Keep Smiling Through

by Lilian Harry

Genres: World War II; Sagas

Synopsis

Continuing the powerful Second World War saga about the lives, hopes and fears of the families in April Grove. May 1941 - and the people of April Grove, Portsmouth are beginning to feel the war will never end. Families are being torn apart, not only by the separations and loss of war, but by more unexpected frictions, as wives and daughters play new and independent roles and children are forced to grow up too fast. Betty faces conflict at home over the man that she loves; Carol is desperate to escape her carping mother; and Micky nearly brings tragedy to them all. Yet as the war irredeemably changes their lives, the families of April Grove learn to endure - and even to keep smiling through.

Release date: August 19, 2010

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 365

Sample

May 1941. The war that had begun in September 1939 between Britain and Germany was throwing its dark shadow over the entire world. The war that was to have been over by Christmas, was beginning to seem as if it would have no end.

The families who lived in April Grove, in the city of Portsmouth, were learning together to face the fears, the privations and the day-to-day drudgery of a war which had stormed its way to their own doorsteps. There was little history to guide them. Never before had war brought death from the skies to the ordinary homes of people who were making no attack, who had no defence. Never before had the population of the entire country been forced to burrow like moles into the earth itself for safety. Never before had a country that had not been invaded woken day after day to find its homes destroyed, its schools and churches ablaze, its workplaces gone.

It was like finding your way through unknown territory, making your own map with each painful step.

‘You wouldn’t know it was Pompey,’ Jess Budd said sadly, when she went down to the Guildhall Square and saw the burned-out shell of her favourite store, McIlroys, the battered railway station, the gutted Guildhall. ‘You wouldn’t believe it had ever been a lovely city, with happy people, a place it was a pleasure to come to. It’s no more than a ruin now – a horrible, dying ruin.’

It was as if the Germans had tried to blast the heart out of the city by devastating its centre, the part that everyone knew and loved. All around the whole area, streets had been bombed, houses flattened, roads obliterated by vast craters. The Madden Hotel was blown apart by a mine, Kingston Prison damaged, the main railway blocked by debris, and even the Royal Hospital struck by a mine. The Dockyard, so vital to the country’s defence, was bombed again and again, and fires raged there day and night as the weary firefighters struggled to control them.

But even as she stared, her heart breaking at the sight of so much destruction, Jess felt the stirring of a determination that had been born and and was growing in the heart of every Briton during those dark months of the blitz. We won’t be beaten, she thought. We won’t give in. And somewhere deep inside her, like the tolling of a bell, she heard the words of Winston Churchill, spoken to hearten a nation that might otherwise have been brought to its knees.

‘We will never surrender …’

‘I don’t know,’ Gladys Shaw said restlessly. ‘I don’t reckon I did all that much. Not when you think about other people, people what died. They’re the ones who deserve medals, not me.’

Olive Harker and her sister Betty Chapman looked at the shining silver disc in its little case. Gladys had brought it up the street to the Chapmans’ house to show it to them specially. The whole of April Grove had been proud of her when they’d heard the news, and everyone would be wanting a look, but somehow Gladys didn’t seem all that thrilled.

I would be if it was me, Betty thought. Or Dennis. And she knew her sister was thinking the same. Suppose she or her husband Derek had won a medal for serving their country in the war. Why, they’d be like a dog with two tails.

She looked at it again. The British Empire Medal, presented by King George the Sixth himself. Well, not handed to Gladys by him personally – she’d had to go to the Chief Constable of Hampshire to get it, and she said that she’d been more nervous about that than she’d been in any of the air-raids of the Portsmouth blitz. But the King had signed the paper, that’s what mattered. He knew about her.

Betty shook her head, marvelling. ‘It’s queer to think that the King knows about people like us,’ she said. ‘Living in little two-up, two-down terraced houses in April Grove in Portsmouth. I mean, you wouldn’t think him and the Queen knew we existed, would you?’

‘They do, though,’ Olive said. ‘Look at the way the Queen talked to my Derek when she came last year. Asking him about me and whether we had any kids, and all that –’ She fell silent and Betty squeezed her hand. She knew that Olive still grieved over the baby she had lost during one of those terrible air-raids. The words the Queen had spoken to Olive’s soldier husband then had given her a lot of comfort, and she treasured them still.

