The Wind off the Sea: A Novel of the Women Who Prevailed After World War II

Prologue

When they all looked back on that time, it was as though he had come into their lives like the wind off the sea. It was as if, without realising it, he had determined to draw their thoughts away from the dreary toil of their days, from the heartache caused by relationships for ever stilled, from the destruction that still sat around in awful witness to the past conflict.

As the winter wind moaned around their houses and cottages, and they sighed at their memories, staring into smouldering fires and looking back to happier times, he seemed somehow to have strolled into their lives, bringing with him not just the promise of spring, but the certainty of summer warmth.

With his arrival they started looking up to that far distant line known as the horizon, looking towards a future which, although it might be stormy, would be far from grey. Naturally—and there can be no guilt attached to them because we are all the same—no-one thought of the effect they might be having on him, as people don’t when someone fascinates them.

Nor did anyone fall to wondering why he was there, what ghost he might have come to lay, or what mystery might be strong enough to have drawn him back to the beautiful old harbourside village that faced the English Channel.

WINTER 1947

Chapter One

The frost had lain heavy on the latch when Mr Todd had made to leave the cottage with his grandson Tam, making it unusually difficult to open the planked wooden door with hands already half frozen. The weather had turned so cold that water had frozen inside the window panes, while outside Tam and his grandfather could see icicles hanging from the guttering as thick as a man’s fingers. When the door had finally been prised open the first thing the little boy saw was a big black bird dead on its back on the hard white ground, its clawed feet thrust skywards as if in one last protest. His grandfather picked the poor little corpse up, and chucked it away without ceremony into a nearby ditch.

‘The rats can have him. No good comes of seeing dead crows,’ he muttered, half burying his face in his thick grey muffler as the east wind bit into his skin. ‘Dead crow in the morning always comes with a warning.’

The little boy by his side said nothing. He knew that his grandfather was right: even the rats needed feeding in a winter as cold and hard as this one. The bitterness of the weather made him feel as though life was on the verge of stopping, that it would just get colder and colder until nothing could survive, until everything and everybody was dead, frozen stiff beneath one huge sheet of ice.

‘Don’t know what we’s bothering to come out for, Tam,’ his granddad muttered on. ‘Ground’s that frozen we’d need a pickaxe to get anything out of it. A pickaxe, or a ruddy pneumatic drill.’

The wind sharpened as they reached the end of the lane and turned into the road leading to the allotments. Mr Todd hunched his shoulders tightly together and buried his chin further in his muffler while Tam gasped out loud as the ice-cold blast seemed to hit the back of his throat.

‘Think it’ll snow now, Grandpa?’ he cried bravely, as tears of cold trickled down his cheeks. ‘Must snow soon, surely, Grandpa?’

‘Too cold for snow, Tam. Far too cold for snow.’

‘How can it be too cold to snow, Grandpa?’

‘’Cos the clouds freeze up, that’s a why, boy. And the snow can’t fall out, that’s a why.’

The two of them continued on their way in silence, as silent as the frozen countryside around them.

‘Can’t remember when I last seen the estuary froze over, and that’s true,’ Mr Todd said, gazing out to sea and suddenly flapping his arms round his body in a hopeless attempt to gain some warmth. ‘They say sea’s froze too, to a quarter a mile out.’

His grandson frowned, staring in the direction of the sea, wondering whether he dare ask to be taken to see the boats glued into the ice, the snow carpeting the boatyard. But his grandfather always liked to do the suggesting; he knew that, as so he should. His grandmother had told him often enough.

You best leave any ideas you have well alone, she’d say, ruffling his hair, which Tam hated. Your granddad’s sort of man who’ll run in the opposite direction you tell him, just for the sake of it. So you just leave any suggesting things to him.

Hardly daring to breathe in or out now, so painful did it seem to have become, Tam wished with all his heart that he was back at home with his granny, huddled over the few lumps of coke and half-dry driftwood that afforded them the only warmth available in this most bitter of winters, rather than trying to curry favour with his granddad by agreeing to accompany him to the allotments to see if there was any food that they could dig up out of the unyielding ground.

