5

      Her watch over, Leading Wren Lyndis Carmichael scanned the letterboard beside the door at Hellas House. Everyone did it. It was automatic on entering quarters.

      She reached for the one addressed to Daisy, recognizing Keth’s writing and the Censor’s red stamp. She would put it in Daisy’s top drawer with the one that came yesterday – a kind of welcome back after her leave.

      It was only then she saw the letter bearing her own name, and a bright orange 20-cents Kenyan stamp. It had taken almost three weeks to arrive. Sea mail, of course. Very few letters came by air now.

      She closed the door of Cabin 4A behind her, placing the letters on the chest of drawers. The midday meal was being served; she would read her own letter when she had eaten because it was from her father and the first since he had written telling her of her mother’s death – the woman she had thought was her mother, that was.

      She glanced round the small, empty cabin. She missed Daisy. It was almost a year since a woebegone Wren in an ill-fitting uniform and flush-faced from a raging temperature came to Cabin 4A.

      A lot had happened in that time. They became close friends, and shared runs ashore with Drew Sutton when his minesweeper docked in Liverpool. Lyn tried not to think about Drew Sutton now, because she had fallen crazily in love with him and ached for him to love her.

      And so he would have, she thought despairingly, had not Kitty Sutton arrived from America. It had been a love-at-first-sight job for them both – or so Daisy had said on one of the rare occasions on which she now mentioned her brother.

      It had been that, all right. Love, and everything else! Drew and Kitty spent that same night together and in the morning they were engaged. That was what hurt, Lyn acknowledged. Them sleeping together, because she had practically offered herself on a plate, only to be gently turned down by Drew Sutton. As if he were waiting for Kitty to come along, she thought, and amusing himself with Lyn Carmichael meantime, damn fool she had been for letting him.

      She lifted her chin and bit on her lip. She no longer cried just to think of Drew, and Drew kissing Kitty and making love to Kitty. Not outwardly, that was. Her tears were gone because she had no more left to cry; only those inside her that hurt like hell; tears that didn’t leave her eyelids swollen and her nose red, but which writhed through her to stick in a hard knot in her throat and refuse to be shed.

      She let go a deep sigh, then made her reluctant way to the mess. After early watch, kept-warm dinners were served and kept-warm dinners offered hard peas and gravy dried leathery. And it was the same with the custard, spooned over a sugarless pudding. Leathery, like the gravy she thought miserably, and at this moment she wanted to be miserable because a letter had come from her father and she didn’t want to open it.

      Nor would she, she thought defiantly, taking a kept-warm plate from the serving hatch. She would not open the letter until Daisy came back from leave; pretend it had arrived only that morning. And then, because Daisy knew all about what had gone on in Kenya, and before Kenya, reading what her father had written wouldn’t seem so bad.

      She speared a chunk of meat on the end of her fork, looking at it distastefully.

      ‘Roll on my leave,’ she said out loud to no one in particular. Roll on October when she would collect her travel warrant and her leave pass, and a seven-day ration card, and go to stay with Auntie Blod in Llangollen. At least in Llangollen there would be no chance of accidentally meeting Drew Sutton – with Kitty.

      She began to mull over the idea of volunteering for overseas service and knew at once she would never do it; knew that she lived daily in the hope of seeing Drew, even with Kitty, because she loved him that much.

      She would always love him.

      Tatiana Sutton left the Underground at Knightsbridge and turned left into Brompton Road, thinking with pleasure of the rabbit, already skinned, and the pheasant, already plucked and wrapped in newspapers, in her leather bag. Daisy’s father had given them and Daisy’s mother prepared them, sending with them her very best love to Sparrow. And not only meat enough for four meals, but two large brown eggs given by Gracie, fresh from the nest only that morning and not weeks old like the rationed shop eggs Sparrow had to break into a cup and sniff suspiciously before using.

      Sparrow would be pleased too with the bunch of Michaelmas daisies and chrysanthemums sent with Julia’s love, and the grave instructions to take care of herself now that the nights were drawing in, and to keep warm.

      Dear Sparrow. So full of love and caring and cosseting. She had made life bearable again, and when the war was over and she had to return to Denniston House, she would miss Sparrow a lot.

      She smiled as she crossed the road into Montpelier Mews, once upon a time the stables belonging to the big houses in the square. The little white house with its red tiled floors and shining brass doorknobs and handles was home to her now and Sparrow her best-loved person – apart from Tim, that was. It shamed her, sometimes, that if asked to place her right hand on the Bible and state who was most precious to her, she would in all conscience have to answer that it was Sparrow, hurt though her mother would be to hear it.

      ‘I’m home,’ she called, banging the outer and inner doors behind her. ‘Have you missed me?’

      ‘I’ll miss the peace and quiet now that you’re back. Are those flowers for me?’

      ‘You know they are. Aunt Julia picked them herself. She sends love and says you are to look after yourself.’

      ‘And is the dear lady well?’

      ‘She is.’

      ‘And happy?’

      ‘Very happy, Sparrow, and chasing around the parish doing her vicar’s wife bit and looking after Bas, who’s on leave for a couple of days.’

      ‘Your Aunt Julia should have had children of her own,’ Sparrow sighed, ‘but she left it over late. I suppose, now you’re back, I’d better make a pot of tea.’

      Truth known, she had been waiting this hour past to make one and would have, were it not wasteful of the tea ration to use a precious spoonful for one person only, when that same spoonful could provide tea for two.

      ‘Yes, please. You put the kettle on whilst I unpack my gifts, food gifts! I tell you, Sparrow, you and I will be eating like lords this week!’

      ‘Hm. Well, I hope the food was honestly got, and not black market.’

      ‘It was – honestly got, I mean. Daisy’s father said he was sorry he couldn’t supply the butter to roast the pheasant in. And did any letters come whilst I was away and did Uncle Igor phone?’

      ‘No letters and no phone call – leastways, not from your uncle. But our Joannie rang to ask if you’d be busy on Tuesday night and I told her you wouldn’t be.’

      ‘But