‘Well, that’s what I mean,’ Gladys said. ‘There’s people like you and Derek – and poor Kathy Simmons, she got killed that night – and all those others who did just as much as I did during the blitz, fighting fires and putting out incendiaries and getting rid of bombs, and ending up hurt or dead themselves. Why should I get a medal, and not them? It don’t seem right.’

‘Don’t talk so daft,’ Olive Harker said stoutly. ‘You drove that old van all through the blitz, you went down that bombed cellar and saved that little girl, you went in that house that could’ve fallen down round your ears at any minute and fetched out that little baby, you did all sorts of things. You were lucky to get away with a broken arm. Of course you deserve a medal. You’re a heroine.’

‘I’m not!’ Gladys said sharply. ‘I’m no different to all the others. I just happened to get noticed, that’s all. And don’t forget there’s a lot of people I didn’t save.’ She fell silent, biting her lip as she remembered the family of little Ruth in the cellar, staring with sightless eyes as she struggled to free the child from the rubble. The tiny baby she’d found wrapped in blankets under the stairs, its mother blown to fragments in the room above. The men and women and children she had taken in her rickety ambulance through streets of flames, to hospitals that might not even exist by the time she reached them.

And Graham Philpotts, the young sailor with the red hair and cheeky grin, who had died from the blast of a land-mine in the doorway of Portsmouth’s Royal Hospital, on the night of 17 April 1941.

Betty watched her friend. She saw the tears in Gladys’s eyes and knew what she was thinking. She was sad about Graham too – he’d been her boyfriend for a while, they’d even talked about getting married. But she knew it must be much worse for Gladys to feel she was responsible for his death.

‘It wasn’t your fault,’ she said gently, as she’d already said a hundred times. ‘You weren’t to know what was going to happen. And you’d had enough that night. You were out on your feet. Someone had to drive the van.’

‘It should have been me.’ Gladys looked again at the medal. ‘It was Graham should have got this, not me.’

The girls were silent for a few moments. Betty glanced around the room. It was the family living room, with the furniture her mother and father had collected over the years – a square dining-table with four chairs, a couple of armchairs for Ted and Annie, a dresser which showed off their best tea-set. In one corner was the cabinet that Betty’s brother Colin had built before he joined the Navy, to house the gramophone. He’d been mad about Joe Loss and Glenn Miller, and his records were stored in the cupboard underneath the speaker.

It seemed a long time since he’d sat in this room and listened to them, winding the gramophone up after every fourth tune. A long time since he’d swung in through the door in his bell-bottoms, his face wreathed in a cheery grin. Betty missed him badly.

She missed Dennis too, and once again she wished she could bring him here. So far, she’d not said much to her family about the young man she had met on the farm where she worked as a Land Girl. Once you brought a chap home, it was considered ‘serious’, and although Betty and Dennis had always been very serious about each other, she knew that it would take time for her family to accept him. And the way her father was now, he might never come round to it.

‘Have you made up your mind about the Wrens?’ she asked Gladys.

Gladys nodded. ‘I’m going down the recruiting office as soon as I can. I went before, but they wouldn’t have me till me arm was better. Dad don’t like the idea much but I can’t help that. He’s living in the Dark Ages if he thinks he can tell me to stay at home. We’ve all got to do our bit.’

‘I know.’ Olive sighed. ‘I’ve almost decided to go for the ATS, but I still haven’t talked to Derek about it. He was home on a weekend pass a couple of weeks ago, but you know how it is – we never seemed to get round to talking about things. Anyway, it didn’t seem right to spoil his time at home going on about the war. All he wanted to do was – well, you know’ – she blushed ‘– and go to the pictures and things like that.’ She smiled. ‘We went to the Regent to see Arthur Askey and Richard Murdoch in The Ghost Train – it was ever so funny. We nearly fell out of our seats laughing. And they’ve got George Formby coming to the Odeon next week, in person, to raise funds for air-raid victims. I reckon I might go – why don’t you come as well? It’d do you good to have a bit of a laugh.’

‘I don’t know, I might.’ Gladys spoke without enthusiasm. She really did seem down, Betty thought. Perhaps she’d be better once she was doing something again – either back at the First Aid Post, or in the Wrens.

The front doorbell rang shrilly and Betty got up to answer it. She came back into the room a minute or two later with Gladys’s younger sister Diane behind her. Diane’s face was pink and excited.

‘I thought you’d be here. Guess what! I’ve got a job.’

