‘So will you look after Georgie on Saturday evening, Mam?’ asked Nancy, quickly checking her reflection in the mirror over Dolly’s fireplace. She carefully smoothed her victory roll, making sure every hair was in place. She had red hair like her sister Rita, but Nancy’s was more Titian in tone, and she always styled it, whereas Rita usually made do with anything that was tidy enough to fit under her nursing sister’s cap. Nancy nodded quickly in satisfaction. She’d been told she had a look of Rita Hayworth about her, and thought there might be some truth in it.

Dolly looked up from the comfy armchair, where she was knitting something in mustard yellow with wool unravelled from Violet’s old cardigan, which had finally given up the ghost. ‘Saturday evening? Are you off out, young lady? Don’t forget your poor husband, stuck in a Jerry prison.’

‘Of course I never forget Sid,’ snapped Nancy, annoyed, ‘but it doesn’t mean I have to spend every hour God sends with his miserable mother in her horrible house. Honestly, Mam, she keeps it so cold it’s a wonder I haven’t turned blue. It’s making Georgie ill, I swear it. He’s got a bad chest again, poor little soul.’ Sid Kerrigan had been a prisoner of war since Dunkirk and had never even seen his little boy. Now and again Nancy felt guilty about that, but usually she was too preoccupied by the idea of her youth disappearing fast and having nobody to go dancing with. ‘Anyway, it’s not as if I’m off gadding about. My WVS group has joined forces with the WI to put on a dance for the visiting servicemen and they need volunteers. Of course I said I’d help out when they asked. They rely on me for that sort of thing.’

Dolly sighed. She’d tried for ages to get Nancy involved with the local branch of the Women’s Voluntary Services, of which she was a mainstay. Then Nancy had outmanoeuvred her by announcing she was indeed joining the WVS, but the branch in the city centre. Nancy assured her mother it was because they were most in need of help – and as it was just after the dreadful days of the Liverpool Blitz, this was true – but it also had the advantage of being away from her mother’s eagle eye, and mixing with the influx of American servicemen, a trickle which grew to a flood after Pearl Harbor. Nancy was fooling nobody – and the fact that she was never without a new pair of nylons spoke volumes. Dolly had a pretty shrewd idea what Nancy got up to in order to get them, but she had no proof. She wasn’t going to stand for her middle daughter letting the family down, and had warned her often enough. Now she had another reason to object.