I went through the motions of greeting the neighbours, of laughing and exclaiming, but all the time I wanted desperately to be alone. My thoughts during the service had been so close to Angus, and this had left a knot of tension tightening in me like a physical ache.

It was a showery day, the sky busy with cloud. I just wanted to walk and walk and have time to think by myself.

‘Where are you going?’ Mummy called after me as I took off along the road with my umbrella.

‘I’m just going to have a look round for a bit,’ I called back over my shoulder.

‘But that nice Mr Craven said he’d come round to the house . . .’ Gladys’s voice wafted to me along the pavement.

I knew this perfectly well, and it was another reason I had to take off. I turned and waved vaguely as if I hadn’t heard properly, calling, ‘Back soon!’ I knew Mummy and Gladys would be all right together listening to all that was going on on the wireless.

Without really deciding where to go I turned automatically towards the centre of Birmingham, walking fast, needing to let off steam and exhaust myself. As I did so I looked down the side streets and could see all the hurried preparations going on for street parties, the trestle tables draped with sheets and people bustling around, some already wearing coloured paper hats. Miles of bunting was going up, rippling above the tables in the side streets, and Union Jacks brightened the grimy fronts of the houses, and everywhere movement of people, shouting, laughing.

Down one street in Balsall Heath a pair of trousers adorned the middle of one of the lines of bunting. I found myself smiling as I heard Douglas’s voice in my head: ‘Still hanging out the washing on the Siegfried Line!’ and I was startled by the way I was becoming used to his jokes, to him.

It started raining and I put up my umbrella, but the rain didn’t chase anyone from the streets for long. I walked down into our battered city, hearing bursts of cheering and bands playing as I moved into the crowded streets in the heart of Birmingham. I felt a rush of loneliness at being there alone on this day, but at the same time it was fitting. It was a day of turmoil for everyone, in its way, and I could not have stood company just then, such was the tension of mixed feelings inside me. But I wanted to be out here amid the frenzied activity of the city, to be part of it on a day when we all stood poised on the rim of the future. I suppose here in all this communal uncertainty I was longing to find the way to orientate myself in my own life. To work out what direction I should take next.

Around me pasty, tired faces smiled along the streets, chattered and shrieked with excitement under the ripple of flags. People were breaking into singing and dancing. A group of women cavorted across New Street with their arms linked singing ‘Knees up Mother Brown’ and pushing their legs up high, and I heard ‘Roll Out the Barrel’ clashing with it from further down the road, and whistles and cheers and shouts of laughter.