The train halted for ten minutes beside a roofless school, its playground turned into a timber yard, and then again on the edge of London, next to a ploughed field containing a scarecrow dressed as a land-girl. Rooks pecked around the furrows, undeterred. One of the Woolwich girls handed round cough lozenges that tasted of burnt paper.

Half an hour passed without further movement, and then a freight train went by with dreadful slowness, each flatbed loaded with a giant roll of cable; Vee counted forty of them before closing her eyes against incipient dizziness.

Mario was telling a story about an aunt of his who found a raccoon living in her laundry-room, and two Anzacs in the next compartment were quarrelling about someone called Beryl, and then the train started up again and crawled along for a mile or two before pulling into a siding to allow another goods train past, and the journey continued in a series of jerks and pauses so that it was almost midday by the time they reached Brighton, and Vee had twice had to take the humiliating via dolorosa to the lavatory – a thousand ‘excuse me’s and the knowledge that at least ten people directly outside the door could hear every rustle and splash. Outside the station, it was sleeting, and the road down to the sea ended in a view of coiled barbed wire and concrete barriers as large as tea-huts so they all had to straggle along the front to find the newly cleared gap in the defences, shedding members of the party to pubs and chip shops along the way, so that in the end it was only Vee and Mario who picked their way past a row of rusting swings and a closed ice-cream parlour, and on to the beach. The stones clacked and slid beneath their feet, and Mario took her arm.

‘Whaddya think?’ he asked.

For a moment she couldn’t answer. She’d thought of the sea as a painting. She hadn’t imagined the noise of it, the unchanging roar, the weight of each wave slumping on to the pebbles, the drum-roll drag of its retreat; she’d thought it would be blue, but it was the colour of wet slate; she’d thought it would keep to its own place, like water in a basin, but she was more than twenty yards from the slapping edge and her lips already tasted of salt.

‘Wanna go nearer?’ asked Mario. The sleet had flattened his curls and his face was raw from the cold. ‘Wanna swim?’ And, without warning, he picked her up and started running with her towards the waves and she had never felt so silly or so young, hanging on to her hat with one hand and gripping the collar of his coat with the other, screaming with laughter while sleet blew up her skirt and a group of sailors jeered from the promenade – and when, just feet from the water, Mario lowered her on to the shingle, she found herself lunging upward, one hand on his shoulder, to aim a peck at the great red face with its dented nose, though she only managed to reach as far as his chin. She’d forgotten the feel of stubble, like taking a thistle to your mouth.