Emma Jones was already sound asleep in her bed when Pru walked into the dimly lit room they shared, and undressed. They had been roommates for a year, and after a stormy beginning, had become fast friends. Pru had heard that Emma had had a rough flight that day and lost a patient, which was rare for her. Of all of them, she had been a nurse for the longest time before the war. Emma had grown up in the slums in the East End of London. Her father had died at the end of the Great War shortly before she was born. Her mother had died of drink when Emma was fifteen. She’d spent three years in a Catholic home for orphans after that, and had somehow resisted the usual temptations of prostitution and minor crime to survive. She had no family, had grown up dirt poor, and had all the toughness and the accent of the East End that went with it when she and Pru met in the RAF.

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.