ONE

      ‘I was speaking to Fred Shipley after Mass this morning, Bill Whittaker said as the family sat around the table that early April morning, eating their large breakfast. ‘You know, from a few doors up?’

      His wife, Marion, nodded. ‘I know him. Ada’s husband. They have a son in the navy.’

      ‘So he was saying. He claims they’re getting all the ships into tiptop condition and more are being commissioned. Not that they tell the men much, but apparently they’re recruiting nineteen to the dozen, only it’s all hush-hush at the moment.’

      ‘Why?’

      ‘At a guess I’d say that they don’t want to start a national panic. Now, you’re not to fret about this, though maybe it is better to be semi-prepared, but I am beginning to wonder if Chamberlain was wilier than we gave him credit for when he came back from Munich waving that piece of paper last September, declaring that there’d be “Peace for our time”.’

      ‘In what way?’

      ‘Well, I’m wondering if all that talk of appeasement was just a ploy so that we could get ourselves on a war footing should the need arise. I mean, can you see a man like Hitler being satisfied with just Austria and Czechoslovakia? And just at the moment he has plenty on his side, with the Fascist Franco winning the war in Spain, and Mussolini in charge in Italy. And Stalin seems to be another brutal dictator.’

      Marion let her eyes settle on her family grouped around the table listening to her husband. Her elder three children looked very like her, with their hazel eyes and light brown hair, her handsome elder son, Richard, tall for fifteen. He had been apprenticed in the brass foundry, where his father worked, for almost a year now, Sarah, her beautiful eldest daughter, would be fifteen in October, and her mischievous second son, Tony, was just turned nine and sometimes one body’s work to watch. The identical twins, Miriam, who was known as Missie, and Magda, looked the spit of their father with their dark eyes and dark hair, and would be seven in June.

      Suddenly Bill’s words seemed to threaten all Marion held dear, and she shuddered as she said, ‘Europe doesn’t seem to be a very safe place at the moment.’

      ‘It isn’t,’ Bill answered grimly.

      ‘But, Bill,’ Marion’s eyes looked large in her pale face, ‘surely no one wants war, certainly not after the last lot.’

      ‘No sane person wants war at any time,’ Bill said. ‘But Hitler isn’t sane, is he? You remember that rampage against the Jews that we heard about on the wireless last November? Would any sane man authorise that?’

      ‘Oh, I remember it well.’ And without thinking of the children listening, Marion went on, ‘The night we heard about it was a filthy one too, cold and windy with rain lashing down, and I thought, what if it had been us thrown out on a night like that, like those poor Jews were?’

      Magda’s eyes were like saucers. ‘So why was Jews thrown out then?’ she asked.

      Tony suppressed a sigh, but he could cheerfully have murdered Magda. She never would learn that once adults realised you were taking an