‘Don’t know why we bothered fighting damn war,’ he heard his grandfather mutter as they reached their destination. ‘You can bet Jerry isn’t half freezin’ to death on a diet of tinned snoek—nastiest tasting fish ever put on a plate is snoek—or trying to dig a frozen turnip out of the ice. Makes a man wonder what it was all about, it does really.’

‘What what was all about, Grandpa? An’ who’s Jerry?’

‘Never you mind, young Tam,’ Mr Todd told him, with a sudden deep sigh. ‘That’s all a dead and buried now. ‘At’s all a dead and a buried now, and that’s for sure.’

As if to amplify his point, he undid the spade he had strapped to his back and started to try to prise some turnips out of ground that had seemingly turned to stone. As he did so, it began to snow. Five minutes later the two of them could barely see each other, let alone the vegetable patch, so thick was the blizzard. Finally Tam heard his grandfather throwing down his spade.

‘’Tis bloody hopeless,’ he swore. ‘Completely bloody hopeless.’

*   *   *

Mrs Todd glanced at the clock and, seeing it was five minutes after the time her husband had said he would be back, immediately began worrying; it was that same worrying that had driven Mr Todd half to distraction during their long marriage. But it was something she couldn’t help—born with a frown, as her own mother had frequently told her. Never seen such an anxious child. Little wonder, however, that the poor woman did worry. Born into the kind of poverty that her marriage did nothing to alleviate, she hardly had two pennies to rub together for the first few years with her new husband. Perhaps lack of money had brought on her miscarriages, for they followed each other so regularly that it seemed she would never have a living child. Finally, Rusty, her first live child, was born, followed by the two boys. Now there were only Rusty and Mickey left to her—Tom, her elder son, having been killed on a rescue mission to Dunkirk.

With a deep sigh, Mrs Todd pulled another thick knit cardigan on over her first one and knelt down at the grate to attend to the vaguely smouldering fire. She worried that her husband and young Tam would be frozen stiff by the time they returned from what she knew must be going to prove to be a fruitless quest. She stared furiously at the few remaining miserable lumps of coke that were refusing to ignite and the lumps of driftwood that were too green even to hold a spark. She had to warm the house somehow, if only for poor little Tam. She just had to warm the house.

Desperate for warmth, and even more desperate to have some sort of welcoming fire going when her husband and grandson returned, Mrs Todd started to scour the house for something dry she could burn. She was so cold that for a moment she even found herself contemplating breaking up one of the kitchen chairs and throwing it into the grate. The truth was that had they been hers to burn, and not her husband’s property, she knew she could not have resisted the temptation. Instead she pulled her wardrobe away from the wall and prised up two of the short loose planks on which it stood in one corner of their bedroom. It wasn’t the first time she had been reduced to this desperate measure, and if the freezing weather continued she imagined that it wouldn’t be the last.

Minutes later, the fire having leaped thankfully and cheerfully into life, she heard the outside latch rise and fall at long last.

‘Hang that soaking wet coat on the clothes horse, Grandpa,’ she called out to her husband as he ushered a half-frozen grandson into the room. ‘And for goodness’ sake sit you both down by the fire while I brew you some hot sweet tea.’

‘Hot maybe, sweet’ll be the day.’ Mr Todd winked at Tam who was too cold even to respond.

As tea was being prepared Mr Todd rolled himself a cigarette that was nearly all paper and precious little tobacco while Tam went to fetch their precious mound of Swan Vestas, all of which had been cut neatly down the middle, such was the shortage of matches. The little boy reached forward eagerly to light his grandfather’s cigarette.

‘Now go and put a light on, lad,’ Mr Todd suggested, once his cigarette was lit. ‘I know it’s not time yet, but five minutes one way or another won’t break the law, will it? No, well, I don’t rightly reckon it will.’

