Moonlight & Lovesongs

by Lilian Harry

Genres: World War II; Sagas

Synopsis

A warm and poignant story set against the backdrop of a great English seaport at war from the Sunday Times bestselling author. As the Second World War enters its final year, the spirit of the close-knit community in April Grove, Portsmouth refuses to die. Teenager Carol Glaister, forced to give up her baby son, becomes increasingly obsessed by the need to find him again. Ambitious, sexy Diane Shaw leaves the aviation factory for a career in the WAAFs but discovers she is up against far more than she bargained for - in both work and love. And Olive Harker struggles to stay true to a husband she has barely seen since the war began, her love challenged in a way she would never have dreamed possible.

Release date: August 19, 2010

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 471

Sample

Even in wartime Portsmouth, a wedding could run to a bit of cake. The whole of April Grove had contributed towards Betty Chapman’s, and everyone was entitled to a few crumbs to wish the newlyweds well. Right down to Ethel Glaister, who’d handed over a few spoonfuls of dried egg with hardly a grudging look, and old Granny Kinch, Ethel’s arch-enemy, who had pressed a sticky paper bag containing a few sultanas, hardened by long incarceration at the back of a cupboard, into Annie Chapman’s hand.

‘You give the girl a good send-off,’ she’d said with a toothless smile. ‘She’s a good girl, your Betty. Always ’ad a soft spot for ’er, I ’ave.’

There was no icing, of course. It seemed funny to have a cake with no icing, and funny that an iced cake should be against the law, but a lot of things were funny in this war. Not that funny was the right word, Annie thought as she cut the cake into small slices and set each in the middle of a square of greaseproof paper. Queer was better. Queer, and sad and downright heartbreaking. And – yes – sometimes funny as well. But, most of all, worrying.

I didn’t know what worry was before all this started, she thought. None of us did. We didn’t know we were born.

Her mother, Mary, was sitting in the old Windsor armchair she’d brought from the house at North End, after Arthur had died. It hadn’t been easy to persuade Mary to come and live with Annie and Ted in April Grove, but she’d agreed at last, quite suddenly, as if she were collapsing. Since then, she’d more or less taken root in that old chair, willing enough to do any little jobs you might give her, like shelling peas or top-and-tailing gooseberries, but otherwise not doing anything except just sit there, staring at nothing, her wrinkled old hands folded in her lap, her lips working as if she were talking silently to someone nobody else could see. When Annie thought of her mother as she used to be, always active, always busy, it brought the tears to her eyes.

There was too much else to cry about these days, though, and once you started you’d never stop. There was Colin, Annie’s son, who’d joined the Navy before the war and gone swaggering off in his bell-bottoms. He had been serving on HMS Exeter when she’d chased the Graf Spee all over the world back in 1940, and was still serving on her when she’d been sunk in the Java Sea over a year ago. It was only yesterday – at Betty and Dennis’s wedding reception – that they’d heard he was a Japanese prisoner of war, and Annie still felt weak at the knees as she relived the moment when she’d read the telegram. Colin, alive. Colin, safe. A prisoner of war, it was true, and they were starting to say some funny – no, queer – things about the Japanese, but alive and safe all the same.

This time, the tears did come and she brushed her hand across her eyes hastily, not wanting them to drop on a bit of cake.

‘They made a lovely couple,’ Mary said suddenly, breaking into Annie’s thoughts with a voice as dry and dusty as Granny Kinch’s sultanas. ‘I still don’t know why Betty couldn’t ’ave wore a white frock. You don’t think they’d bin – well, you know …?’

‘I don’t think any such thing, Mum,’ Annie said sharply. ‘Betty’s a good girl, you know that, and young Dennis is religious. It’s because he’s a Quaker that she never wore white. They don’t believe in it.’

She folded greaseproof paper over a piece of cake with exaggerated care. In her mind, she wasn’t nearly as sure as she’d have liked to believe about Betty and Dennis. They’d been walking out together a long time, and who knew what could have gone on at that farm where Betty was a land girl, what with all the haystacks and long grass and that, and no mother to keep an eye on them? The Spencers were a decent enough couple, it was true, but they couldn’t be expected to take the same care as if Betty’d been their own daughter, and maybe things were different out in the country.

