First, Georgie had started coughing again, leading her mother-in-law to be even more unpleasant than usual, implying Nancy was a bad mother, when anyone could see she was trying her best, and with precious little help from the miserable old woman. Nancy had debated leaving him at home in her care, he sounded so bad, but she decided that wrapping him up warmly and rushing him round to Dolly was the lesser of two evils. At least she’d know he was cosy and well fed with her. She wouldn’t put it past her mother-in-law to forget to keep an eye on the little boy, she was so mired in her own sense of the world doing her wrong.

Nancy hadn’t stayed long at her mother’s, as she was still full of rage at the slight of being overlooked in favour of Kitty as godmother to Ellen. Kitty Callaghan, for heaven’s sake! What did she know about bringing up babies? All right, she’d helped raise Tommy when their mother had died, but she hadn’t given birth to him, had she? She hadn’t gone through all that, and she knew nothing about a mother’s feelings for a baby. Despite all her frustrations, Nancy loved Georgie with a genuine and sometimes almost overwhelming love, and she simply could not believe that Kitty was capable of experiencing anything like it.

Also, Kitty had been away for over three years with hardly a visit home in between. That made her out of touch with everybody and what the family was like now. The war had changed everyone and all their relationships, and surely Kitty couldn’t begin to realise this. Fine, so Rita wrote to her, and Danny probably did as well, but it wasn’t the same as being here with them all. Kitty had hardly exchanged two words with Violet; she hadn’t been here for the Liverpool Blitz when so many had been killed or injured from their own small patch of Bootle, and she certainly didn’t know Ellen. You couldn’t just assume all babies were the same – even Nancy, living a few streets away, had picked up from her sisters’ and mother’s chatter that the little girl had her own sleep patterns, her preferences for how she liked to be carried, what made her comfortable and what didn’t. Kitty would be a useless godmother. She herself, Nancy, would be a far better one, and yet she’d been royally snubbed. She thought she would burst at the insult.