‘Well, thanks for letting me stay here with you, Jean.’

‘You know you’re always welcome, Francine.’

They were avoiding looking directly at one another, both of them knowing there were questions that must not be asked and answers that could not be given.

‘I bet this B & B the BBC are putting me up at in Bangor won’t be anywhere near as comfortable.’

‘What do you think you’ll do when you’ve finished doing these BBC programmes?’

Safer to talk about Francine’s singing than about the fact that she had broken her contract with the theatre to take on this nowhere near so well paid work where she wouldn’t even be the main act but would merely be supporting Vera Lynn, just because it was in Bangor, and because Wales was where Jack was. Safer too, Jean felt, not to mention either the letter that had come for Francine in Jack’s schoolboy handwriting. That way, if Vi should find out and object, she would be able to deny that she had been involved.

Outside the car the BBC had sent was waiting, its driver standing on the pavement smoking a cigarette.

‘You’ve got everything?’

Francine nodded. ‘I’ll write and let you know when I’m settled in.’

She hadn’t wanted to say anything but Jean discovered that she had to.

‘You … you won’t do anything silly, Fran, will you?’

Francine looked at her, and shook her head, bending down to pick up her case. She was only taking a few of her clothes with her, leaving the rest behind in her trunk.

The twins came rushing in just in time to see her off, hugging her and saying how much they were going to miss her.

‘You know why she’s doing it, don’t you?’ Jean said to Sam later as she poured him a cup of tea. ‘She’s doing it so that she can see Jack.’ She put down the teapot. ‘If Vi finds out …’

Sam reached for her free hand and held it tightly within his own. ‘You’ve got to let them sort out their own lives, love.’

The B & B in Bangor was every bit as dreary as Francine had known it would be, but the other entertainers billeted in the town were a cheerful lot, including in their number some of Liverpool’s most famous comedians such as Tommy Handley from the programme ITMA, but Francine’s mind was on other things.

Jack had written to her to tell her that the new couple he was living with were much kinder than the Davieses but that he wished he was still in Liverpool. He missed her, he had written, and Francine certainly missed him.

The first thing she had done – even before unpacking her case and introducing herself to the other entertainers billeted in the boarding house – had been to find out how far it was to the small Welsh village where Jack was staying and how easily she could get there.

She would be best driving there, she had been told, since it was too far to cycle and there was no direct route by train.

It hadn’t been easy finding someone prepared to lend her a car, but eventually Francine had managed to persuade a local garage owner into doing so, with the aid of an enormous sum of money.

Now, following the carefully written down directions that had accompanied his even more detailed instructions on the proper care of his precious car, she was driving along virtually empty roads that climbed upwards into Welsh mountains so high that their tops were lost amongst the clouds. Great barren sweeps of granite mountainside rose starkly either side of her, as she drove through valleys so narrow that the towering mountains cast shadows that Francine felt must never be penetrated by the sun. This was a dark and ancient land that wore its scars and its survival proudly.

She had brought sandwiches and a flask with her, but she didn’t bother to stop to enjoy them. She would share them instead with Jack.

She exhaled with relief when she found the small village with the long and unpronounceable name, which was close to the farm where Jack was living. She stopped the car outside the post office and got out. It would be a good place to enquire which direction she should take out of the village to reach the farm.

As she walked out of the sunshine into the gloom of the low-ceilinged room, the half a dozen or so people waiting in a queue all turned to look at her, as people do when strangers arrive in close-knit communities.

‘I’m looking for the Thomases’ farm,’ Francine told them, feeling that some explanation of her presence was called for.

The people in the queue looked at one another and there was a groundswell of muted conversation in Welsh.

It was the woman behind the counter who answered her. ‘It’s down the road on the left as you go past the chapel, but you won’t find much of it left, not after what the Luftwaffe did to it last night. Dropped one of their ruddy bombs right on top of it, they did, see, and flattened the whole place.’

The singsong words danced inside Francine’s head, impossible surely to believe, for what reason could the Luftwaffe have for dropping bombs out here where there was nothing but sheep and a handful of scattered farms, and Jack.

Francine started to walk and then run from the post office towards her borrowed car.

The road up to the farm was potholed and narrow, and at the end of it lay what must have once been a building but was now a heap of rubble, over which hung a pall of dust and smoke from the still smouldering rafters.

A group of rescue workers, their faces smeared with smoke and their expressions bleak, stood silently beside a couple of battered trucks.

Francine got out of the car.

‘You can’t go over there, bach,’ a short burly-looking man told her, barring her way. ‘Too dangerous it is, see, with the building half collapsed already.’

‘Please let me past. My son was staying here. I have to know what’s happened to him.’

Something – pity, perhaps – came and went in the man’s eyes before he explained, ‘There was no one survived – took a direct hit, the place did, see. They reckon the pilot was after Liverpool but lost his way and had to turn back so he dumped his bombs in Wales. Half a dozen or more gone off last night, there was, so they say, but this was the only one that hit anything.’

