A Mother’s Blessing. Annie Groves
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Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
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London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain as Goodnight Sweetheart HarperCollinsPublishers 2006
This edition published 2020
Copyright © Annie Groves 2006
Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.
Cover photographs © Gordon Crabbe (model), Daily Herald Archive / Getty Images (background)
Annie Groves asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008395872
Ebook Edition © January 2009 ISBN: 9780007279500
Version: 2020-01-30
For Maxine – confidence-builder extraordinaire
Table of Contents
Copyright
Dedication
Part One: July 1939
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Part Two: Christmas 1939
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Part Three: October 1940
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Acknowledgements
Keep Reading …
About Annie Groves
Also by Annie Groves
About the Publisher
‘No! Don’t.’
‘Aw, what’s up with yer?’
‘It’s not right, that’s what,’ Molly announced, keeping her arms folded tightly over her chest to prevent Johnny from making a fresh attempt to touch her breasts. It was a warm July evening and they had decided to walk home from the cinema on Lime Street to Edge Hill, the small tight-knit community of streets clustered together in a part of the Liverpool that didn’t belong to the dockside but wasn’t part of the new garden suburbs like Wavertree either. A few yards ahead of them, she could see June, Molly’s elder sister, locked in the arms of her fiancé, Frank.
‘Aw, come on, Molly, just one kiss,’ Johnny persisted cajolingly. ‘Look at your June. She knows how to treat a chap.’
Molly didn’t really want to look at June because June was with Frank, and just thinking about her sister’s boyfriend always made Molly’s heart ache painfully and her skin flush. But Frank was June’s. And the only smiles he ever gave to Molly were kind and older-brotherly. Agreeing to go out with Johnny was the best way Molly could think of to stop herself from thinking about Frank. Frank belonged to June, and that was that.
‘Come on, Molly, give us a kiss,’ Johnny coaxed. ‘There’s nowt wrong in it. Look at your June and Frank.’
Molly tensed. There it was again – that pain she had no right to have. She had been struggling all evening to evade Johnny’s amorous advances, and the eagerness she could hear in his voice now, as he pressed closer to her, made her feel wretchedly miserable and uncomfortable. What was wrong with her? Johnny was a good-looking lad, tall with thick dark hair. But his bold gaze and knowing smile intimidated Molly. Instinctively, she knew that Frank would not make a girl feel uncomfortable when she was with him; neither would he start pressing her for intimacies she wasn’t ready to give. Unhappiness clogged her throat and tears burned at the back of her eyes.
June and Frank were oblivious to Molly’s plight. Not