Religious though Dennis might be, it was a queer sort of religion, when all was said and done. Wouldn’t fight for his country – and what a to-do that had created in the family! She still went hot and cold when she thought of that speech Ted had made at the wedding, even though it had turned out all right in the end. Wouldn’t argue the point, which exasperated Ted nearly as much when all he wanted was a good set-to, with Dennis ending up by seeing it Ted’s way. Wouldn’t take his hat off to any man, not even the King himself, nor call anyone ‘sir’ which was their right and proper entitlement. Yet a quieter or more respectful young man you’d go a long day’s march to meet, and he’d risked his life time and time again in bomb disposal. It didn’t add up, somehow, and when things didn’t add up ordinary folk like Annie and Ted felt uneasy.

‘He’ll make Betty a good husband, all the same,’ she said aloud, to herself as much as to her mother. ‘Even though he’s blind and lost a couple of fingers in that explosion. You can tell they think the world of each other. He’s learning to do things round the farm already, so that Mr Spencer was telling me.’ She laughed suddenly. ‘Even if he did creosote the same bit offence twice and leave the next bit bare!’

She finished packing up the cake and put it all in her basket. ‘There, that’s done. Our Olive can take those bits and pieces round the neighbours when she comes in. She’s just gone up the road to see Florrie Harker.’ Florrie Harker was Olive’s mother-in-law.

The back door opened and Olive came into the kitchen. Gladys Shaw was with her. Annie smiled. She’d always got on well with Peggy Shaw, Gladys’s mother, although before the war she’d not had a lot of time for Gladys, nor her younger sister Diane – a pair of flighty pieces, she’d thought them. But Gladys had proved what stuff she was made of when she’d driven an ambulance all through the Blitz, saving goodness knows how many lives, and finally been presented with a medal by the King – not that the King himself had actually pinned it on her chest, but the Chief Constable had and that was nearly as good. Now she was nursing at the Royal Hospital.

‘Those the pieces of cake?’ Olive asked, seeing the basket on the table. ‘I hope you left a bit for tea, and I wouldn’t mind some to take back to camp with me.’

‘Go on, there’s not enough to feed half the Army,’ Annie said. ‘You take those bits round and then I’ll see what we can spare … You’ll take a bit for your Bob, won’t you, Gladys? He’ll appreciate that, out in the desert.’

‘That’s if it gets past the censor,’ Gladys said with a grin. ‘If they don’t eat it, they’ll blow it up. I was ever so pleased to hear about Colin,’ she added, rather shyly. She’d been carrying a torch for him ever since before he joined up, Annie thought, feeling sorry for the girl. She was sure Colin had never done anything to encourage her. ‘D’you know an address I could write to? I know they like getting letters from home,’ she added, turning pink.

‘I’m sure he’d like to hear from you,’ Annie said, ‘but we don’t know any details yet. Just the telegram that said he’d been reported as a prisoner of war. I’ll let you know as soon as we hear anything more.’

‘Trust our Col to fall on his feet,’ Olive remarked carelessly. ‘I never did believe he was lost. Take more than a ship sinking to get rid of him. You’ll see, soon as the war’s over he’ll be back, strutting about pretending he’s cock of the walk and shooting old man Jones’s cats with a bow and arrow from the turret.’

Gladys laughed, but Annie’s mouth twisted a little as she smiled. Her emotions were too near the surface to let her take it as lightly as Olive seemed to. They’d waited for news of Colin for a whole year, never knowing whether he was alive or dead, and she still hadn’t properly taken it in.

‘He can shoot all the cats in the street,’ she said, ‘as long as he comes home safe and sound,’ and her eyes filled with sudden tears.

Olive made a face, annoyed with herself for being so tactless. ‘I’m sorry, Ma. I didn’t mean to upset you. We’ll all be glad to have Colin back. And I’m as thankful as you that he’s safe. You know, I reckon they’re better off as POWs. At least you know they’re not having to fight any more.’

Annie nodded, determinedly pushing away the rumours about what the Japanese were doing. She got up and laid a clean tea towel over the small greaseproof packets in the basket.

‘There you are. You take those round while I get the tea ready. How’s your Diane?’ she asked Gladys. ‘I hear she’s going in the WAAF.’

Gladys nodded. ‘She’s hoping to hear any day. She’s just about old enough; they’re taking them at seventeen and a half now. Dad’s not too pleased – he says she could get exemption, with working at Airspeed – but nothing’ll satisfy her except getting into uniform.’ She sighed and looked disparagingly at her own grey dress. ‘Wish I could. I reckon they’ve forgotten me, it’s been so long since I applied. The Wrens are the most popular, see, with Pompey being a Naval town, and they had thousands right at the beginning.’

