‘Oh, Grandad, if you’d seen it out there. Seen our soldiers coming back bedraggled and beaten. And yet,’ she added with the ghost of a smile as she thought about Gordon Stratford, ‘they didn’t act like they were beaten. They were still shaking their fists at the enemy planes and promising to go back.’

‘And you reckon you want to lend a hand, eh, lass?’

‘I want to “do my bit” as they say.’ She smiled up at him, trying to be light-hearted about it, but there was no deceiving the old man.

His face was sober as he asked quietly, ‘Danny going too, is he, lass?’

She looked squarely into the watery, faded old eyes. ‘I – think so, Grandad.’

Slowly, the old man nodded.

‘What did your dad say about the boat?’

‘He was very good about it,’ Danny answered her. He grinned at her. ‘Said he wished he’d been with us.’

She smiled back. ‘That’s just what me grandad said. Oh, but your dad’s so good. He never says much, does he? But he’s a wonderful person.’

‘Aye,’ Danny murmured. ‘An’ he’s been good to me.’ There was silence and Kate knew they were both thinking about the same thing; that he wasn’t really Danny’s father.

‘He loves your mam so much. You can see it in his eyes when he looks at her, even now, after all these years.’

‘Aye, an’ it can’t have been easy for him.’

‘But she loves him,’ Kate reassured him. ‘I know she does.’

‘Aye, well . . .’ They were getting into dangerous waters, touching on a subject that they had not openly discussed for years. Yet always it lay between them.

As if deliberately to change tack, Danny said, ‘By the way, can you have a word with Rosie?’

‘Rosie?’ Kate was surprised. ‘What about?’

‘She’ll be getting herself into trouble if she dun’t watch it.’ When Kate still looked puzzled, he went on, ‘It’s them Army lads that’s billeted with me grandad.’

Beth Eland’s father, Dan Hanley, was the coastguard at Fleethaven Point and, living alone, was the only one with room to spare for the soldiers who manned the gun emplacement on the dunes facing the North Sea.

‘Oh.’ Now Kate understood. ‘What about her mam or Grannie Harris? I’d have thought she could make young Rosie toe the line.’

‘She’s grown into such a pretty little thing,’ Danny murmured.

‘All those blonde curls and big blue eyes,’ Kate laughed. And Rosie’s figure too, she was thinking, all curvey in the right places.

‘She’s so innocent, though,’ Danny was saying. ‘Living here at the Point all her life, she ain’t had much to do with men. She just won’t know . . .’