Tam, a serious and dutiful expression on his young face, stood on the chair by the door, and pushed the light switch down. Just as solemnly he watched the low wattage bulb flicker into life, because he was not so old that it did not seem to be some sort of miracle how the turning of a switch could make a piece of glass light up.

‘Word is, on the wireless that is, it’s going to snow for a week or more,’ Mrs Todd said, as she put down her wooden tray, loaded with a teapot carefully covered with a cosy, and cups, their faces turned to their saucers, not to mention a precious jug of hot water, and a tiny jug of milk, on the table under the window. ‘I can’t remember a winter like it, I can’t really.’

‘How’s our Rusty?’ Mr Todd wondered, as his wife handed him a plate holding a slice of brown bread scraped lightly with margarine and a cup of steaming tea.

‘She’s lying in bed with a face as long as a wet week,’ Mrs Todd sniffed. ‘Peter’s gone to the garage, although I should imagine this weather’ll bring him home soon enough. No-one’s got any petrol coupons they want to waste in this weather, and there’ll be no mending neither, I shouldn’t have thought, so much good it’ll do him, but gets him out and away from Rusty, so that’s something.’

Mrs Todd sighed and shook her head slowly from side to side, which was enough to tell her husband what she was feeling. The Todds had been married long enough for Mr Todd to understand that the slow shaking of his wife’s head meant that their daughter was no better.

‘Mickey still in the churchyard?’

‘Can’t think why,’ Mrs Todd replied, sitting down to her own tea on the other side of the fireplace. ‘Ground’s like rock. Vicar says there’s that many funerals being delayed, but they can’t do a thing about it. Suppose they’re stockpiling them, back at the undertakers, poor souls. But it doesn’t bear thinking about. They were saying in the village, people are being found all the time, all over the country, dead in doorways, frozen stiff—tramps mostly, mind. But not just tramps, waifs and strays too—and not only waifs and strays neither. Ex-servicemen too, standing about in this weather with trays of matches for sale, and after what they’ve done for their country. Makes you think.’

‘What can you say?’ Mr Todd sighed. ‘Risk your life for King and Country and come home to die from neglect in a doorway.’

‘It simply isn’t right. It just doesn’t make sense.’

‘When did war ever make sense? That’s what I’d like to know. You tell me when a war ever made sense. I tell you, it never did.’

Tam stared from one old face to another as they sighed and grumbled, wishing with all his heart that he could read the time. He knew his father came back at six o’clock every evening. He just didn’t know when six o’clock would come; soon he hoped, silently, swinging his legs slowly under him, as his grandmother switched on the wireless, and his grandfather held out his cup for more tea. He’d just like it to be really soon.

*   *   *

As she lay in bed in the dark, Rusty could hear her parents’ voices floating up from down below. She had only just woken up from a sleep from which part of her wished that she had never woken, yet she knew exactly what time it was, without even having to look at the clock, because there was yellow in the white of the falling blizzard from the glow of the one dim bulb that lit teatime by the fireside downstairs. Despite the twilight falling beyond the window, however, she made no move to switch on the light by her bedside, perhaps because the coming darkness outside the window matched her feelings so precisely.

In her imagination she could feel the warmth of her newborn baby lying in her arms, imagine the softness of the face held close to hers, see herself carefully folding the shawls around it to keep it snug. But although Peter had taken the precaution of heaping her bed with extra blankets and coats before leaving to go to his garage, she knew the room to be colder than it had ever been, for her baby was dead, and Mickey was down at the churchyard with it, and she imagined there would never be a day for the rest of her life when she didn’t think of it, wondering over and over why it had been taken from her.