‘Nursing’s just as good war work,’ Annie said. ‘You know that.’

Gladys and Olive went out and strolled along the pavement. April Grove ran alongside a large area of allotments which stretched away almost like a little bit of countryside, with plots freshly dug and sown. Broad beans were poking their green leaves an inch or so above ground now, and the potatoes weren’t far behind. Anyone who was able to do a bit of gardening had an allotment and grew their own vegetables, and a lot of them grew soft fruit as well. The homes of April Grove and the other streets round about were as well stocked with jams and bottled fruit as sugar rationing would allow.

‘Mum and Dad are thinking of keeping hens,’ Olive remarked. ‘Uncle Frank’s getting some. Rhode Island Reds, he’s going in for. And a couple of cockerels – he says they’ll be ready for the table by Christmas.’

‘I know.’ Gladys lived next door to Frank and Jess Budd and had seen the coop being built. With Frank’s shed at the bottom of the garden and the Anderson shelter in between, it took up most of the space that was left. There was just room for the tomatoes to be planted in the square bit left at the top, and Jess’s washing line to be strung along the path. ‘I hope they don’t crow too much, specially when I’m on night shift.’

Olive laughed. ‘After four years of air-raid sirens, a few cocks crowing won’t make much difference.’ She stopped. ‘Here, isn’t that Carol Glaister coming down March Street with her mum?’

Gladys stopped too and they watched the pair walking rather self-consciously down the street. Ethel Glaister looked much as usual, in her powder-blue costume that she’d had since before the war started, with a bit of frilly veiling that was supposed to be a hat. She wore high-heeled shoes, white gloves and a dainty brooch on the lapel of her jacket, and all she needed was a flower in her buttonhole to look as if she was going to a wedding.

Carol, however, looked as if she’d just got out of bed after a night spent in her clothes. She was wearing an ill-fitting skirt, bunched around her waist, with a grubby white blouse and an old winter coat in brown herringbone tweed which she’d left unbuttoned. Her shoes were scuffed and hadn’t seen a brush or a bit of polish in weeks. She looked tired, her skin muddy and her hair lank, in contrast to her mother’s brightly made-up face and Marcel-waved hair.

Ethel Glaister looked vexed at seeing Olive and Gladys. She hesitated briefly, then walked on, looking as if she meant to march past them with no more than a nod, but Gladys stood in her way and she was forced to stop.

‘Hello, Mrs Glaister. Hello, Carol. It’s a long time since we saw you – how did you like Devon, then?’

The story Ethel had given out was that Carol had gone down to Devon to help look after her sister Shirley, who was staying with relatives there, but everyone knew Carol had been in a home for unmarried mothers, having a baby. The baby had been adopted and the whole thing had caused a lot of talk in April Grove, with the older people sniffing their disapproval and the younger ones half inclined to stand up for Carol. Most of them were well aware that there, by the grace of God, went they, although some of them, like Diane Shaw, scoffed at Carol for ‘getting caught’.

What must it be like to give your baby away? Olive thought now, staring at the younger girl. She thought of the one she’d lost before it could even be born, and the one she and Derek had tried for before he went away. Her disappointment when she discovered a couple of weeks later that they’d failed had been nearly as great as when she’d had the miscarriage.

But Carol had actually given birth to a live baby, a little boy, and had looked after it for six weeks in the home before it went to new parents. How had she felt about that?

‘Devon was all right,’ Carol said in a dreary voice. She had gone to her relatives there for a few weeks after leaving the home, but there wasn’t really room for her and in the end Ethel had agreed to have her back home again. Neither of them relished the prospect much. ‘Plymouth’s much the same as Pompey, really.’

‘Go on, don’t they get lots of cream and stuff there?’ Gladys asked. ‘I thought you’d come back as fat as butter.’ Olive nudged her sharply, and Gladys blushed. ‘Well, you know what I mean … So what are you going to do now, get a job? Or join up?’

‘Carol’s not old enough to join up,’ Ethel said sharply. ‘Anyway, I want her at home to give me a hand. It’s time she did a bit to help out.’

She jerked at Carol’s arm and turned away, clacking down the pavement in her high heels. Carol shrugged, gave the two girls an apathetic glance, and followed her.

‘She looks really fed up,’ Gladys said. ‘And that coat! It looks like one old Granny Kinch might have thrown out. Well, I wouldn’t want to be her, stuck in that house with a cat like Mrs Glaister.’