‘What sort of a job?’ Gladys stared at her. ‘You’ve already got a job, at the laundry. I didn’t know you’d got the sack.’

‘I didn’t.’ Diane tossed her head. She’d had her fair hair cut short lately and it clustered in tight curls round her small face. She was wearing a summer frock with short sleeves and her arms were sunburnt. ‘I’m fed up with the laundry. I’ve got a job at Airspeed.’

‘Airspeed? What, making aeroplanes?’

‘That’s right. I daresay I’ll learn to fly them too.’ Her tone was casual but the three older girls could tell that she was smouldering with excitement. ‘I think that’s the best thing anyone could do, don’t you? Fly in a plane, up there in the sky.’ She glanced towards the window, at the blue square that could be seen through the top of the pane. ‘Better’n driving an old van round the streets.’

‘Now just you look here, Diane Shaw –’ Gladys began, but Olive stopped her with a hand on her arm.

‘She don’t mean anything, Glad.’ She looked at Diane. ‘You don’t really think you’ll be allowed to fly, do you? I mean, everyone knows about Amy Johnson, but they won’t let ordinary girls like us fly in the war.’

‘Won’t they? I bet they will. Women are going to do everything in this war.’ Diane’s blue eyes glittered. ‘There aren’t going to be enough men to do the jobs, are there? We’ll be doing it all, so that men can go off and join the Forces. And we’ll be joining alongside ’em soon, and fighting as well. I tell you what, if we don’t make up our own minds what to do they’ll make them up for us. And I’m not waiting to be told – I know what I want to do.’

There was a moment’s silence. Then Gladys laughed uneasily and said, ‘Hark at you!’ She turned to the other two. ‘Our Di always did think she knew it all. I can just guess what our Dad’ll have to say about it.’

‘He’s not getting the chance,’ Diane declared, much as Gladys herself had done only ten minutes earlier. ‘He can’t stop me going to work at Airspeed, and once I’m there he won’t be able to do a thing about it. Anyway, I’ll probably join the WAAF in a year or so. That’s where I’ll get the best chance of learning to fly.’

‘Learn to fly!’ Gladys said scornfully. ‘You’ve got as much chance as I have of steering the Ark Royal. The nearest you’ll get to flying is walking past an airman in the street.’

‘All the same, she’s right about some of it,’ Olive said. ‘Women are starting to do all the jobs that men have been doing. And the papers are full of advertisements asking girls to join up. How do we know what we’ll be having to do in a few months’ time? After all, you’d never have guessed this time last year that you’d be driving an ambulance through air-raids and winning medals, would you?’ She thought for a few minutes. ‘I’ll tell you something else. I reckon she’s right about us not having the choice if we wait much longer. We’re just the age to get called up, and if I’ve got to go I want to go into the Army, like my Derek. He’ll be home again this weekend – I’ll talk to him about it the minute he gets here.’

‘But you’re a married woman,’ Gladys said. ‘Surely they won’t –’

‘Married!’ Olive said bitterly. ‘You’d hardly know it, would you. You could count the nights Derek and me have had together on your fingers, and still have a few left over to mash the potatoes. I don’t reckon that counts for anything these days.’

‘Not even if you had a baby?’

‘I’m not going to have a baby,’ Olive said shortly. ‘Not until the war’s good and over, anyway.’ She got up abruptly. ‘I’ve got to go now, Glad. Mum and Dad are down North End with Granny and Grandpa and I promised to go and meet them so that Mum could go straight to the First Aid Post and I could walk back with Dad. He’s still poorly, you know. I wonder sometimes if he’ll ever get over that turn he had during the bombing.’

She walked out, and Gladys gave Betty a rueful look.

‘I’m a twerp, I really am. I don’t know how I could have said that to Olive about babies. One of these days I’m going to open my mouth and shove my foot so far down it I’ll swallow my toes.’

‘I know. I say things without meaning to as well. But you can’t keep on remembering, can you – not when there’s so many other things to think about all the time. And we’ve all got our own worries.’

‘Well, we’ll have to be going too,’ Gladys said, getting up. She looked at her sister, who had opened the gramophone door and started to look through the records. She was humming one of the Glenn Miller tunes, and Betty felt a lump in her throat as she remembered Colin again. String of Pearls had been one of his favourites. ‘Come on, Di. Tell us a bit more about this job of yours. You’re not really going to be helping to build planes, are you?’

