‘But . . .’ Katie called out, as the door slammed shut. ‘You don’t understand. My husband – he was killed at Arnhem.’ Her voice sunk to a whisper. ‘You stuck-up, cold-hearted bitch.’

No, she thought, standing in the dusk, she couldn’t face any more. She felt cold and shrunken inside. The woman’s words had sliced into her. It was her mother all over again, that stone-hearted sanctimony. Because it was all true: she wasn’t respectable. There was no husband, killed at Arnhem or anywhere else. She was going to be burdened by her shame every day of her life, no matter how much she lied and pretended and put on a brave front. How was she ever going to find a place for herself and her little boy? Somewhere they could just live in peace and make some sort of life? She had hoped to find a place in Handsworth, to be close to her present lodgings, because Maudie, her current landlady, was going to carry on looking after Michael. But maybe that was a vain hope – she’d have to find a place that wasn’t quite so respectable, where people were more desperate for her rent. This dreadful thought sunk into her: the idea of returning to the sort of place where she had grown up, surrounded by poverty.

Trying to pull herself together, she turned for home. She’d go back to the cosy little house near the park, to Maudie and the children. That would cheer her up.

Crossing over the main road in the falling dusk, she headed home along a side street of tall Victorian houses. Even after all this time it still felt like a novelty being able to walk the evening streets and be able to see, after all the war years of blackout when some nights you could scarcely see your hand in front of your face. The neglect that most houses had suffered through the war was shrouded now by the encroaching darkness, and Katie thought how cosy some of them looked, the lights on behind the curtains in the wide windows, many of them with a pretty border at the top, of coloured glass flowers and fruits. These were the sorts of houses where they would have had maids before the war, and maybe a few still did. But all that sort of thing seemed to be dying out. She peered curiously at each house as she passed, hoping to catch a glimpse of the lives going on behind the glass, aching at the thought that she would never have a proper family now, or a normal life.

A movement caught her eye in the downstairs window of a house halfway along. A plump arm and shoulder appeared through the curtains, and something white. There was some operation going on with a pot of glue, a card being stuck into the window. For a moment she shrunk down behind the hedge, waiting until the card had been attached and the person had withdrawn. With curiosity, but not much hope, she crept up the path.