I have written twice before, but have not had a reply from you. Perhaps you did not get the letters.

Kate, we must meet. I shall be attending a big meeting in Grantham the week after next. If you’re still the new CO’s driver, you should be bringing him . . . We could meet on the Wednesday about four, at the station, if you could manage it.

There was nothing in the letter to give any real clues and to Ella’s acute disappointment there was not even a name at the end. She knew there had been a lot of difficulty in writing letters in wartime, particularly perhaps for servicemen, but he might have put his name, she thought crossly.

It was the only one from the mystery man; the others were from people she knew. One was from Grandpa to Kate, written to her at the Suddaby station and enclosing another from Aunty Peggy and both letters were dated a few months before Ella’s birth.

Her grandfather’s letter was short, a mere two lines.

I think, my dear, that the enclosed letter will be the answer for you, at least for the time being . . .

The answer to what?

Ella began to read Peggy’s letter,

My dear Jonathan,

Of course Kate can come back to us. We should love to have her – it will be like old times – and she would be company for Mother, who, although still lively in her mind, is increasingly confined to the house and, indeed, to her sofa. As you know, since Father died, Mother has slept downstairs in the living room and so Kate, and her little one when it arrives, could have Mother’s bedroom upstairs. I’m still in my own room anyway, so it won’t be putting us about at all! And there’s still the tiny bedroom Kate had before, when the little one gets older . . .

Ella laid down the letter. So, that was how she had come to be born in Lincoln and why they had continued to live with Aunty Peggy, Jonathan’s sister. She read a paragraph again. What did it mean ‘Kate can come back to us’? She didn’t understand that bit at all. She would have to ask . . . Oh no, she told herself firmly, you can’t ask Gran. Now she knew the whole story, or at least most of it, she could sense even from these sparse letters that Kate had gone to live with Peggy because her own mother, Esther, would not have Kate, pregnant and unmarried, at home. Esther Godfrey had turned out her own daughter. That must have been ‘the answer’ Jonathan referred to; the answer to a problem and a problem caused by her grandmother. That much, at least, Ella could deduce.