Betty went back to the farm next day. She’d been hoping to see Dennis while she was home, but as usual he’d been called out to help deal with some unexploded bombs that had been discovered out at Southsea. You never knew when they were going to turn up, and they always had to be disposed of straight away. The fact that they might have lain there for months didn’t mean they weren’t going to go off.

‘A lot of them are timed,’ he’d told Betty. ‘Some have delaying mechanisms and their timing doesn’t start until they’re disturbed, or they might be set like an alarm clock, to go off after a few days – or even months. We can’t take any risks with them.’

Betty shuddered. She hated thinking about what Dennis did, even though she admired and loved him for doing it.

‘I don’t know anyone as brave as you,’ she said, and Dennis laughed and hugged her.

‘Everybody’s brave in this war. We just have different ways of showing it.’

He came out to the farm to see her a couple of days later and she told him about Gladys’s medal.

‘She doesn’t seem to want it at all. I mean, she’s thrilled in a way, of course she is, but she doesn’t think she deserves it any more than anyone else. It’s like you said – everyone’s brave. Why should just a few be picked out?’

‘Because that’s the only way you can do it,’ Dennis said. ‘You can’t give everyone a medal just for being alive now – it wouldn’t mean anything. I suppose in a way, it isn’t Gladys who’s getting the medal, but all the ambulance drivers who do the sort of work she does. She’s a sort of representative.’

‘I reckon you deserve a medal,’ Betty said. ‘Doing what you do.’

‘But I couldn’t do it without the Pioneers digging the shafts and the rest of the crew. So if I did get a medal – which I hope I won’t – it’ll belong to them as much as to me.’ He was silent for a moment, then said, ‘I’m sorry I couldn’t get to see you in Pompey. I wanted to see where you live – and meet your family.’

Betty bit her lip. She met his eyes. They were serious, their hazel light darkened. She sighed.

‘You know what I think, Dennis. I want you to meet them. I really do. I want them to meet you, to know what a smashing chap I’ve got. But – I don’t think it’s a good idea. Not just yet.’

‘Is it your dad still?’ he asked quietly.

‘Yes. He’s not getting any better, you see. He’s a bag of nerves. And anything that upsets him – well, the doctor says we’ve got to be really careful or it’ll just set him back.’

‘And meeting me would upset him.’

‘It’s not you,’ she said quickly. ‘I mean, it’s not you as a person. It’s – it’s –’

‘It’s me as a CO,’ he said. ‘A conscientious objector. That’s what would upset him, isn’t it? Someone who refused to fight in the war.’

‘You have to understand him,’ Betty said. ‘I mean, people like us – like him – well, we don’t think that way. We think what we’ve been brought up to think, I suppose. Same as you.’

‘No. I was brought up to think for myself.’

‘Well, so was I!’ she said quickly, then shook her head. ‘No, maybe I wasn’t. Not in the same way. But you still think the same as your dad, don’t you? He was a CO in the last war. And you’re one in this. So how d’you know you are thinking for yourself?’

Dennis smiled. ‘Well, perhaps I might not have known at first. But a few months in prison would soon have told me if I wasn’t. And they didn’t make any difference to what I thought, did they? No, Betty, I’m pretty convinced about what I’m doing. And I feel a lot better for it now I’m in bomb disposal.’ He glanced at her. ‘Wouldn’t that make your dad feel any different?’

‘It might. Well, I’m sure it would. But – he’s been through a lot, you know. The first war – and then Dunkirk. And that really was brave. He used to hate even taking the ferryboat across the harbour at night during the raids. Going all that way – and being bombed – and seeing other ships go down, and all those soldiers …’ She shuddered. ‘The doctor said it was all too much for him even though it didn’t come out for months, not until that night he was firewatching on top of our turret. It was building up inside him all that time and he just couldn’t take any more, and broke down. We’ve just got to wait till he gets better.’

Dennis nodded. ‘I know. I do understand, Betty. And I’d be happy to wait, if only …’ He took her hand and stroked it gently. ‘… If only we knew things were going to turn out all right for us. If only we could look ahead.’

Betty met his eyes and felt a deep quiver of fear. She knew what Dennis meant. If he didn’t meet her family soon, he might never meet them. Life was uncertain for everyone these days, but for no one was it less certain than the members of the bomb disposal crews.

The next bomb might be his last.

