Before either of them had even begun cooking tea, Katie went to her mother in the kitchen. Vera was standing at the sink in the scullery, her hands in water.

‘I’m very sorry if I’ve upset you,’ she said. ‘I never meant to. I was just out with someone I met. I wasn’t doing anything wrong, I promise.’

Vera turned her head, and for a second her eyes wore a harsh expression as if she was about to speak angrily. Then she looked down at her hands in the water.

‘You must . . .’ She swallowed. ‘You must consider my feelings. Here I am, all alone . . . You go off, and I’ve got no idea where you are, whether you’re with some man.’

‘But—’ Katie tried to interrupt. She hardly ever went out! Her mother was making her sound like a wild and uncontrolled man-eater!

Vera silenced her again with a look. She lifted her hands out of the sink and reached for the towel on its nearby hook.

‘I think it would be better if you didn’t go out of an evening.’ She dried her hands and put the towel back. ‘I mean, look what happened to your uncle . . .’ She covered her eyes with a hand for a moment. Katie realized they both knew that Uncle Patrick’s death had not been an accident, but never could this be admitted out loud. ‘At least until the war’s over.’

‘Until the war’s over?’ Katie was outraged ‘But that could be years – we don’t know when it’s going to end, do we?’

‘Of course not – but did you hear what I said? I’m not having it. You’ll stay in.’

Katie had not had much of a social life before, but she had at least seen some of her girlfriends. She’d more or less lost touch with her old school friend Amy, who had worked on the Woolworth’s counters after leaving school, had married a boy called Dickie when she was seventeen and moved over to Northfield. So far as Katie knew, Amy was looking after their little boy while Dickie was away in the army. And with her mother’s curfew on her, which she was sitting out, hoping that she would soon change her mind, Katie only managed to see Ann or Pat on a Saturday.

The nice friendly typist she met when she went to the firm for the first time must have left by the time she got there, as she never saw her again. One or two of the other girls in the pool were nice enough, but the other shorthand typists at Collinge’s were older than her, and though none were as old and fearsome-looking as Miss Hurley, they were more like mothers to her than friends. There was an especially kind one called Maureen, who sometimes stopped by and asked how she was getting on.

At first she found the work daunting. There was the walk into the factory, being eyed up by the young men with their loud, saucy banter and admiring remarks thrown in her direction. She tried to ignore it, but she dreaded ever being sent down into the works and having to walk past lines of the gawping, greasy-handed young men. And there was her boss, Mr Graham, a crusty, heavy-featured man in his forties, who came to work in a shiny, badly fitting suit. He smoked almost constantly and sent her out in the dinner break to buy him Capstan Navy Cut tobacco to feed his hungry pipe. She came home with her clothes stinking of it at the end of each day. He was pleasant enough, but was under pressure and curt with her, especially at first when she made mistakes and misunderstood things about the work schedules that she was hammering out on her big Remington typewriter.