‘But I’m here to help,’ I urged her. ‘I thought you wanted to do more nursing?’

‘What’s wanting ever had to do with anything?’ she snapped. She handed the bowl of pig’s flesh to Mrs Drysdale. ‘Here, you could finish this off for me, please.’ We went through to the living room. ‘She’s so wasteful getting the meat off,’ she murmured.

Mummy was up to her eyes in make do and mend. There were old cut up shirts and curtains strewn all over the living-room sofa. She held up a length of curtain material in a yellow and white regency stripe.

‘I thought this would run to a skirt. Or do you think you’d look too much like a stick of rock in it?’

‘No, that would suit me very well.’ I smiled cautiously. ‘It’s just – I’ve decided to delay my midder training for a few months and work in casualty for a bit. Extra help’s needed everywhere.’

Mummy stopped again and looked up at me awkwardly. ‘I suppose I could fit in a few hours at a first aid post. It’s not as if you and William are holding me back any more.’

‘I’m sure they’re crying out for you,’ I said.

The first bombs had fallen on Birmingham in August 1940. The bombardment crescendoed through that foggy, blacked-out winter, right through until April 1941. So much that we had thought solid and sure, familiar landmarks made of weighty stone, caved in like plywood boxes. The bombs destroyed the Market Hall, smashed to rubble sections of Fort Dunlop, Marshal and Snelgrove’s, the Bull Ring, the BSA. People pushed the remains of their belongings from bombed houses to the emergency centres in wheelbarrows and babies’ prams. In November, the fires from Coventry’s sacrifice bled into the sky.

I worked nights in the casualty centre at the Queen’s Hospital in Bath Row. Mummy was doing two-night stints in the first aid post at Moseley Baths.

On one of the heaviest nights of the blitz I set off late for work. Pushing down feverishly on the pedals of my bike I turned into the Moseley Road. There was a light mist which made the going slower with my muffled headlamps. I breathed in mouthfuls of the damp air. Abruptly, the air-raid sirens let out their terrible wail into the night.

‘Damn and blast it!’ I stopped, my stomach churning with nerves. Gas mask. I couldn’t go without it tonight. I tore back home to fetch it and set off again, balancing the box in my wicker bicycle basket.

I had only gone about a mile when I heard the sound of the first planes. In panic I dismounted, and finding myself against the wall of a churchyard, left the bicycle and ducked down in the graveyard, somewhere I would never normally have gone at night on my own. Squatting, head down, hands against the lichen-covered brick of the wall, I became aware of my quick breathing, the beat of my heart, close and hard, and in the distance the drone of the planes.