She set aside all thoughts of Dolly and her tangled private life as she continued down Camden Road. There was no sign of Rosie at the Anchor, and Peggy wondered fretfully if she had heard about Ron. Rosie had been her friend for years, and Peggy frequently wondered what Ron had done to deserve her. He’d better hope his Irish charm would smooth this latest disagreement and win Rosie over.

Peggy loved her father-in-law, for although he was scruffy and an unreliable pain in the neck, he’d been her rock since Jim had been called up, and she knew that he simply adored Rosie, and would be heartbroken if she ended things between them. What Peggy couldn’t understand was why he persisted in upsetting her. If he took it into his head to go and see her while still silly with drink, then he was asking for trouble. Turning up full of remorse was one thing, but being drunk and maudlin was quite another.

With her thoughts churning, Peggy didn’t stop to chat as she headed for home, but merely nodded to acquaintances, and waved to Fred the Fish and Alf the butcher as she passed their shops. She wanted to get home, have a cigarette and catch up on what everyone had been doing before she prepared herself to face whatever this evening might hold.

She stopped on the corner by the burnt-out skeleton of a bombed house and waited for a convoy of army trucks to rumble up the hill from the seafront. She could see Beach View from here – the home in which she’d been born and raised, and to which she’d returned after her marriage to Jim and her parents’ retirement.

It was one in a short row of four-storey Victorian terraced houses which stood in a cul-de-sac halfway up the steep hill. There had once been six, but following a gas explosion right at the beginning of the war there were now only four. The rubble of the destroyed houses remained, but nature had taken over and now it was mostly hidden by brambles, ivy, grass and wild flowers.

Similar terraces lined the hill all the way up to the main road, which led past the Cliffe estate and RAF station to the villages and towns which lay to the north and east, and as Peggy stood there, she noted that just about every roof had missing tiles covered haphazardly with tarpaulin. Damaged chimney stacks had been shored up or demolished, and broken window panes had been boarded over since it was clearly pointless to keep replacing the glass when Jerry persisted in shattering it again. Walls were pocked by bullet scars from marauding enemy fighter planes, and not a lick of paint had touched the doors and window frames since war had started in earnest back in 1940.