‘He wouldn’t have known nothing, bach,’ another man told her gently.

‘Killed old Thomas’s prize dog, it did, an’ all. Promised me one of her pups, he had,’ a third mournful voice joined in.

Francine wished they would go away and leave her here on her own.

Jack. She couldn’t take it in that he was gone. Dead. Killed. Here in this burned-out wreckage of what had once been a home. She couldn’t visualise him here; not at all. When she created a picture of him inside her head she saw him in Liverpool, smiling up at her … and alive.

But he wasn’t alive. How could he be? Francine looked at the still smouldering wreckage and knew that the men were right and that no one, nothing could have survived. Jack. What she had previously thought of as emotional pain had been nothing. This now was real pain, and it had only just begun.

As she drove past the small stone-built chapel on her way back to Bangor she looked at the message written outside. It read, ‘God is with you.’

She started to laugh hysterically.

The now-familiar wail of the air-raid sirens brought Bella out of her sleep. She lay in bed listening to it without making any attempt to obey its summons. She could hear Bettina and her mother getting up, and making ready to take refuge in the communal air-raid shelter at the end of the road. Still she didn’t move.

There was a sharp rap on her bedroom door and then it opened and Bettina warned her, ‘The air-raid siren’s gone.’

‘I’m not going.’

She could almost feel Bettina’s angry frustration as she wondered what to do and then, after hesitating, she closed the door and Bella heard her hurrying down the stairs to join her mother.

The front door opened and closed. The wail of the sirens stopped. Bella counted the seconds that ticked by. She had reached forty-five when she heard the first undulating hum of approaching desynchronised aircraft engines, the noise swiftly growing louder. Soon the scream of falling bombs and explosions would fill the air, along with the thump of the anti-aircraft guns. Familiar noises now, that had fallen into a familiwell-organisedar pattern. In the morning, newspapers would carry reports of where the bombs had fallen and how much damage they had done.

Bella tensed as she heard the first whining whistle of descending bombs, followed by the dull crump of explosions.

It had started. Well, she didn’t care. She didn’t really care about anything any more.

A bomb screamed earthwards so close at hand the noise hurt her eardrums. Silence. Then an almighty explosion that shook the whole house to its foundations and brought the toiletries on her dressing table crashing to the floor, filling the air with the scent of her Ma Griffe perfume.

At the hospital, as soon as they had heard the air-raid siren, the nurses and porters had rushed to get the patients to safety, following a now well-organised procedure after a month of constant alerts. Seb, who had been told he would be discharged in the morning, made sure he kept a protective eye on Grace, as he and the other mobile patients helped the nurses with those who were bedridden.

‘I dare say it will be the docks that will be getting the worse of it,’ Seb shouted to Grace above the noise of the sirens.

Grace nodded, feeling more anxious about her father and her brother, who were both bound to be more closely involved in the raid, than she was about herself.

The night was filled with the sound of exploding bombs and destruction, whilst the ack-ack guns of the batteries spat out rounds of gunfire that lit up the sky. Shattered glass covered the ground, crunching underfoot.

‘They’ve got the Customs House,’ one of the porters yelled, ‘and a couple of warehouses.’

Just as they reached the shelter a dozen or more incendiary bombs hit the ground, bursting into flames. One of them came so close that Grace felt the heat of it singeing her uniform before Seb dragged her out of the way.

Another landed on the entrance to a corporation bus that had just stopped outside the hospital. Whilst Grace watched, the conductress kicked it off so that it exploded harmlessly in the street.

Dodging the broken glass from windows blown out by the bombs, and the incendiary bombs themselves, Grace finally got her patients into the shelter.

In answer to Seb’s, ‘You OK?’ she gave a brief nod and acknowledged, ‘Yes, thanks to you.’

There was no time to say any more. She had her patients to attend to, and Sister was doing a roll call to make sure that no one had been left behind by accident.

By the time that had been done the German bombers had turned for home and the all clear was already sounding.

Luckily the hospital itself hadn’t been hit, but there’d been a lot of damage down by the docks and Wallasey Town Hall had been hit, as well as several houses, Seb reported to Grace before she went off duty.

‘You won’t be here when I come back on duty tonight. The ward won’t be the same without you.’ Despite her best intentions Grace knew that her voice was betraying how she felt.

Seb squeezed her hand. ‘I’ll be waiting for you here at the hospital when you come off duty on your day off, just like we’ve arranged.’

Grace looked at him. ‘Do you think it’s too soon, after Teddy?’

‘No, I don’t, and I don’t think that Teddy would think so either,’ said Seb seriously, still holding her hand. ‘We already know how we feel about one another, and my guess is that your Teddy’s up there somewhere watching over you and that what he wants more than anything is for you to be happy, Grace.’

