He turned and cocked an eyebrow, ‘Yes?’

‘Just … take care.’

He gave her a cheeky wink and then he was gone, leaving her feeling strangely uneasy and deflated. It would be many long hours until he returned from his mission and suddenly she wasn’t sleepy at all.

‘Ooh,’ Monica teased when Livvy strode into their hut shortly after. ‘Didn’t take you long to latch on to one of the dishy new pilots, did it? I had my eye on that one myself, as it happens.’

‘Actually, I already knew Giles,’ Livvy said tiredly. ‘I’ll tell you all about it sometime.’ But not now, she thought. She was far too wound up thinking of him preparing for take-off and praying that he would come back safely, although why she should care quite so much, she had no idea.

Chapter Thirty-Four

Bobby woke with a start and peeped out into the road from the shop doorway where he had slept. He was so cold that his teeth were chattering and the air, which was heavy with smoke from the hundreds of fires that were still raging, was making him cough.

It had been too dark for him to try to find his way home the night before and so he had huddled in the first shop doorway he came to and curled into a ball to try and keep warm. The food that Edith had lovingly packed for him the morning before was long gone and now as well as being cold, his stomach was grumbling with hunger. Just for a moment he wondered if he had been right to come back but he knew that he would never have settled until he knew that his ma was safe, so the best thing to do now was go and check on her and then head back to the Midlands.

The trouble was the streets all looked so different now and he wasn’t even sure he was heading in the right direction. Nothing looked as he remembered. Whole streets had been flattened and there were piles of bricks and rubbish that had once been people’s homes everywhere he looked. The sight struck fear into his heart. What if his own home was now just a pile of bricks? What if his ma had been buried underneath? Suddenly he didn’t feel quite so hungry anymore and, swallowing back the tears that had sprung to his eyes at the thought of his mother lying crushed beneath their home, he squared his shoulders and set off through the choking smoke that hung over the entire city in a thick black cloud, and when he glanced down, he saw that his clothes were already covered in a fine dusting of soot.