Even at this time of day there was still ice on the inside of her window panes. The short dark bitter days of cold, the endless nights when her mood seemed to be echoed by the winds that constantly moaned around the cottage, the shortages of every needful thing—everything conspired to make her wonder why she now faced not new life, but yet more death. Too miserable to cry and too cold to feel anything except misery she tried turning her thoughts to spring and summer; towards flowers and a warm sea running up the harbour full of brightly painted boats. But since all she could see were black leafless trees outlined against darkening skies, even the idea of warm spring weather and blue skies seemed like a hopeless fantasy, something that, like her dream of motherhood to come, would never now happen.

You’ll have another one.

To other people the baby was just a baby, whereas to her a baby was a person. You couldn’t replace people, so why did the cruel unthinking world believe you could replace a baby?

You’ll have another one.

If she heard that said one more time Rusty thought she might kill herself. Even the vicar, as he parted from her at the baby’s funeral service, pressing her hand and turning to go, had said the same.

You’ll have another child, Mrs Sykes, I feel sure of it.

Rusty had nearly shouted at him—so very nearly. She was so upset that she wanted to take hold of him and tell him—tell him that a lost baby wasn’t like a broken plate. You couldn’t just apply to the shop for another one with the same pattern. But she hadn’t. She had just looked at the ground and nodded silently, before moving away from the vicar as quickly as politeness would allow.

Now propped up on her cold pillows in the growing darkness Rusty stared numbly at the ceiling, which seemed to be growing less like part of the room and more like the dark lowering sky outside, a firmament that was reaching down, it appeared, with every intention of eventually smothering her. Hot tears trickled down her half-frozen cheeks as she rocked herself to and fro, one of her pillows cradled in her arms while darkness fell around her, enclosing the world outside her window. She heard the sounds of her husband returning, but rather than talk to him she feigned sleep when he quietly pushed open the bedroom door to check on her, a mock sleep that soon became a real one as she drifted off, only to wake again shortly afterwards when her son was brought up to bed by his grandmother. With a deep sigh she turned on to her other side, thankful that yet another long meaningless day was nearly at its end.

Pulling her bedclothes up high, almost over her head, she buried herself as deeply as she could, and found herself hoping against hope that perhaps there would be no tomorrow, or at least if there were she might not wake up to it. Much as she hated the dark, for once in her life she found herself hoping that this particular night would have no end, and day would never break; that no faint light would creep through the thin curtains, and for her there would never be another winter’s morning—no voices would murmur, no doors would open and shut, and there would be no sounds of people going about their business. That there would be no more life, in fact; no more seemingly endless bitter days or long drawn out freezing nights, no more pain, no more utter misery, no more anguish. At this moment in her young life, all Rusty wanted was for it to come to an end. Now.

*   *   *

Judy Tate was due to go and meet Meggie at Cucklington House, but a change in the weather had delayed her departure. To pass the time, she sat in the window of Owl Cottage watching the skies for a break in the snow with Hamish, her black Scottish terrier, sitting beside her on the window seat, seemingly as intrigued by the blizzard outside the diamond-shaped lead panes as his mistress.

‘I don’t think it’s ever going to stop, old boy, do you?’ Judy asked him, stubbing out the end of her cigarette. ‘Having been frozen stiff I now think we’re all going to be buried alive under a blanket of snow.’

Hamish leaped to his feet and started to bark at a cat streaking across the snow in front of the sitting room window. Judy was brushing some ash off her tartan skirt, reluctantly giving in to the idea of having to cancel her lunch date, when she saw the sun coming out, lighting up the snow which had stopped as suddenly as it had begun, and at once changed her mind, eager to get out of the cottage that, because of the bitter weather, had of late become something of a prison.

Five minutes later the sun was shining so brightly off the deep, crisp snow that when she opened the front door to step out she had to shade her eyes to look over the winter landscape. The beauty that greeted her raised her spirits immediately, but once outside she found it was still as bitterly cold as ever, a cold that burned into her lungs when she breathed it in, forcing her to wrap a thick red wool scarf around the lower part of her face. Holding Hamish’s lead tightly in one gloved hand, she made her way slowly and carefully, passing only a few other brave souls trying to go about their business, or keep appointments somewhere in Bexham. The trek took her twice as long as usual so it was with some relief that she finally arrived at Cucklington House, where in answer to her tug on the old iron bell rope to the side of the wood-panelled, black-painted front door Meggie Gore-Stewart arrived to greet her, wearing an old fur coat, a matching hat and sheepskin gloves.