‘Oh, Seb …’ Grace’s voice was muffled. ‘I think you and Teddy would have got on really well together.’

‘I think so too,’ Seb agreed. The public air-raid shelter at the bottom of the street was crammed with people. One household had been having a party when the siren had gone off, and the men had grabbed their beer and the women the sandwiches, and now the party was continuing inside the shelter in a very jolly way indeed, with one of the guests playing his harmonica and several of the men singing at the tops of their voices.

Jean gave the twins a warning look when she saw them exchanging looks and giggling. Of course the old-fashioned songs weren’t to their taste, but at least they drowned out some of the noise of the bombs going off.

Sam was on standby down at the Salvage Corps headquarters in Hatton Gardens, and Luke was on duty at his barracks.

The harmonica player had stopped to have a sandwich, allowing them all to hear the fierce retaliatory fire from the ack-ack guns defending the city.

‘It’s been the early hours of every other night damn near all month now that we’ve had this going on,’ one of the women complained. ‘I’m sick of having to get up out of me bed and come down here.’

‘Well, you’d be a hell of a lot sicker if one of them bombs landed on the house whilst you was in the ruddy bed,’ her husband pointed out.

A couple of women had young children with them and were hugging them protectively, making Jean think of Vi and Jack – and Francine, of course. There was no doubt in Jean’s mind that Francine had taken the BBC work so that she could be close to Jack.

Of course, Vi was bound to be feeling smug about sending Jack away now that Wallasey had been bombed a couple of times – not that Jean had seen anything of her twin since the day she and Edwin had come round to collect Jack.

Vi had told her then that Charlie, like Luke, had been posted to Home Duties in case of an invasion, and of course she had been full of Charlie’s bravery at Dunkirk, saying how she thought he deserved to get a medal.

Up at the hospital Grace would be on duty, and Jean said a special prayer for her eldest daughter. It had been terrible what had happened to that young lad she had been friendly with, but Jean had noticed a certain sparkle in Grace’s eyes on her last visit home, and there’d been a lot of references to ‘Seb’ to accompany that sparkle.

The all clear sounded, breaking into Jean’s thoughts and bringing with it a wave of relief that had everyone in the shelter gathering up their possessions and getting ready to go home.

Outside the sky was already lightening, revealing the familiar and blessedly undamaged outline of the street and their homes.

The air, though, tasted of smoke and dust, and there were fires burning down by the docks.

* * *

‘They got the Customs House and a couple of warehouses, and by all accounts there was a fair few bombs dropped on Wallasey again,’ Sam told Jean as he demolished the breakfast she had made him when he had arrived home just after six in the morning.

‘I can’t stay. We’ve got some salvage work to do on some warehouses that got hit,’ had been his first words to her after he had given her a reassuring hug and a kiss on the cheek, ‘but I wanted to make sure you were OK. Oh, and there was a bomb went off up near the hospital but no one was hurt.’ He was pushing his chair back and standing up as he finished his cup of tea, kissing her again and telling her cheerfully, ‘Better get back, love.’

Vi was still in shock, still unable to do anything other than stare in disbelief at the scattered still smoking rubble that had once been a house. She hadn’t been able to bring herself to look at the shrouded stretcher she had seen carried away.

‘Well, I never thought that Hitler would bomb a nice road like this one,’ said a woman wearing a dressing gown to no one in particular. ‘All three of them were killed, so I’ve heard. He was a councillor, you know.’

‘Yes,’ Vi agreed, for once unwilling to boast of Edwin’s position and their connection to the Parkers.

She hadn’t been able to believe it when Edwin had told her that the Parkers’ house had been hit by a bomb and that the Parkers had been inside it at the time. No one would ever know why they hadn’t been in their Anderson shelter now, of course.

Bella had behaved very oddly when they’d told her, laughing so wildly that Edwin had said she was hysterical. It was the shock, of course. But like Edwin had said, there’d be things to do, seeing as Alan’s parents had been killed as well, and Bella was bound to come into a tidy sum of money, Alan being their only son and Bella his wife, or rather his widow.

‘Fran!’ Jean exclaimed in surprise when she opened the door to her younger sister later in the morning.

‘Jack’s dead,’ Francine said bleakly. ‘Killed by a bomb dropped on the farmhouse where Vi had sent him because it was safer than being here.’

‘Oh, Fran, no! Oh, my poor girl.’

Jean could hear the twins coming clattering down the stairs, exclaiming, ‘Auntie Fran, you’re back!’ their voices changing when they saw that she was crying.

‘What is it? What’s wrong?’ Sasha asked uncertainly.

‘Go back up to your bedroom, you two,’ Jean instructed them. There’d be time enough to tell them what had happened later.

‘I never even got to say goodbye to him properly, or hold him or anything They couldn’t find anything, you see. Not anything at all. The bomb was a direct hit and …’

Very gently Jean guided her sister into the kitchen and then closed the door.