‘You’re a good man, Jim Reilly,’ she said softly. ‘I’m so very lucky to have you love me.’

He cupped her face and gently kissed her lips, her eyes and the tip of her nose. ‘I’m the lucky one, Peggy Reilly,’ he murmured. ‘You’re my heart and my home – my everything – and we will walk into the future knowing the world is finally at peace and a better place for having one another to share it.’

She placed her hand against his heart and looked into his eyes with such love he felt like weeping. ‘One heart, one mind, one love above all others to bind us,’ she whispered. ‘We are truly blessed.’

MEET THE CLIFFEHAVEN FAMILY

PEGGY REILLY is in her early forties, and married to Jim. She is small and slender, with dark, curly hair and lively brown eyes. As if running a busy household and caring for her young daughter wasn’t enough, she also runs the local uniform factory and still finds time to offer tea, sympathy and a shoulder to cry on when they’re needed. She and Jim took over the running of Beach View Boarding House when Peggy’s parents retired. When war was declared and the boarding house business no longer became viable, she decided to take in evacuees.

Peggy can be feisty and certainly doesn’t suffer fools, and yet she is also trying very hard to come to terms with the fact that her family has been torn apart by the war. She is a romantic at heart and can’t help trying to match-make, but she’s also a terrible worrier, always fretting over someone – and as the evacuees make their home with her, she comes to regard them as her chicks and will do everything she can to protect them.

JIM REILLY is in his mid-forties and was a young engineer in the last days of the First War, where he served alongside his elder brother, Frank, and father Ron. Now he’s fighting for king and country in India and Burma.

Jim is handsome, with flashing blue eyes and dark hair, and the gift of the Irish blarney he’d inherited from his Irish parents, which usually gets him out of trouble. He enjoys the camaraderie of being a soldier, but the conditions and dangers he’s encountering in the jungles have somewhat dampened his enthusiasm, and he treasures the letters and cards from home.

RONAN REILLY (Ron) is a sturdy man in his sixties who often leads a very secretive life away from Beach View now that his experience and skills from the previous war are called upon during the hostilities. Widowed several decades ago, he has recently married the luscious Rosie Braithwaite who owns the Anchor pub.

Ron is a wily countryman; a poacher and retired fisherman with great roguish charm who tramps over the fields with his dog, Harvey, and two ferrets. He doesn’t care much about his appearance, much to Peggy’s dismay, but beneath that ramshackle old hat and moth-eaten clothing, beats the heart of a strong, loving man who will fiercely protect those he loves.