She had been determined to make something of herself as a young girl, and to not wind up like her mother and too many women she knew like her. By sheer grit and determination, she had gotten a scholarship to a state nursing school before the war, became a nurse and then a midwife, and had worked as a midwife in Poplar in the East End. She had remained faithful to her roots. When the bombing of London started, she had joined the army and later the Medical Air Evacuation Transport Squadron as soon as it was formed. She had had a boyfriend when the war started. He’d been shot down and killed over Germany in 1941. She hadn’t loved another man since, and didn’t want to. She concentrated on her work.

She was twenty-six years old, although she was so small she looked like a child at times. But she was all woman and all heart, and fought like a cat, or the street fighter she was, any time she felt she needed to defend someone or something she cared about. She fought for her patients’ lives harder than any nurse Pru had ever known.

They’d had their share of run-ins at first. Emma had a profound distrust of anyone from the upper classes, and she got into arguments with Pru constantly until she finally realized that Pru wasn’t snobbish and didn’t give a damn where Emma had grown up, or that she was from the East End. They had been best friends ever since. She teased Pru at times about where she came from, and Pru returned the favor by calling her an “East End guttersnipe.” The insults they cheerfully exchanged horrified anyone who heard them, only to realize later that the two women loved each other and would have died defending each other. Emma had punched a soldier in a pub once when she thought he had insulted Pru, and a bar fight had broken out all around them. The two women had escaped before the police arrived, and they laughed all the way back to their barracks.

Pru felt bad about the boy she’d heard Emma had lost that day. She knew how hard Emma took her losses and that she always considered it a failure on her part. But no matter how hard they tried, they couldn’t save them all. They tried to, but sometimes the damage was so great that even extreme measures didn’t make a difference. The worst part of their jobs was the men they lost, although the time saved by airlifting them out of the battle zones and flying them back to the hospital saved many of them. It was a new fight for the nurses and the corpsmen every day.

Emma stirred as Pru changed into her nightgown and slipped into her bed across from Emma’s. Emma popped her head up, with her short bright red hair sticking up like a pixie’s. She was half asleep.

“Is that you?” Emma asked sleepily.