“I’ve made him sound like a hero. He wasn’t. He walked out on my mother just as the war started. I think he had some kind of breakdown. He’d fought in the first war and survived. And when it looked as though it was happening all over again it was too much for him.”

“I don’t think that was an uncommon reaction among veterans of the Great War,” said Howard. “All that sacrifice for nothing.”

“Yes, but he’d also met someone else. That was the real reason for leaving. He just took off. I don’t think the marriage had been happy for some time; it was just duty holding them together.”

Jean couldn’t now recall ever witnessing any signs of physical affection between them—hand-holding or the welcoming kiss at the end of the working day—even before the rift. She had assumed this was normal and every marriage the same until she had noticed that her aunt and uncle in Harrogate did things differently: he called his wife Honeybun and never missed an opportunity to pull her onto his lap, or slide an arm around her waist; higher if he thought no one was looking.

“Perhaps he wouldn’t have left if it hadn’t been for the war. I think he just felt he’d already used up all his luck in the first war and needed to seize a last chance at happiness. And the thing is, he was right. It was his last chance.”

“At least he got to choose,” said Howard after a pause. “Your mother had no choice.”

“Yes—that’s it exactly,” said Jean, all her reticence melting before the warmth of his compassionate good sense. “It was just imposed on her. And even so she felt this terrible shame and guilt, as though it was somehow her fault for not being able to keep her husband.”

“Did she ever speak to you about this?”

“No, no, that would have been impossible. She couldn’t talk about personal things. But I could tell—it was evident in every fiber of her being. The whole purpose of her life was to be a wife and mother.”

They pulled up at the traffic lights on Croydon Road and were able now to exchange a quick smile of understanding on Howard’s part and gratitude on Jean’s.

“So she leaned on you instead?”

“Yes. Heavily. She doesn’t have an independent bone in her body—she wasn’t brought up that way. You read about these resilient women who raise five children single-handed and take in laundry and slaughter their own pigs and the rest of it. Well, she wasn’t one of them. And then before she could even get used to the idea that he’d left her he was killed in an air raid. So it was as if he’d abandoned her twice over. She’d never had the chance to have it out with him and she couldn’t even mourn him as his widow because everyone knew he’d already left her.”

This was the hardest thing, Jean thought. On top of losing everything else—her husband, her future, her pension—she had even been cheated of the sympathy that was her due.