Queenie blushed crimson. ‘No. Nothing.’

Dr Parrott smiled. ‘That’s good news. If anything changes though and you do start noticing something different, you must come back to me. In the meantime, I’ll do your urine test and will let Mary know when I have the results.’

Queenie breathed a sigh of relief as they left Dr Parrott’s house. ‘Mary, how can a doctor tell by your wee if you’re pregnant?’

‘They inject your urine into toads.’

‘Toads! What, as in like a frog?’

‘Yes. They import a special breed from abroad and keep them in tanks.’

Completely baffled, Queenie said no more.

The school holidays began and instead of going out exploring the bomb sites with Viv or playing silly games, Queenie spent most of her time with Mrs O’Leary or Aunt Edna. She much preferred being at their homes to staying in her own. She no longer felt close to her mother. Her dad was making all their lives a misery and in Queenie’s opinion Molly Wade should be putting her foot down.

On the Tuesday, Viv squealed with delight as their neighbours Aggie and Nelly Brown arrived home from evacuation. ‘Come on, Queenie. Let’s go and greet them.’

Pleased that Viv would now have Nelly to hang out with, Queenie told Viv to greet them with their mum. She hadn’t forgiven Aggie for blanking the two letters she’d written to her. Who did she think she was? She was no friend of hers any longer, the ignorant cow. Queenie had only written the second letter because, when she’d received no reply to the first, she assumed it must have got lost in the post. Queenie cursed herself. ‘What an idiot,’ she muttered.

Peeping through a tiny gap in the curtain, Queenie saw their landlord approach her mum. He looked annoyed and started pointing towards the roof of the house.

Viv ran back inside the house. ‘Aggie says hello. Where’s mum’s purse, Queen?’

‘Dunno. What’s the landlord saying?’

‘Dunno. Probably wants money.’ Viv ran back outside with the purse.

Since their dad’s army wage had stopped, their mum had been forced to take two cleaning jobs, just so they could eat and keep a roof over their heads. It was she who was handing all her hard-earned wages over to the landlord while her father drank any wages he earned down the pub. Queenie didn’t know if her dad even had a proper job. The docks had been bombed badly during the Blitz and with his shattered right leg, that he now dragged behind him, she was sure he wasn’t working back there, though her mum swore he was.

A serious expression on her face, Molly walked back inside the house and asked both her daughters to sit down.

‘What’s up?’ Queenie asked.

Molly sighed. ‘There’s no easy way to say this, girls. Our landlord has insisted on renting the upstairs of our house out. There’ll be a new family moving in next Monday.’

‘But he can’t! What about our bedroom? Where we meant to sleep?’ shrieked Viv.