She told Katie that the firm off Bradford Street, which made carburettors, urgently needed a secretary for one of their quite-senior staff.

‘Shall I tell them you’re interested? They’re offering four pounds a week.’

‘Yes, please!’ Katie said.

She left the office daunted, but excited. Four pounds! That was a hell of a step up from her present wage of fourteen and six in the typing pool. And to think she started as a filing clerk only five years ago on nine shillings! But she was bright and good at her work: she knew she stood out. Serck Radiators, where she was working now, would give her good references, and her looks didn’t do her any harm, either.

As usual, she was very smartly dressed. Katie had inherited her mother’s elegance along with her father’s dark looks. Ann and Pat, friends with whom she’d shared the two years of evening classes – shorthand, typing and bookkeeping – at the Commercial School in Sparkhill, always said she looked dressed fit to kill. And thanks to Vera’s sewing lessons, Katie could make almost anything. She browsed round the Rag Market for second-hand clothes made of nice materials and remade them into garments to fit her.

‘I wish I could sew like you and your mom,’ Ann would grumble, pulling her badly fitting skirt down as it ruckled up over her plump hips. ‘I always look like a bag of muck tied up in the middle, compared with you!’

Today Katie was wearing a well-tailored suit in an attractive navy twill that Vera had made for her before the war. It always ironed up nicely and looked good as new, and under the jacket she wore a cream blouse with a Peter Pan collar and small pearl buttons. She had had her hair cut recently, level with her shoulders, which brought out its natural wave, and she wore it fashionably rolled and pinned back from her face at the front and sides. Her face had matured and filled out a little; she looked a little older than her years and had turned into a beauty, with her dark-haired Irish looks needing no make-up to improve them. Even the woman at the Labour Exchange looked at her with reluctant admiration.

She made her way across to Bradford Street and climbed the hill, pleased to see the imposing, blackened red-brick frontage of St Anne’s Church up on the right. The sight of it comforted her. She still went to Mass quite regularly. She had missed her uncle such a lot after he died, and still there was an ache in her heart whenever she thought of him. Going to Mass seemed to bring her closer to both him and her father. She had a Mass said for each of them every year, though she didn’t tell her mother about that. In fact, Vera was so nervy these days that Katie didn’t tell her about very much.

A few minutes later she was looking up at an imposing factory building with a row of arched windows on the second floor, below which ran a white banner on which was painted in dark-blue letters: ARTHUR COLLINGE.