in it to make her walk a pleasant one, and to allow her to pause to stare in shocked compassion at the blitzed and bombed-out centre of the city. She could see huge gaps where it looked as though whole streets had disappeared, and smaller ones, where only a single house had gone, leaving the rest of the street intact.
The city was very different from the pretty Hertfordshire village where she had grown up, Diane acknowledged. Her parents were far from well off, but their semi was one of several on a quiet leafy lane opposite the village green and duck pond. Diane had grown up knowing virtually everyone else who lived in the village. She couldn’t help contrasting the pretty comfortable calm of her home village with the devastation of this powerful northern port city. Her parents had been proud but anxious when she had announced her intention of doing her bit and joining up, and they had been even more anxious when she had told them that she was seeing an airman, insisting that she took him home with her so that they could meet him. Although at first they had been cool towards him, by the time Diane and Kit’s forty-eight-hour pass was up, Kit had completely charmed them. Diane had been so thrilled and proud, both of him and her parents. Of course, the minute her mother had discovered that he was virtually an orphan, having lost his mother shortly after his birth, she had taken to fussing over him. They had laughed about it together later, Kit teasing Diane that once they were married she would never be able to run home to her mother because she would always take his side. She had laughed too, telling him with the assurance that falling in love brought that she would never ever want to run anywhere other than to him.
She had been so deliriously happy, living in a world coloured by her hopes and dreams for the future, even if her heart had been in her mouth during every mission Kit flew, her fear always that he might not make it back. Too happy, she knew now. And her fear should not just have been for Kit’s survival but for the survival of their love.
She had been so busy with her own thoughts whilst she was walking that she hadn’t really observed very much of her surroundings, and it came as a surprise when she realised that she must have passed the hospital she had been told to look out for and that she could now see the Picton Clock landmark she had been warned meant that she had gone too far and missed her turning.
An elderly woman, obviously having noticed her looking around, came over to her.
‘Lost your way, have you?’ she enquired.
‘I’ve been billeted to Chestnut Close,’ Diane explained, ‘but I think I’ve missed my turning.’
‘Well, as to that,’ the other woman sniffed, ‘you have, yes. This is Wavertree, not Edge Hill.’ The way she stressed what she obviously considered to be the superiority of ‘Wavertree’ would normally have made Diane smile. A similarly petty type of snobbery existed in Melham on the Green, the village where she had grown up, with one end of it being considered ‘better’ than the other. Kit had enjoyed teasing her about her mother’s pride in the fact that their well-cared-for semi was just over the invisible border that separated the ‘better’ end of the village from the ‘other’ end. ‘And, of course, we aren’t supposed to give out directions to strangers,’ the elderly lady added pompously.
‘No, indeed,’ Diane responded with suitable gravity. ‘Actually, I do have the directions, but I’ve wandered off track. I believe that I should have turned off left for Chestnut Close before I got here.’
‘There’s some folks that live there that like to claim that it’s in Wavertree, on account of it being on the border, but even if they are right, the better part of Wavertree is further up the road, past the tennis club and that. I expect you play tennis, do you? I used to play myself when I was younger.’
Diane made her excuses as tactfully as she could. The older woman’s question had brought a fresh wave of painful memories. The previous summer she and Kit had just managed to snatch the mixed doubles trophy from the previous year’s winners at the Cambridgeshire courts where they and other members of the RAF squadrons based locally played.
It had been at the tennis club, on a warm September night just after the Battle of Britain, not yet two years ago, that Kit had proposed to her.
If they had got married straight away then, instead of deciding to wait, would things have been any different?
It didn’t take Diane long to retrace her steps and find the turning into Chestnut Close, which turned out to be a neat collection of small semidetached homes and terraces of four interlinked red-brick houses, with low red-brick front garden walls and privet hedges.
Number 24 was about a quarter of the way down Chestnut Close, and Diane suspected that she saw several sets of net curtains twitching as she walked up its tidy gravel path.
The front door was opened the moment she knocked.
‘Come in, dear,’ she was instructed by the small, plump woman in her fifties who greeted her, whom Diane assumed to be her landlady. ‘I’ve bin expecting you. Tired, are you, and parched too, I’m sure? I’ll put the kettle on and then I’ll take you up and show you the room. You’ll be sharing, did they tell you that? Another young lady who’s working at Derby House. I told them when they asked me if I’d have some lodgers that with me being a widow and liking things just so, I’d only take young ladies. Not that some of them I’ve had have been what I’d call “ladies”, but then I can tell that you’re a decent sort. I’m Mrs Lawson, by the way. It’s a good-size room, the largest in the house. It was me and my Herbert’s room but seein’ as I’m on me own now I moved out of it, like, and I got rid of the double, had a pair of single beds put in – there was that many young couples wanting to have it, what with the furniture shortage an’ all, and there’s much more space in the back room now with only a single in it. It’s funny, isn’t it, some folks don’t like sleeping in a single after they’ve shared, but me, I don’t mind at all. I like me own space, you see, and men and marriage -well, they aren’t allus what they’re made out to be, take it from me. It’s this way,’ she continued without pausing for breath, as she started up the stairs, leaving Diane to follow her.
‘Now I’m very fussy about the state of me bathroom – I won’t have no makeup nor any of that fake leg stuff all over everything. Baths are once a week, unless you want to pay for extra. You’ll get your breakfast, and a meal before you go out when you do your night shift. But there’s to be no food taken upstairs to your room. And no followers neither,’ she added firmly. ‘I won’t have no truck with any of that kind of goings-on.’
They had reached the landing and Diane reflected ruefully that beneath Mrs Lawson’s soft outer plumpness lay a core of pure steel.
‘The lady wot you’ll be sharing with is married. Only bin here a couple of weeks herself, she has.’
‘This is the room.’ She gave a small knock on the door and called out, ‘It’s only me, Mrs Stone, duck, bringing up the new lady.’
Diane heard the sound of the door lock being pulled back, and then the door opened.
‘I’ll leave you two to get to know one another whilst I make you both a cuppa,’ Mrs Lawson announced.
‘Not for me, thanks, Mrs L. I’ve got to go soon,’ said the room’s occupant.
‘Right you are, duck,’ said the landlady, leaving Diane and the girl now seated on one of the room’s two narrow single beds to study one another surreptitiously in the slightly awkward silence that followed her exit.
‘I’m Diane – Di,’ Diane introduced herself.
‘Myra Stone,’ the other girl responded.
Diane