‘No Richards?’ Judy wondered, looking around the hall and suddenly noticing some missing paintings. Judy knew better than to pass comment. She was aware that Meggie’s financial circumstances had become somewhat straitened since the war, what with overdue taxes and debts she had been obliged to pay off following the sudden death of both her parents, killed in a car accident in America the previous summer. The tragedy had left the already chaotic Gore-Stewart family affairs in a bigger mess than ever, forcing Meggie to try to raise the necessary funds from everything she had been previously bequeathed by her adored and adoring grandmother. Judging from the increasingly bare walls of Cucklington House, and the lack of any silver on the sideboard, the going was not likely to get any easier.

Meggie pulled a comically over-tragic face as Judy rephrased her question about the missing butler, wondering if he too had been hocked?

‘Richards is upstairs in his sty,’ she sighed, narrowing her eyes and taking hold of Judy by one arm. ‘Determined to keep warm with the help of a bottle of nose paint. Come on—come through to the kitchen at once. I’ve found some sardines in the larder and some biscuits for the cheese in an old tin—and best news of all, the biscuits have no weevils. Imagine? Besides, it’s almost warm in there.’

Following her friend’s example and keeping on her overcoat, Judy trod carefully down the dark flagstones into the large kitchen. The room was dominated by an old cream-coloured range to which they both immediately gravitated, as towards an open fire, putting their still gloved hands on its comfortingly warm exterior.

‘I’ve got some brandy—or would you rather a gin?’

‘Anything. Anything as long as it’s alcohol.’

Meggie poured them both large brandies, and then, still in gloves, hats and coats, with even Hamish carefully pushing his backside against the stove to warm himself, they raised their glasses to each other in a toast.

‘To hell with rationing and the Labour government and God save all here.’

Meggie sat down on one side of the old table, while Judy pulled up another chair to sit opposite her.

‘So Richards has taken to his bed, has he? What a bother. I suppose that means you have to do everything, and in this place that’s not funny. I remember even your grandmother said it was too big for her, and she had plenty of people to help her.’

‘And wasn’t Madame Gran a lucky devil, to say the least of it. Even so, Richards can stay there and rot for all I care, even if the dust gets thicker and the cobwebs heavier. When all’s said there’s no-one to see them but him and me—and he can’t see much through his eternal hangovers anyway.’

‘Have you thought of kicking him out of bed?’

‘No, but I have contemplated murdering him. Only the thought of ending up swinging on the end of a rope is stopping me. I don’t think being driven mad by your grandmother’s lunatic old butler is enough to risk being topped. Funny really, him taking to his bed now that the war is finally over—I mean, it just doesn’t seem to be in character. He was so utterly resolute when the bombs were dropping, a rock upon whom we all leaned, day and blooming night, really he was.’

‘Perhaps he’s missing all the excitement?’ Judy wondered. ‘Lots of people are missing the war. That could be the trouble. Or he could be just plumb tuckered out?’

‘I know just how he feels,’ Meggie sighed, lighting up a cigarette. As she offered Judy one, she saw the look of surprise in her friend’s eyes. ‘Don’t say you don’t miss it, Judy? Since I’ve come back from America, I don’t know why, but I seem to miss it more and more. It’s as if, having been wholly alive, I am now half asleep.’

‘I suppose that now you come to mention it, I suppose I do—a bit,’ Judy said after a moment, surprising herself with her reply. ‘I hadn’t really thought about it before. War seemed so awful, and I just thought, well—peace is going to be—’

‘Course you do,’ Meggie interrupted as she topped up both their glasses. ‘God, after all that danger and excitement, everyone pulling together—life is so dull. Don’t you find it dull, and grey, Judy? Walter must, surely?’

