As she opened the front door, Winnie could hear dance music seeping from the ground-floor flat, the volume not quite loud enough to cover the sound of the baby crying. The post had been shuffled into neat piles on the hall table, and Winnie took her own bundle and started upstairs, passing Mr Veale halfway, as he left for his night shift at the Cossor Works. He nodded politely, but said nothing. It was not a friendly house – no one had been there long; no shared triumph or disaster had bonded them.

Inside her rooms, Winnie closed the curtains and switched on the light, and wrapped herself in a blanket crocheted by her grandmother. There was a letter postmarked Salisbury at the top of the pile; her father’s firm had moved to Wiltshire at the start of the war and her mother sent her a weekly chronicle of provincial life which varied so little from letter to letter that Winnie played a type of Housey Housey when reading them, taking a sip of beer or eating a monkey-nut whenever she saw the words ‘evacuee’ or ‘vicar’ or ‘soup’.

During Winnie’s visits, her mother treated her like an invalid, speaking in hushed tones to callers (‘the things she’s seen’) and draping a blanket over her daughter’s legs whenever she sat down, but the funny thing was that none of her parents’ friends or acquaintances seemed to have the slightest interest in what was happening in London. ‘Yes, I heard on the news there’d been trouble,’ they’d say, vaguely, before switching to the topic of the cheese ration or the sex-crazed land-girls who scandalized Chippenham on a Saturday night. It didn’t help that the BBC’s stock phrase was ‘Rockets have fallen in the south of England’, a deliberate obfuscation which sounded as if Jerry were idly scattering V-2s from Broadstairs to Worcester, with the capital just catching the odd one.

Winnie got the impression that the provinces thought London was clinging to the limelight, exaggerating its suffering, but perhaps the truth was that after five years, everyone was simply bored of bomb stories. Everyone was bored of everything, really; it had all been going on for far too long.

‘Now, Winifred, you have to admit that you’ve definitely done your bit,’ her mother had said, on her last visit. ‘Why don’t you come back here until Emlyn comes home? There’s masses of things you can help with – the Savings Committee’s always short of people, and I know that the Chippenham Players would die if you offered your services.’

‘As what?’

‘You’re a trained actress!’

‘I’m a trained warden. I even train other wardens.’

‘Yes, but …’ She could see her mother casting around for bait. ‘They’re going to be putting on War and Peace, and I’m almost certain they don’t have a Natasha yet.’

Winnie had let out an incredulous hoot. ‘Oh, Mummy, don’t be ridiculous.’

‘Why is that ridiculous?’

‘Natasha’s supposed to be sixteen and drop-dead beautiful – and she’s the lead. Even when I was at drama school, I only ever played servants.’ Three years of trudging across the stage with a broom (‘Housemaid … Winifred Bridge’), of bobbing a curtsey, of answering a flimsy front door to willowy blondes, of attempting to wring character from the words ‘Shall I collect the tea tray now, madam?’ In everyday life, she might merely be classified as stocky, but the physical standards of the acting world were different; she’d realized quickly that lissom beauty was the norm and her own role was that of useful visual contrast, a bulky prop that might add ballast to a scene. In the end, she hadn’t bothered to give the starched apron back to the college wardrobe department each time, but had just hung on to it for the next part. After graduating, she’d only had one professional job, touring the East Midlands in a thriller, playing an unnamed nurse (‘Please don’t tire him’) while trebling as ASM, understudy and prompt, and then the war had started, and then she’d met Emlyn.