’s all those vegetables and fruit coming along. I don’t want to lose them.’

‘Nor do I.’ Jess had always liked the situation of April Grove, with the allotments running along the bottom of the narrow gardens. It was almost as good as being in the country, to be able to look out of the back window and see patches of green stretching away.

Frank’s allotment wasn’t actually close to the house, it was true – a good five minutes’ walk, in fact – but seeing him off with his gardening tools over his shoulder made her feel good. It was satisfying, somehow, to know that he was going off to do something he really enjoyed, something out in the fresh air after the long hours spent in the boiler-shop, stoking up great furnaces and operating a huge steam-hammer.

Jess could barely imagine what Frank did all day long in the Dockyard, but when he was on the allotment she knew he was digging or raking, or hoeing. And she knew that when he came home he would be bringing a bucketful of potatoes, some carrots or a firm green cabbage.

It seemed the right thing for a man to be doing – feeding his family.

Frank grew more than vegetables on his allotment. He also grew soft fruit – currants, gooseberries, rhubarb and, as a special treat, a few strawberries.

The cupboard in the alcove beside the fireplace in the front room was filled with jars of jam and bottled fruit. There were pickles too, made from onions and the tomatoes that grew in the back garden because the allotment was full. Out in the shed were sacks filled with potatoes and root vegetables, and in summer there was always plenty of salad – lettuces, celery, cucumbers, spring onions and radishes.

He was a good provider, was Frank, and he worked hard. It didn’t mean he was always easy to live with – tiredness and the frustration of his job made him short-tempered sometimes, and he’d never been one to suffer fools gladly anyway. But Jess knew he always wanted the best for her and the kids, and he was prepared to work all the hours God sent to make sure they got it.

Frank came in as she was slicing bread and spreading it with margarine. She paused for a moment to smile at him and he bent to kiss her. He was a big man, almost six feet tall and heavily built, his muscles developed by years of hard toil in the Dockyard. His hair, almost black like Rose’s, was greying now he was in his mid-forties and beginning to recede a little but he didn’t let it worry him. ‘A high forehead’s a sign of intelligence,’ he would say, ‘and I’m getting more intelligent every year!’ Like Jess, he thought there were more important things in life than appearance, though he liked her and the children to look well cared for.

The cloth was on the table and he sat in his armchair, reading the Evening News, while Jess boiled the kettle on the gas stove out in the little lean-to scullery. She had made some rock cakes earlier that afternoon and she piled them on a plate and set them in the middle of the table, with a jar of home-made blackberry and apple jam and a pot of sardine and tomato fishpaste.

‘Where are they all?’ Frank asked as she came in with milk and sugar.

‘The boys have gone down the railway station with Bob Shaw to see Pompey come back with the Cup. Goodness knows when they’ll be home, but I told them to be back before dark. Rose is up at Joy Brunner’s, she’s stopping to tea. We might as well have ours now.’

Frank put down his paper and got up from the armchair. As always, he looked huge in the small room. He could strike terror into the hearts of guilty small boys (and in his eyes, small boys almost always were guilty) and command respect from most other men. His principles were rigid and sometimes harsh. Only Jess knew how soft his heart was in reality.

He sat down at the table. As usual, the family had eaten their dinner at one o’clock and there would be a supper later in the evening, a cooked snack of something on toast, or an egg. Tea was invariably bread and cake of some kind, usually home-made. The only cakes Jess bought were doughnuts or cream fancies, which they sometimes had on Sunday.

‘So how’s our Ted and Annie?’ he asked, spreading his bread with fishpaste. At the sound of the jar being opened, Henry the tabby cat got up from the rag rug in front of the fireplace, stretched and came to sit beside Frank’s chair. Frank cut a small triangle of bread and held it down to him, and the big cat reached up a paw and took it daintily. ‘I thought Ted might walk over the allotment.’

‘Ted was doing an extra shift on the ferry. Annie just popped in for a cup of t