Mark hadn’t been given leave for months now, and they knew he would be flying almost every day. What Churchill called the Battle of Britain was raging over the south coast, and the nightly bombing of London and other big cities followed. He declared that ‘never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few’. Mark was one of ‘the few’, Kath knew – and she also knew that the casualty rate was high. His occasional letters were brief but determinedly cheerful. Each day the family steeled themselves, fearing the arrival of the postman or the telegram boy and scouring the newspaper lists of casualties. ‘No news is good news’ became their morning mantra.

Felixstowe began to feel like a ghost town. Notices were posted at the Town Hall declaring that all children and their mothers, as well as the ‘aged and infirm’, should leave the town for safer areas inland. Schools were closed, and by August just a few thousand residents were left. But the railways were vital for bringing in troops and supplies, so Pa was deemed an ‘essential worker’ and Ma simply refused to leave without him.

‘Whatever will we do if the Germans invade?’ Kath asked.

‘We’ll go to stay with Auntie Phyllis.’

‘I’m sure she’d welcome us with open arms.’

‘Don’t be so cheeky, young woman,’ Pa said.

Kath recalled their last visit to her great-aunt’s dark little flat in Stowmarket, crowded with over-large furniture and dusty pot plants, and the way that Phyllis had fussed around them, adjusting the lace antimacassars that seemed designed to slip from the backs of the chairs. When the adults weren’t looking, Kath had taken a peek into the other rooms: the tiny old-fashioned kitchen, a bathroom with a rust-stained bath, a bedroom dominated by a large double bed and a further room she’d expected to be for Phyllis’s lady companion, but which seemed to be in use as a study.

The WAAF leaflet sat on Kath’s bedside table. As her twentieth birthday approached, she raised the topic. It was a mistake. Ma went pale and slumped into a chair. ‘How could you even think of it, Kath?’

‘I need to do something.’

‘But I can’t lose both of my children.’

‘You haven’t lost one yet.’

‘You know the odds, for heaven’s sake.’

Later Kath heard her weeping upstairs, being comforted by Pa. So for the moment she kept herself busy, volunteering for the Home Guard, issuing gas masks, helping with the evacuations, helping with civil defence tasks, evacuations and ‘digging for victory’ by turning the back garden into an allotment.

With only one income, there was much drawing in of belts. There was little to spend their money on anyway, since many of the shops and all the seaside attractions had closed ‘for the duration’. There were even, it was rumoured, mines buried beneath the fabled golden sands where, just the previous year, children had made castles and tried to dig to Australia. Somehow it was this, above all else, that gave Kath sleepless nights. What has my beloved town come to, she asked herself?