‘I wonder what happened to her baby,’ Olive said. ‘I wonder if she knows where he’s gone. They take them miles away sometimes, and don’t tell you who’s got them, or anything. One of the girls on the gun was telling me about it.’

‘I suppose they think it’s better that way. Gives you a chance to forget about it. I mean, there’s no good hankering after it once you’ve made up your mind, is there? You’ve just got to put it behind you and start again.’

Olive couldn’t see how that would be possible. Forget you’d had a baby? When you’d carried it in your body for nine months, given birth to it, held it in your arms and fed it? When you’d looked after it for six weeks – bathed it, cuddled it, seen its first smile? She shuddered, feeling the pain as sharply as if she’d shared Carol’s experience. That poor kid, she thought. No wonder she looks so awful. But you couldn’t expect Gladys to understand that.

‘Come on,’ she said, ‘let’s get rid of this cake. Mum’s packed up enough slices for the whole street.’ She sighed. ‘I ought to have given Mrs Glaister and Carol a bit, I suppose. That means I’ll have to knock on their door. I just hope it doesn’t upset that poor girl too much.’

There was no need to call at number 14 with wedding cake. Jess Budd was Annie’s sister and Betty and Olive’s aunt, and she had helped with the wedding, using her dressmaking skills to make the grey frock that had given Annie such heartache, and saving lard and margarine for sausage rolls for the reception. She and the rest of the family had had their share of cake, though she knew the boys, Tim and Keith, would have eagerly accepted more if they’d had the chance.

‘That’s to go round everyone,’ she’d told them sternly when they’d looked askance at the minute portions they’d been given on Saturday. ‘It’s a token, that’s all. It’s not meant to keep you from death’s door.’

‘It wouldn’t keep a mouse from death’s door, a tiny piece like that,’ Tim had grumbled. ‘I don’t see the point of little bits of cake. I’m going to have doughnuts at my wedding.’

‘Who will you marry?’ Keith asked with interest. ‘Wendy Atkinson? She’s about the right age. Or maybe Stella, or Muriel. They need a husband, now they’ve got no mum or dad.’

Tim scowled. The thought of a wedding, at some distant point in the future, was one thing – actually considering any of the girls he knew as a bride was quite another. ‘I shan’t marry any of them. Actually, I probably won’t get married at all. Wives aren’t much use to explorers.’

‘They can help them pack, and have tea ready for them when they get home,’ Keith pointed out. ‘It’s like the Home Front. There has to be someone to do all the work while the men are away.’

The boys were out now, roaming around some of their old haunts. Keith would be going back to Bridge End later this afternoon, to the old vicarage where he’d been staying as an evacuee. Tim had been there too, until a few weeks ago, and he’d been happy enough until he’d had to leave the village primary school and go to the secondary school at Winchester. It was the Portsmouth school really, but like a lot of other schools they’d had to try to fit two lots of pupils into one space, taking turns with the classrooms and playing fields. After the muddle over his scholarship exam, Tim had never settled down again and in the end it had been decided he would be better off at home, where he was working for the local chemist as a delivery boy and waiting for an apprenticeship to come up.

The boys’ elder sister Rose was indoors with Jess and Maureen, who was nearly four. Maureen was playing on the floor with a set of old wooden building bricks and a bag of coloured marbles. She spent hours like this, arranging the bricks in enclosures and shifting the marbles around between them, sometimes one or two at a time, sometimes in clusters. Sometimes Tim would let her play with a couple of old Dinky toys he had – a car with an open top and a Pickfords furniture van with a rear door that really opened – and she would settle some of the marbles in the car seats for all the world as if they were people, and push them around on the rag rug.

‘There’s something wrong with her,’ Rose said. ‘Why doesn’t she play with dolls, like other little girls?’

‘Well, there aren’t many dolls around for her to play with, are there?’ Jess said. ‘Only that old one of yours with the china head, and she don’t seem to like that one all that much. And the rag doll I made her that she takes to bed, and the golliwog Cherry knitted for her.’

‘That’s three. That’s as many as I ever had,’ Rose said with a touch of resentment. Rose was almost sixteen now and she’d grown out of the novelty of having a baby sister. It had been all right when Maureen was a baby, she thought, a real one in a pram you could push around the streets. It had been nice having her to cuddle and play with and feed with a spoon, though she hadn’t been so keen on the nappy-changing part. But a four-year-old was a very different matter, always wanting to poke her fingers in where they weren’t wanted, and forever asking questions. Maybe it was as well to leave her quietly playing on the rug with her bricks and marbles.

