Her thoughts turned to those carefree days on the rubber plantation in Malaya when the future had seemed so certain, and she was a young girl in the throes of first love. The memories of that time were as ephemeral as a half-forgotten dream, difficult to capture, and as elusive as smoke, for they seemed to belong to someone else – a very different Sarah to the one sitting here in the manor house gardens.

Sarah and her younger sister Jane had led a comfortable, privileged life amongst the ex-pats until the Japanese had invaded, and they’d both had to grow up very quickly as they were torn from home and family and forced to flee to England.

How very different they were now compared to those girls who’d arrived, bewildered and uncertain they’d ever see their parents or Sarah’s fiancé again. Jane had been dependent and childlike following a riding accident, but she’d left Beach View a confident, bright young woman to take up a secret posting with the MOD, and Sarah, who’d merely played at working for her father when she found time in the heady whirl of her social life, was now happily fully employed by the Women’s Timber Corps, and feeling very much at home with her Great-Aunt Cordelia and the wonderfully motherly Peggy.

Sarah smiled. At least Peggy and Aunt Cordelia would approve of Delaney now that it turned out he wasn’t married, but how would they feel when she told them she was planning to marry him and set up home with him in America?

She hugged that joyful thought, warmed by the hope it brought her, until the images of that long ago tropical night when Philip had proposed came to haunt her. They’d been on the veranda at the back of the house which stood on stilts and overlooked the vast rubber plantation, the darkness of the encroaching jungle behind them. Her father Jock and her heavily pregnant mother were in the airy sitting room behind the long, delicate muslin curtains which undulated gently in the warm breeze that smelt of frangipani and mimosa.

Sarah closed her eyes again, trying to capture the scene, and the emotions of that moment, but the images were faint, as if she was watching it through the muslin, the participants a blur as they stood there against the backdrop of verdant green.

She gave a little sob of anguish as she realised she could barely remember what Philip had said to her that night, for the events which had swiftly followed had been so terrifying they’d erased nearly everything that had come before. That quiet moment in which she’d accepted his ring was the last they’d shared, for within a matter of days, they were running for their lives.