‘But can I have a bike for home anyway?’ asked Tommy, taken with the idea now. ‘Then you wouldn’t have to worry about me getting home an’ all. Kitty wouldn’t have to sit up. We both know what she’s like,’ he said conspiratorially, suddenly all man of the world. ‘Can’t have that now, can we?’

Danny threw up his hands. ‘All right then, Tommy, we’ll see what Pop has to say and find someone to recommend you to the GPO,’ he said. ‘You win.’ But actually, he thought to himself, it was me who won that conversation. Tommy hasn’t gone running off to join the Merchant Navy and I won’t have to tell Jack the news. And, who knows, Tommy might just end up in his ideal job, for now at any rate.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Laura set down her beautiful fountain pen and reread what she’d just written. She thought it just about made sense but her mind was whirring. Perhaps she’d got it all wrong and was making a fuss about nothing. Indeed, if she didn’t have the physical evidence of the scrappy piece of paper now carefully flattened under her empty tea mug, she would have thought the whole thing was a figment of her imagination.

She couldn’t even write what she really wanted to say as the censor would block it out. Never mind, all she really needed to do was make sure it sounded sufficiently urgent for Kitty to take notice and to agree to meet her.

She stared out of the window of her new attic billet in Kentish Town, across the rooftops of northwest London towards the centre of town. How she and Kitty and Marjorie would have loved to have lived here during their training – they could have walked into Piccadilly at a push and gone to all those bars and clubs that Elliott had known. Now such venues held little interest for her. It would just be one more place to dodge the buzz bombs, the new German weapon that had been causing havoc over the summer, no doubt launched in retaliation for D-day.