‘I want to marry you, Betty,’ he said softly, drawing her close into his arms. ‘But I want it to be with your family’s blessing. I don’t want anything coming between you and them – just in case …’

Betty stared at him, then flung herself hard against him, gripping his body against hers, burrowing her face into his chest.

‘Don’t say things like that, Dennis! Don’t. It frightens me too much. I want to hold you tight and never let go of you. I want you to stay with me, and not go back to those horrible bombs. I don’t care about my family, I don’t care about anyone else – I just want you.’

But it wasn’t true, and they both knew it. Families were important. Families, friends, strangers, people they would never even meet – all were important. That was why Betty was working on the farm, toiling until her back was almost breaking, freezing in winter, almost melting in summer. That was why Dennis spent his days at the bottom of a deep shaft, often knee-deep in mud, working painstakingly on a bomb that might explode and shatter his body at any second.

That was what the war was all about.

‘So what would you be doing in the ATS?’ Derek Harker asked his wife.

They were sitting in the Chapmans’ front room. It was understood that when Derek was home on one of his short leaves this room belonged to him and Olive. They’d put out a few of their wedding presents, to make it feel a bit more like their own home, and even Annie wouldn’t come in without knocking. Tonight, Derek had brought Olive a bunch of flowers – big coloured daisies and a few sweet williams – from Atkinson’s, the greengrocer’s at the top of March Street, and she’d arranged them in the glass vase Jess and Frank had given them.

Olive sat down and snuggled into the curve of his arm.

‘I don’t know. But there was a bit in the paper about it last week.’ She sat up and reached for a sheet of newspaper on the shelf. It was from the Evening News, dated 11 June, and the headline read: War Work With A Punch In It For Girls. Olive began to read aloud, stopping to make her own comments.

‘There’s ever so many different things you can do. Some of the girls are trained as gunner girls.’

‘What, firing guns?’ Derek interrupted. ‘I didn’t think they let girls do that.’

‘I don’t think they actually fire them.’ Olive read on. ‘No, it says the girls spot the raiders and direct the fire. The actual laying and firing – what’s laying, I wonder? – is done by men. But it’s just as important, the paper says. The girls wear battledress and work under the same conditions as the men, and share their mess and all that.’ She gave Derek a mischievous grin. ‘It’s all right, they do sleep separate! Or I could work in Signals. That sounds interesting. It says here you’re right in the “nerve centre” of the Army, replacing signals officers all over the country. I might go anywhere!’ She saw his face and added hurriedly, ‘Mind, being married I expect they’d try and keep me around here. Or I might get sent down to Wiltshire. That’d be the ticket, wouldn’t it, if we were in the same camp.’

‘I’ll believe that when I see it,’ Derek said cynically, but he added, ‘Go on, Livvy. What else does it say?’

‘They’re looking for women with a bit more schooling too,’ she said, her finger on the small print. ‘They train you for whatever you’re going to do, of course, but they don’t need any standard of education for those jobs. Just as well!’ She laughed. ‘But anyone who stayed on and got School Certificate or anything like that, they’ll get put with the Royal Artillery on anti-aircraft and searchlight batteries, or even in gunnery research. If you’re on that you have to go to a “famous army school of research” – it doesn’t say where, of course – and you have a special uniform. It’s a white skirt and dark blue jacket and a forage cap in pale and dark blue. Doesn’t that sound nice! Better than khaki.’

‘Sounds a bit conspicuous to me,’ Derek said. ‘You’d be seen miles away.’

‘It’s meant to be. It was designed in 1600. They didn’t do camouflage then, they wanted to make sure everyone knew which side they were on.’

‘They never had women soldiers then!’

Olive read it again. ‘Well, perhaps not. It’s been designed to match the men’s uniforms, but they were designed then, so it comes to the same thing. Still, I don’t suppose I’ll be doing that. We never did science at school.’

‘Is that all? What about office jobs? That’s what you’re good at.’

Olive didn’t hear him. She was still reading the article.

‘Here’s something that’d suit Gladys Shaw. They have drivers too, for convoy driving. They take trucks and lorries and all sorts – even tanks, I wouldn’t be surprised – all over Britain. Sometimes they’re away from headquarters for four or five nights.’ She lifted her head and gazed at her husband, her eyes shining. ‘Think of it. Cornwall this week, the Highlands of Scotland the next. I’ve always wanted to go to those places. Oh, I wish I’d learnt to drive when Gladys did!’

