‘They’re going to sweep all this away, you know,’ he’d said one evening over tea. ‘All this area’ll go. It’s a new era, now we’ve got a Labour government – they’ve got to do better for the working man, better houses. The lads’ve been talking about it all through the war. They won’t let them get away without doing it now.’

‘Swept away?’ Cynthia said.

‘All these old houses – they’ll have to go.’

Em and Cynthia looked at each other in dismay. They knew that the powers that be had plans, but they weren’t at all sure that they wanted their house swept away.

‘Equal shares – none of this government by the rich. We’ve all had more than enough of that.’

He tried to draw Bob, Em’s dad, into discussions, but Bob, though obviously not in any disagreement with him, was not a great talker. Last year, in the elections after the war, they had voted Labour, even though they were grateful to Winnie Churchill. But it was just odd, hearing Norm suddenly giving off opinions like that. The war had changed him.

‘I’ve seen blokes killed,’ he said tersely to her, when she accused him of being on a soapbox one evening. ‘And I’ll be damned if they’re going to have died for nothing – for it all just to go back to how it was before, with certain people lining their pockets.’

He had also come home with other high hopes – of independence, of starting something up.

‘I’d like my own little business,’ he said to Em, when they were alone in bed, soon after he came back. ‘Not have a boss – to be the one in charge.’

‘But what could you do?’ Em asked. The thought seemed extraordinary to her, and well out of reach.

‘That’s the trouble – I don’t know.’ He sounded frustrated. ‘A shop, maybe?’

But very quickly he was coming down to earth. There was no money for anything new. Norm was having to come to terms, within those first days home, with the fact that the only obvious thing for him to do was go back into the police force, where he’d started out.

Last night, lying with her in the darkness, he’d said sadly. ‘I dunno – I thought things were opening out. That was the feeling I had: I wanted to keep it up, carry on like that. In the war things felt important. We felt important. Now it just feels as if things are closing in, getting smaller, as if there’s nowhere to turn.’

And Em stroked one of his arms, which were wrapped around her, and felt desperate, because it felt as if she and Robbie were part of that closing down and hemming in. As if they were making life for him feel like a prison, shutting him away from his new, high hopes.

IV

KATIE

Thirty

June 1946

She didn’t think she could face knocking on yet another door.

Katie stopped for a moment in the street, trying to hold back the tears that were stinging her eyes. Her throat felt sore with the effort of not crying. The light was at last beginning to die on this long June evening, but there were a few people about and children still playing out, and she didn’t want anyone to see the tear that oozed over and ran down her cheek.