As you will discover, things are changing at Beach View now the war in Europe is over, and Peggy is having to come to terms with the fact her chicks are starting to leave home. I’ve taken huge delight in planning lots of weddings for With Hope and Love and, like Peggy and Cordelia, I’ve shed a tear or two of my own as these young girls have begun their new and exciting lives.

Cliffehaven too, is slowly getting back onto its feet as the holiday makers return, new homes are built, and the men start to come home. But the war is still raging in the Far East, and Peggy is once more forced to call upon her inner strength to maintain hope that Jim will eventually come home.

I hope you enjoy With Hope and Love. It is not the end of the series, for the problems besetting Peggy and her remaining chicks are yet to be resolved. Now my brain and my hand are working properly again, I’m busy writing Homecoming which is due to be published in January 2020.

With my very best wishes to you all,

Epigraph

They went with songs to the battle, they were young,

Straight of limb, true of eye, steady and aglow.

They were staunch to the end against the odds uncounted,

They fell with their faces to the foe.

They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old:

Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.

At the going down of the sun and in the morning

We will remember them.

‘For the Fallen’ by Laurence Binyon (1914)

1

Burma
8 May 1945

The monsoon heat and humidity had risen swiftly during the day, the rain bucketing down through the jungle canopy in a ceaseless deluge which turned the soft earth to thick, cloying mud that ran in rivers right through the makeshift respite camp. The conditions made the exhausted soldiers’ lives a misery, for clothes didn’t dry, boots and feet rotted, and there were several instances of men having mould growing in the folds of their skin from being constantly damp.

It was now late afternoon, and although there was a canvas roof and thick matting spread over the floor of steel sheeting in the motor maintenance area, Second Lieutenant Jim Reilly was soaked to the skin with sweat and mud as he lay cursing beneath the three-ton truck. He was struggling to remove its broken exhaust pipe before darkness fell, but the bloody thing seemed to be welded with rust to its moorings, and he couldn’t shift it.