‘I wonder sometimes what’s going on in that little head,’ Jess observed. ‘I mean, look how she’s got them all arranged. It’s almost as if she’s making up a story with them. She’s in a world of her own half the time.’

There was a knock on the door and a moment later they heard Peggy Shaw’s voice calling. The door was never locked during the day and Peggy, who lived next door in number 13, was a close enough friend to just pop in, but she always called out first. That was only polite. She came in now, thin and wiry, bristling with energy as usual, her eyes snapping, and behind her, scarlet with excitement, came her daughter Diane.

‘Guess what! Our Di’s got her papers from the WAAF. Came this morning. She’s tickled pink but my Bert’s proper upset. Says he’ll go along and try to get her out of it—’

Diane butted in. ‘He can’t do that. It’s the law now, girls of seventeen and a half—’

‘Yes, but you don’t really have to go, not when you’re already doing important war work, making planes,’ Peggy said, clearly continuing an argument which had been going on for some time. She turned back to Jess. ‘I’m not even sure they’ll let her go from Airspeed, but she’s so mad about flying, she won’t take no for an answer. Not that she’ll ever get the chance to fly. Well, it stands to reason she won’t, doesn’t it, a bit of a girl, not when there’s all those chaps—’

‘They’re letting women fly,’ Rose interrupted. Jess frowned at her, but she continued, ‘I read about it the other day. They’re building so many planes, there just aren’t enough men to take them to the airfields. They need the RAF pilots for bombing and fighting anyway, so they’re letting women do it. They wouldn’t be able to manage without the women.’

Diane looked pleased. ‘See, that’s just what I told you,’ she said to her mother, and then to Rose, ‘You’ll be able to volunteer yourself soon, won’t you? Why don’t you try the WAAF as well? We might get posted together.’

‘Rose has got a long time before she needs think about that,’ Jess said sharply. The thought of any of her children having to go to war filled her with terror. It was bad enough having the boys evacuated, so that they’d never been able to be a proper family, all together, since Maureen was a few weeks old. ‘She’s nearly two years younger than you, Diane.’

‘Oh, that doesn’t matter,’ Diane said offhandedly. ‘You don’t have to show your birth certificate. I don’t reckon they ever check up: they’re too glad to get people. And Rose looks older than fifteen when she does her hair up. I bet she’d pass all right.’

‘Well, she’s not going to try,’ Jess said, annoyed. ‘She’s all right at home, learning shorthand and typing. That’ll be a lot more use to her after the war than flying an aeroplane.’

Diane shrugged. She was too excited at having got her own way to bother about what other people said, and she was looking forward to leaving home and getting some independence. Her father’s insistence that she should be home by ten-thirty at night was getting beyond a joke.

‘Have you heard about the Americans?’ she asked Rose now. ‘They’re coming to Pompey soon – soldiers, sailors, airmen, the lot. That’ll brighten the place up a bit.’

‘Well, you needn’t think you’ll be mixing with them,’ Peggy said. ‘It’s best to keep with your own sort. They’re different from us, Americans, you don’t know what their standards are.’

‘Go on, they’re all right,’ Rose said. ‘I’ve seen them on films. They’re just like us, except they talk with American accents and live in big houses. I think it’d be smashing to have a Yankee boyfriend, don’t you, Diane?’

Jess pursed her lips. Rose hadn’t had a boyfriend at all yet, and she agreed with Peggy that the girls should stay with their own kind. She didn’t want Rose influenced by Diane, either. Peggy was a good friend, but there was no doubt that her younger daughter was flighty, always had been.

‘You’d better get back indoors,’ Peggy said severely to Diane. ‘And if you think you’re going to join the WAAF just so you can stay out late and get up to goodness knows what with Americans, you can think again, young lady. You’re still under your father’s and my control till you’re twenty-one, war or no war, and don’t you forget it.’

Diane rolled her eyes towards Rose and pulled a comical face. Rose giggled and the two older women sighed. There was just no telling young people these days, and they both knew that Peggy’s words were empty really. How could you control a girl once she was away from home? You just had to hope and pray they’d remember all they’d been taught. And some of them forgot even before they’d left their own front rooms. Like Carol Glaister, next door.