‘In a way I’m just glad to be still alive, Megs. I think I could take any amount of so-called austerity in return for us all still being here. Particularly Walter. Seriously—don’t you feel the same?’

‘About Walter?’

‘Seriously.’ Judy laughed. ‘I know it’s all a bit grim right now, but isn’t that the rough with the smooth thing?’

‘I suppose.’ Meggie sighed. ‘It’s just not quite how one saw it all. Not quite what one was brought up to expect. Still, long as you’ve got a bit of whoopee water in the drink cupboard, and a few friends to chew the old cud with, I suppose one must not grum. Only bugbear I have personally speaking is fighting the old ennui, as the song has it.’ She tapped the ash off her cigarette into the ashtray in the middle of the kitchen table in front of them. ‘Although must say—after the States, life here has an altogether greyer hue. Not a morning goes by but I don’t wake up and find myself missing real coffee that tastes of coffee, and fresh bread rolls and curls of cold butter … how I wish I hadn’t said that.’

‘How I wish you hadn’t.’

Judy sighed gloomily, the idea of real coffee and equally real rolls and butter filling her with inexpressible longing. She turned her thoughts away from such unimaginable luxuries, and sipped at her drink instead. At least that was real. Rather than think about the change that had obviously come over them all, she turned her mind to the present, to the shift in Meggie’s circumstances, to this new strange life her friend was being forced to lead, all alone in a large echoing house, trying to find the wherewithall to survive. To say that she was curious would be understating it.

Having finally warmed up due to the heat from the stove as well as the brandy Meggie slipped her fur coat off her shoulders and draped it over her knees. As Judy followed suit, she laughed.

‘My God, we both look like Madame Gran when she was being driven about Bexham in the old Rolls.’

They both laughed again, then fell to silence.

‘Are you all right, Megs?’ Judy enquired, reading a sudden dark expression on Meggie’s face.

‘Yes. Of course. Why shouldn’t I be?’

‘Nothing. You just suddenly—you suddenly looked a little sad, that’s all. Is it still your parents?’

‘Is what still my parents?’ Meggie asked tetchily. ‘You know I didn’t get on with them.’ She averted her eyes and lit another cigarette from the one she was just finishing.

‘You’ve never really talked about it. The accident, I mean.’ Judy shrugged. ‘I just wondered whether you wanted to talk about it.’

‘Nothing really to talk about, darling. Besides its being a bit of a bore. Having to scratch round to pay their dues. I mean they really were quite hopeless. Not just with me—with money. With their affairs. I don’t think it’s quite fair, actually. Leaving such a terrible mess behind one. For someone else to clear up. I don’t consider that to be quite the thing. So there you are—that’s it. That’s how all right I am. I’m fine, darling. Just a mite miffed.’

‘Are you having to—are you having any difficulty?’ Judy corrected herself. ‘Getting the necessary, I mean.’

‘You’re wondering about the missing paintings?’ Meggie flashed a sudden smile, much to Judy’s relief. ‘It’s all right, I haven’t flogged them—yet—although dare say I’ll have to surrender them sooner or later. At the moment they’re only up in London being cleaned—just in case. Anyway, this is boring. I hate talking about money, et cetera. Much more interesting—how’s it feel to have a husband again?’

Judy went to say something, and then stopped.

‘It feels strange,’ she said, finally and reluctantly. ‘I don’t know why, and I never thought to say it, but having Walter back after six years, after thinking he was dead—it’s a bit odd actually.’

Meggie nodded, as if she hadn’t paid much attention to this admission.

‘Does Walter talk about his war much, or is he how they were when they came back from the last war? A lot of them wouldn’t talk about it, you know. Not a word. According to my grandmother. It was as if four years in the Flanders mud had never happened. Is Walter a bit like that?’

