‘Jack.’

‘Not from round here, Jack?’

A smile darts across his face, but quickly fades. ‘Nee, lass.’

He fears she is about to ask him more, but as the road dips away from them, she lets out a cry of relief.

‘There, there it is! Not far now.’

Just before them, set back from the lane, is a white rendered farmhouse, a yard to its side bordered by buildings, with fenced meadows beyond that back onto woodland.

By the time they reach the gateway, he is practically carrying her. She whimpers with every step.

A dog appears from the open-fronted building on the left, prick-eared and sharp-eyed. It races towards them, head low, its tail beating from side to side.

‘All right, Kip,’ Gwen mutters as it begins to dance around them, barking.

A man emerges from the same building, rubbing his oil-slickened hands on a piece of rag. His face flares with concern.

‘Gwen?’ He tosses the rag to one side.

Jack notices Gwen’s breathing has become shallow. With inordinate effort, she steps clear of his grasp to address the man now running towards them.

‘I got thrown, Dad,’ she murmurs. Her lips turn the colour of chalk.

Jack catches her as she falls.

Chapter Seven

Jack

June 1939

‘Into the house with her!’

The man Jack now knows to be Gwen’s father runs before him, hastening up the steps from the yard to the back of the house, shouting, ‘Muriel,’ before berating the dog that spins around his ankles, barking with excitement. Jack follows in his wake, Gwen’s head lolling lifelessly against his shoulder. She is light in his arms and he realises she is little more than a scrap of a girl; he doubts she is yet twenty.

‘Where the hell did it happen?’

‘Just up the lane a bit, in the bends …’

‘What the devil was she doing up there?’

The farmer’s face creases with confusion, but he instantly dismisses the rhetorical question and urges Jack to hurry while quickening his own pace. By the time Jack reaches the top step, he has disappeared into the house. The back door hangs open and Jack turns his body to angle both himself and Gwen through its frame. He blinks, adjusting to the gloom of the kitchen he has entered, its low ceiling striped with tar-blackened beams that dispel the morning light.

He pauses, unsure where to go. The dog whines at him from the rush mat on the threshold. Faint voices carry back from the front of the house, their rapid modulation betraying increasing anxiety. Jack bounces Gwen into a more secure grip then advances towards them. Mounting the step into the doorway before him, he finds himself in a long narrow strip of hall beside a staircase.

‘Hallo?’ he calls. Gwen stirs in his arms.