‘Well, I’m not sorry you didn’t,’ Derek declared. ‘Look, Livvy, I don’t want to stand in your light, but how d’you think I’d feel, never knowing where you were? I mean, it’s bad enough now when we hear there’s been a raid on Pompey and I don’t know if you were in it. But if you were driving all over the country, I’d be scared all the time that you’d been in some place that had got hit. And Army camps aren’t the safest places to be in, you know. The Germans aim for them more than anything.’

‘I know.’ She laid the newspaper down and sighed. ‘Don’t you want me to go and register, Derek? Only I just can’t stand seeing Gladys with her broken arm and her medal and thinking I’m not doing anything at all. And I think girls like me are going to be called up soon anyway.’

Derek didn’t answer at once. Then he said slowly, ‘I wish you didn’t have to do it, Livvy. I don’t like the idea that girls have to get mixed up in this war. But there it is, and if you’ve got to join up I’d rather you were doing something you enjoyed.’ He repeated his previous question. ‘What about office jobs? There must be plenty of those, and you’ve got good experience.’

Olive wrinkled her nose. ‘To tell you the truth, Derek, I’d be glad to get out of the office. I’ve never really liked being stuck behind a desk messing about with invoices and such. Some of these jobs sound really interesting. And I’d feel I was doing something.’ Her eyes strayed again to the headline and the photograph of ATS girls in their uniforms, lining up for parade.

‘You’d be doing something in an office,’ Derek pointed out, but his voice sounded half-hearted, as if he knew that she really didn’t want to be persuaded. ‘Well, what sort of pay will you get? I’ve heard it’s pretty low. D’you think you’ll be able to manage? I’ll send you mine of course, same as I’ve been doing,’

Olive shook her head. ‘Oh, I shan’t need to use any of that, Derek. We’ll put it away. I want to save up for our home, when all this is over.’ She looked back at the newspaper. ‘There’s a bit here about the pay. Some girls only start at two shillings a day – mind, that’s for Sundays as well, so that’s fourteen shillings a week – but if you get promoted you can be getting nearly thirty-five bob a week. And all found. No rent or bills to pay, all your food provided, and all your clothes. Even your toothbrush! And they keep up the National Insurance, so there’s really nothing to come out of that, it’s all pocket-money. I should be able to save quite a bit.’

‘You know you’re going to get promoted then?’ he said with a grin.

‘I’m going to try my best to be,’ Olive declared. She looked at him again. ‘Derek, I’m sorry if you don’t like it. I could always see if I can get out of it, if you really want me to. I mean, I’m working for your dad in his office – they might let me off.’

‘How long for? They’d be calling you up soon anyway.’ He shook his head. ‘No, I reckon we’ve got to make the best of it, Livvy, and like I said before, I’d rather you were happy.’ He reached out and drew her close again. ‘Matter of fact, I think I’ll be rather proud of you when you’re in uniform. And I’ll tell you what –’ his face was very close to hers now, his lips brushing her cheek in the way that made her stomach quiver ‘– I’ve never kissed a soldier before. It’ll be a new experience for me!’

‘Derek Harker!’ Olive pulled away, pretending to be shocked, and then laughed and let him pull her close again. ‘I should just hope you haven’t,’ she murmured into his neck. ‘So you’d better start getting some practice in now, hadn’t you, for when I come home in khaki.’

With a swift movement, Derek slid her into a lying position on the settee. He lay above her, resting on his elbows, and looked down into her face. She stared back at him, her heart beating quickly, a teasing, provocative smile on her lips.

‘Oh, Livvy,’ he said, and his voice came out like a groan. ‘Why do we have to be apart? Why can’t we be together like this all the time? This bloody, bloody war …’

At first, Jess Budd hardly noticed the old man, shuffling slowly along September Street on that bright June morning of 1941. There were too many like him these days – homeless victims of the blitz that had torn their city to shreds during the past few months. They were housed in church halls or schools, anywhere where a few mattresses could be spread out and people fed while the authorities tried to find them somewhere else to live. And with their workplaces destroyed too, as often as not, there was nothing else to do but wander the streets.

Jess felt sorry for him. He might have only just been bombed out, she thought, glancing at the face behind the straggling grey whiskers, the eyes peering through thick glasses. There had been a raid on Portsmouth the night before, and a huge bomb had dropped in Torrington Road. It had burrowed its way b