Judy hesitated, not wanting to be disloyal to the only man she had ever loved, and at the same time longing to talk about the state of her marriage.

‘A bit,’ she admitted, finally. ‘You’d think that after all those years in Norway fighting with the Resistance he’d have a bit to say on the subject, but all he ever really says is later, Judy, later. All in good time. It’s a bit hurtful actually. At first I thought perhaps he had a mistress over there that he couldn’t tell me about—or something or other. But then I saw this look he has in his eyes and I know it couldn’t be that.’

‘Why?’

‘Because he looks so lost. He looks as if he still doesn’t quite know where he is. Maybe it’s because he had to kill people, that kind of thing.’

‘Hardly surprising, darling. There was a war on.’

‘But then you don’t talk at all about France and being in the Resistance,’ Judy continued. ‘Not even to me, so I suppose it’s hardly surprising if Walter doesn’t either.’

‘We’re probably all afraid of being war bores, darling. Better by far to put it behind us, yes? It is actually all over now, you know. Better to leave be and not become a bore about it.’

‘You could never be accused of that.’ Judy laughed, pointing accusingly at Meggie. ‘You even turned down a medal without telling me! I only found out by chance!’

‘A medal’s a medal, for all that—that’s all it is,’ Meggie replied, getting up out of her chair. ‘Now then—I don’t know about you, but I’m famished. As always. Let’s eat.’

Far from the expected sardine on stale bread with a bit of old cheese, much to Judy’s surprise and delight Meggie had performed a small culinary miracle, and from such basic ingredients as she had found made a delicious meal of sardines and anchovies—a lucky discovery apparently—served in a delicious dressing miraculously concocted out of some old white wine dregs, long ago turned to vinegar, and the last of an ancient bottle of olive oil, stuffed into two large baked potatoes, followed by slices of farmhouse cheddar served on hot toast.

‘Don’t tell me you’ve learned to bake.’ Judy stared at the loaf on the side. ‘You’ll be wearing a pinny next.’

‘Wouldn’t be caught dead. As a matter of fact I learned to bake bread when I was a child—Grandmother’s cook taught me, under Madame Gran’s insistence. Only three things a girl needs to know how to do to make her way in the world, she used to say. You’ve got to be able to make love, bread and Three No Trumps doubled and vulnerable.’

Further fortified by a bottle of claret Meggie had luckily brought up earlier from the cellar but which had only thawed out sufficiently to be drinkable after being stood on the stove for a full twenty minutes, the two young women reminisced about their times together at the start of the war, remembering those dark days now almost fondly, for all the world as if they were the good times that would never roll again.

‘Things can only get better, I suppose, Meggie,’ Judy mused as they moved back again to sit close to the stove. ‘Things always seem worse in the winter, particularly a winter as hard as this one.’

‘I don’t know about you, but I was brought up to believe that the spoils of war were what came with peace. Prosperity. Optimism. Triumph. Not shortages, queues and misery. I mean, regardez nous, would you? You’d think we’d lost rather than won the war, wouldn’t you?’

‘Perhaps we did. What an awful thought.’ Judy stared ahead of her at something she couldn’t quite name. ‘In fact, in more than one way we just might have lost, you know, and no perhaps about it. In fact, in one way, I think that we actually did lose.’

‘And what way is that, do tell.’

‘I think maybe we’ve lost our innocence.’

*   *   *

Ellen flicked her duster idly along the top of the desk, much more interested in what her employer’s daughter was doing than in the little bit of housework that was required that morning.

‘You’re smoking yourself to a standstill, since you and Master Max have come back from your London visit, Miss Mattie,’ she said, looking at the thin blue spiral of smoke that was rising from the sofa, and giving an extra flick of her duster as if to underline her point. ‘That’s the third cigarette you’ve had since I started doin’ in here this morning, and I think that’s too much, really I do, Miss Mattie.’

