She’d met him at one of her sister’s awful parties; they’d both been very drunk, crushed together in a group on the narrow iron balcony outside Avril’s Kensington flat, and when a warden in the street below had shouted that they were showing a light, Emlyn (who’d been an English teacher before joining up) had replied, ‘It is the east and Juliet is the sun,’ and Winnie (who had once played the Capulets’ maid) had found herself supplying the next line, after which there wasn’t much else they could do except finish the scene (to some applause), lock lips for the rest of the evening and then go to bed together. Winnie had married him a month later, and waved him off at the station a week after that, and she’d been so deeply in love that the train had seemed to drag half of her away along the tracks, and the awful truth was that now she could barely remember what Emlyn looked like. She had photographs, of course – it wasn’t the outline of his features that she’d forgotten, but the play of his expressions: did he squint when he laughed, was there a line between his eyes when he frowned, did he show his teeth when smiling? She had no idea. Nor could she remember the timbre of his voice, or the sound of his yawn, or what he said when he sneezed, and because he wrote very little about the POW camp, even when she asked him to, she couldn’t even visualize what he was seeing, or doing, so that there was nothing solid for her to hold on to, only those letters with their endless impersonal detail; she had fallen for Romeo and now found herself padlocked to the editor of Modern Homes and Gardens.

Sitting with the page in her hand, her future life planned down to the handles on her kitchen cupboards (lucite and chrome), Winnie felt the same coppery taste in her mouth, the same ominous visceral lurch as when she’d heard the doodlebug approach this afternoon.

At the Post, they’d had a sweepstake for the date of the German surrender. Smiler had picked out December ’44, and Winnie had got June of next year. The terrible thing was that she half hoped she’d win.

Vee hadn’t expected Oxford Street to be so crowded. After spending a fortnight’s meat budget on The History of European Architecture in Cullbright’s (‘Wouldn’t you rather get a surprise for your birthday?’ she’d asked Noel. ‘No,’ he’d said. ‘I’d rather get precisely what I want.’), she crossed to Dickins and Jones at the top of Regent Street. Half the windows were still boarded up, but the place was heaving, and it took forty minutes of determined elbow-work to purchase a pair of flannel pyjamas and three vests for Noel and a pale-green crêpe blouse – marked down because of a water stain – for herself.

By the time she’d escaped it was edging towards twilight. It had snowed earlier in the week – just a sprinkling, but it hadn’t melted and now the pavement was corrugated with ice. The book in its string bag banged against her knees as she walked; all the lodgers had chipped in to buy it, although ‘all the lodgers’ no longer included Miss Zawadska, who had transferred to BBC Drama at Evesham. So far, there had been no takers for her room; the card in the window of the Hampstead newsagent’s was beginning to look rather dog-eared.