When Mark finally managed to come home for a few days he was clearly exhausted, but after sleeping for twelve hours he reappeared in a buoyant mood. Ma had been saving ration coupons for weeks, and laid on a feast.

‘We’ve got the bastards on the run,’ Mark declared, loading his plate. ‘We were massively outnumbered, but we’ve got them scared. A thousand German planes shot down in just a month, they’re saying.’

‘What’s your personal tally, son?’ Pa asked.

Mark frowned and tapped his nose. ‘Not allowed to say, sorry.’

‘But if we were so outnumbered, how did we manage to see them off so successfully?’ Kath asked. ‘Are our planes that much better?’

‘C’mon, sis. It’s the skill of the pilots, of course.’

‘Another piece of pie, anyone? More carrots? They say they help to make your eyesight sharper,’ Ma said.

‘Puh,’ Mark snorted, holding out his plate. ‘That’s just propaganda, Ma.’

‘Carrots?’ Kath said, confused. ‘What on earth . . .?’

‘So the Germans don’t suspect the real reason for our success,’ he finished cheerfully. ‘It’s all a game of bluff and counter-bluff, this war.’

‘Some kind of game, when people are getting killed in their hundreds.’ Just as soon as she’d uttered the words she regretted them, lowering her gaze to avoid her mother’s furious glare.

‘What’s all this talk about some kind of magic eye in the planes?’ Pa asked. ‘Do you know anything about it?’

‘You don’t have to tell us, Mark,’ Ma said. ‘If it’s secret.’

Mark leaned back in his chair, his cheeks flushing. ‘Is that what they’re saying? Well, Ma’s right, I can’t tell you anything, sorry. But just to reassure you, we do have some very clever bits of kit that the Germans don’t have. Or at least, theirs is not as clever as ours. Not yet, anyway.’

Kath’s twentieth birthday was a low-key affair celebrated with fish and chips from the shop, wrapped in newspaper, followed by a few pints in the local with Joan and her boyfriend Sam as well as a couple of girls from school. All the talk was of the people they knew who were away fighting: Mark, Billy Bishop and all the boys from school who had already been conscripted. Kath told them about her meeting with Adam Merriweather and everyone agreed he’d had a tough life, with his mother’s death and then getting so horribly burned and losing his sight.

‘And all for what, you wonder?’ Kath said.

‘To stop the Germans?’ someone said, sarcastically.

‘I know that,’ she snapped back. ‘I meant, why are the Germans doing it?’

‘’Cos of the way they were treated after the last war, perhaps?’

‘They started that one too. Whatever can they expect?’

The conversation rumbled on. Sam was the only boy in the group, and Kath wondered how he’d managed to avoid conscription. He was a tall lad, blond-haired, gangly and often hopelessly clumsy, as though his limbs had somehow outgrown the ability of his brain to control them. As a schoolboy he’d been painfully shy and never ‘one of the gang’. Quite what Joan saw in him Kath had never quite understood, until that evening.