Mattie didn’t even bother to look up from her copy of The Tatler, flicking her ash inaccurately into the fireplace as she stared at a particularly foolish-looking set of young people enjoying a joke on the stairs at a dance in some particularly gloomy-looking country house.

‘You’ll find furniture gets much cleaner, Ellen, if you move the articles on top of it while you’re dusting, rather than threatening them with your duster,’ she countered, throwing Ellen a look, which was promptly greeted with a sniff and a shrug. ‘Or counting how many cigarettes I might or might not have had for that matter,’ she finally decided, as she closed her magazine. ‘Anyway, I’m only doing my duty. In case you may have forgotten, smoking is a government directive. Everyone in London’s smoking like chimneys. The Prime Minister, Mr Attlee—’

‘I know who the Prime Minister is well enough, thank you, Miss Mattie,’ Ellen interrupted. ‘Having helped to have him voted in.’

‘Mr Attlee wants us all to smoke as much as we can. Be patriotic, smoke your way through the day, that’s the maxim.’ Mattie picked up a fresh magazine. ‘By lighting up a ciggie every twenty minutes I happen to be doing my duty for God and the King.’

‘I can’t see the point of it, really I can’t, can’t see the point of smoking, Miss Mattie.’

‘I suppose the point behind their thinking, Ellen, is that the more we smoke the less we will feel the hunger pangs, that’s the point. They want us to smoke to make up for the fact that there’s no tea, no butter, no bread, no eggs, no nothing really.’

Momentarily distracted from the magazine, Mattie breathed out a beautifully shaped smoke ring and watched it drifting across the sitting room before it disappeared against the Japanese-style pre-war wallpaper.

‘Well, I wouldn’t know about that,’ Ellen muttered. ‘Not being a smoker meself. And isn’t that young Max just waking up and calling for you?’ Once more she stooped, pretending to dust a chair leg, at the same time cocking her head to the ceiling above. ‘He’s a healthy pair of lungs on him, and that’s certain.’

‘Even if I haven’t, you mean?’ Mattie returned, throwing her now finished cigarette on the fire. ‘Coming, Max!’ she called. ‘Mummy’s coming!’

*   *   *

‘We’ll go out to the village green and make a snowman,’ she promised Max a little later, as he jumped down the stairs in such a state of excitement over the snow that he could barely stand still long enough for his mother to dress him in a thick home-knitted hat, gloves and socks. Having put on her own overcoat, the much darned lining of which was a tribute to the needlewoman in her, Mattie stepped outside into the front garden and straight on to the green.

After the loss of her mother in a wartime fire, she and her father had moved from Magnolias to the Place, a light and roomy house directly overlooking Bexham village green. To their mutual surprise they found they had both settled into the new house without any sense of regret for their previous home, perhaps because, among many other advantages, the new house was considerably nearer to the Three Tuns where Lionel Eastcott liked to go for a regular drink at certain equally regular times of the day.

Out on the green Mattie and Max found that they hardly noticed the cold, so engrossed did they become in building their enormous snowman. They weren’t alone, because the green was already dotted with groups of other children similarly employed, under the vigilant eyes of their mothers.

‘Now that really is a snowman. That is going to be the best snowman of them all, Max,’ Mattie said. ‘If there was a prize for best snowman, undoubtedly you would be the winner, sweetie pie.’

Having carefully inserted the two old black coat buttons for the eyes that she’d brought out especially for the task, Mattie stood back to admire their handiwork. As she did so she noticed a figure walking nearby, a young woman carrying a large pink-blanketed bundle in her arms. As soon as she realised who the woman was, Mattie caught her breath. The last thing she’d heard about Rusty Sykes had not been good—and yet here she was out walking with a baby cradled in her arms.

For a moment Mattie stood motionless, not knowing what to do, hoping against hope that Rusty might not have seen her, or that if she had she might be just as anxious as Mattie to avoid contact. As she stood watching Rusty seemed about to pass on by, so Mattie thought her wish had been granted, until Max suddenly