I don’t know what I’d do if our Rose got into that sort of a mess, Jess thought as Diane whispered something that made both girls go off into fits of giggles. I just don’t know what I’d do. You can’t feel safe with any of them now, till they’re decently married off like Olive and Betty.

‘Here,’ she said to Peggy. ‘Have a cup of tea. The kettle’s boiled five minutes ago, and I’ve got a nice piece of wedding cake here, that Annie gave me. I reckon we deserve a treat.’

Receiving a piece of Betty Chapman’s wedding cake almost as soon as she’d got inside the door of number 15, was something Carol Glaister could have done without. Coming home for the first time for nearly a year was bad enough, especially considering all the things that had happened during that year, and walking back into her mother’s front room, with its fussy little knick-knacks and antimacassars on the chairs, felt like walking back into a trap.

‘You needn’t think you’re going to be Lady Muck here,’ Ethel said sharply as Carol put down her shabby cardboard suitcase. ‘You might have bin living in a big house all this time, with bathrooms and inside lavatories, but we don’t run to that kind of thing in April Grove. Not but what we couldn’t have had a bath put in the scullery with a lid over it, like Mrs Hawkins has got round Carlisle Crescent, if your father had put his mind to it,’ she added bitterly.

‘I wasn’t exactly waited on hand and foot in the home,’ Carol answered. ‘We had to do all the cooking and cleaning. Like slaves, we were.’

‘And quite right too. Teach you a few home truths. I reckon I always did too much for you. Why, you couldn’t even knit before you went away.’

‘I can now.’ Carol thought of all the tiny garments she had knitted during the past year. There hadn’t been a moment when you could sit down with your hands idle. You had to be doing something all the time – knitting, sewing, hemming and stitching, for the babies that were expected. And if it wasn’t that, it was socks for the Army, or balaclava helmets. There seemed to be no end to the socks and balaclava helmets soldiers could get through.

‘Anyway,’ she said, reverting to her mother’s earlier remark, ‘you can’t say I was living in a big house down in Devon. Ten of us there was in that little cottage. We had to take turns to breathe.’

‘You needn’t be clever with me, miss,’ her mother retorted. ‘I had enough of that before. Too easy with you, I was, and look where that got us. Now you’re back, we’ll have things a bit different. You’ll do as you’re told and you’ll do some work around the place. I’ve had enough of being a skivvy.’

Carol gazed at her. Like all the other houses in April Grove, except for the Chapmans’ at the far end, number 15 had only two rooms downstairs and two bedrooms above, with a lean-to scullery and an outside lavatory. Some years before, Ethel had bullied her husband George into glassing over the area between the scullery and the wall between them and number 14, turning it into what Ethel grandly called ‘the conservatory’. It made more room and meant you didn’t have to put on your mac to go to the lav, but the house was still really just a two-up, two-down, and with only Ethel living there it couldn’t have made much work.

‘I don’t see how you can call yourself a skivvy,’ Carol said. ‘With Dad away in the Army, and our Joe at sea, and Shirl down in Devon still—’

‘Well, you’ll make more work, won’t you, just being here. There’ll be your bed to make and sheets and clothes to wash, and your meals to get, not to mention all the dust and dirt you’ll drag in on your shoes.’ Ethel slammed the door of the front room. ‘Come on. We’ll keep at least one room decent.’

What does she think I’m going to do, keep pigs in there? Carol thought as she followed her mother into the back room, where the family spent most of their time. But Ethel had always been proud of her front room. She’d tried to make them call it the ‘parlour’ and all her best ornaments were in there, together with the bone china tea set with roses on which was displayed in a glass-fronted cupboard, and the cushions she’d embroidered herself, as plump and untouched as the day she’d first set them carefully in position, balanced on their points, in the two armchairs. Small though the house was, the room was only used at Christmas or if there were visitors for tea on Sunday afternoons, and the rest of the family had always preferred the back room, which was as shabby as any room could be that Ethel had anything to do with, and comfortably cluttered.

However, there wasn’t much sign of a family now. Since Joe had joined the Royal Navy, Ethel had put away all the clutter of model aeroplanes and ships which he’d made, all the cigarette cards and copies of Hotspur and Wizard which he’d left piled up in a corner, and all the Joe Loss records he’d saved up for. They were all in a box on top of the wardrobe, waiting for him to come back again. She’d thrown out all her husband George’s stuff – the pokerwork pipe-holder Joe had made him, the p