“No. I died right over there. Do you see that block of flats?” She pointed at a modern apartment building. “Those are quite new. Back in my day, this was a row of houses. That’s where it happened. I didn’t live here in my life, but after that, it became my home. Strange impulse, to stay where you died. I don’t quite know why I do it . . .”

“What happened?” I asked. “If that’s okay to ask.”

“Oh, that’s no bother,” she said almost cheerfully. “Luftwaffe raid. Tenth of May, 1941. That was the last big night of the Blitz. That was the night the Germans hit St. James’s Palace and the Houses of Parliament. I worked in communications, sending coded messages and reports on what was going on in London. We had a small telegraph office located quite near here. A bomb hit the end of the road and destroyed everything along this street, including most of these houses. I came out after the bombs fell. You could hear survivors under the rubble. I was helping get a little girl out from under a pile of the stuff when the rest of her house fell on us both. And that was it, really. Thirteen hundred people died that night. I was just one of them.”

It was all very matter-of-fact.

“When did you know you were a ghost?”

“Oh, immediately,” she said. “One moment I was helping the girl out of the rubble—the next, I was looking down at the rubble and watching someone lift me out of it, and it was abundantly clear that I was dead. It was a shock, of course. The bombing raids had stopped for a while, but there was so much destruction all around . . . there was so much to do. I would sometimes find someone who had been gravely injured, and they could see me, and I would sit and talk to them. I’d pick little things out of the rubble—photographs, things like that. I was still useful. I just refused to slip away. At first, it was difficult. For the longest time, weeks, I was too weak to do anything except linger on the spot where I died. I had no form that I could see. But I managed to pull myself away from the rubble. I suppose I made myself, really. You mustn’t let these kinds of things get in your way. It’s as Prime Minister Churchill said: ‘Never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never—in nothing, great or small, large or petty.’ A wonderful speech. He gave it after my death, but it was quoted all over. I’ve always gone by those words. They’ve gotten me through many years.”

Jo’s literal “never say die” attitude was somewhat overwhelming, but one thing was clear—she knew about fear. She knew what it felt like and how to deal with it.