Gary would be home for Christmas. He’d finally found time to write to her properly and he said he’d been thinking of her all the while, as his unit fought its way across France, liberating the people and advancing the Allied cause. The knowledge that she was there back in England waiting for him had driven him onward, giving him a reason to survive. ‘I hope you’ll be giving me a warm welcome,’ he’d said, and a little tremble of anticipation shot through her. It wasn’t exactly a passionate letter on the face of it, but she could read between the lines. Gary was clever – he’d know that the censor would read it first and would have no wish to embarrass her by being any more graphic. But she could tell what he meant all right. Well, far be it from her to deny a fighting hero his comforts when he made it back.

Carefully she refolded the letter and tucked it inside a book on the shelves beside the mantelpiece. The Encyclopaedia Britannica – it wasn’t very likely that her mother-in-law would look in there. She barely lifted the newspaper, even though her usually absent husband worked on the Liverpool Post on permanent night shift. Nancy nodded in satisfaction. It might be pie in the sky, but she had begun to dream that Gary would somehow get her out of this cold, loveless place, rescue her from Mrs Kerrigan’s meanness and the soulless existence she’d got used to. Who knew what might happen once he came home?

Kitty hated it when she got back so late that she didn’t have time to make a meal for Tommy. If she knew she would be working well past when he usually ate, she cooked the night before and left a pot of stew on the cold shelf in the larder, along with a note on the kitchen table to remind him to heat it up. The problem came when she was asked to stay on at the end of a normal day shift, which wasn’t uncommon. She could hardly say no. It was never for a trivial reason and she knew it was her duty to agree.

Tommy wouldn’t be going hungry; Dolly would see that he ate something hot, or if she was busy then someone else would step in. Kitty wasn’t worried that her little brother would starve. It was more that cooking for them both and then eating together gave her a chance to talk to him, to find out how his work was going, to see if there had been any difficult deliveries in the day, and to check that there had been no repeat of the episode Sarah had told her about.