‘It’s over …’ Nora spins towards them, her features illuminated by her exploding smile. ‘Bloody hell, Gwen, that’s it! They’ve done it! It’s over!’ She throws back her head and whoops, her shout echoing across the field. The crows erupt from the woods behind them, flapping skywards, past the ghostly half-moon that still graces the clear morning sky.

‘Tommy boy! The war is over!’ Nora grabs Tom under his armpits. Screeching, she whirls him round and around until he is flying like one of his beloved Spitfires. He giggles with delight, a smile splitting his cheeks, but it fails to mask the hint of uncertainty that lurks behind it.

Gwen does not engage with their joyful exuberance. Instead, she drifts forward, the significance of the tumbling bells weighing heavily on her thoughts.

The war is over.

‘Oh, Gwen!’

She gasps as Nora wraps her in an unexpected embrace, rocking her from side to side and squeezing her so tightly she can barely breathe. Released, she stumbles.

‘Our boys will be coming home at last!’ Nora cries. She whips back to Tom. ‘Tom, your daddy is coming home!’

Tom jumps up and down, matching Nora’s ecstatic cheers with his own, but Gwen can tell he doesn’t fully understand. How can he? Nora is fuelling his excitement for a man he has never met, a man who, for him, fails to exist beyond the grey-and-white photograph that sits on the mantelpiece at home. How can he possibly comprehend his father’s return?

And she alone knows he has no need to, because Jack Ellison won’t be coming home.

He promised her.

He promised her faithfully he wouldn’t.

Chapter Two

Jack

June 1939

‘Jack.’

The sudden weight of a hand on his shoulder startles Jack awake. His eyes flare as he recoils from the touch, his arm rising defensively, his boots scrabbling against the rough boards beneath him. He flails like an upturned beetle struggling to right itself.

‘Easy, lad, easy, you’re all right, now. You’re safe.’

The familiar voice penetrates Jack’s blind panic. The tightness in his chest eases and the blood coursing through his veins slows to a placid flow as his ragged breaths taper. He blinks. Striations of sunlight score his vision like lines in an exercise book. His fragmented memory pulls together until he is at last able to fix himself in time and place. Pain races up his stiff limbs as he shifts himself upright, his legs bent before him. He winces, licking his chapped lips.

‘Ben,’ he says at last, acknowledging the grinning face of the man squatting before him.

‘Aye, you daft beggar. Wakey, wakey, rise and shine.’

‘Jesus, but I hurt,’ he groans, stretching his cramped limbs.