CONTENTS

       TITLE PAGE

      COPYRIGHT

      EPIGRAPH

      PART ONE

      ONE

      TWO

      THREE

      FOUR

      FIVE

      SIX

      SEVEN

      EIGHT

      NINE

      TEN

      PART TWO

      ELEVEN

      TWELVE

      THIRTEEN

      FOURTEEN

      FIFTEEN

      SIXTEEN

      SEVENTEEN

      EIGHTEEN

      NINETEEN

      TWENTY

      PART THREE

      TWENTY-ONE

      TWENTY-TWO

      TWENTY-THREE

      TWENTY-FOUR

      TWENTY-FIVE

      TWENTY-SIX

      TWENTY-SEVEN

      TWENTY-EIGHT

      TWENTY-NINE

      THIRTY

      THIRTY-ONE

      EPILOGUE

      ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

      ABOUT THE AUTHOR

      BY THE SAME AUTHOR

       ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

      ONE

      ‘My station’s coming up next, and then it’ll be Lime Street, luv, tek it from me. Done this ruddy train journey that many times, I have, since this bloomin’ war began, I can tell the stops practically in me sleep. That is, of course, if a person could manage to get any sleep with the trains being that full and noisy. Not that I’m complaining, like, not about the overcrowding nor about all the place names being teken down from the stations so as to confuse any of Hitler’s spies wot manage to land. Aye, and if I were your age, I’d be in uniform too. WAAF isn’t it?’ Diane Wilson’s new-found friend said knowingly, referring to the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, studying Diane’s airforce-blue-clad frame admiringly.

      ‘That’s right.’ Diane smiled politely enough to be pleasant but not so warmly that she would be encouraging the woman to ask her too many questions.

      ‘A right ’andsome lot them fly boys are. By, if I had me time again…’ the older woman chuckled.

      Now it was harder for Diane to force a responsive smile. Automatically, and despite the fact that she was wearing gloves, she placed her right hand over the bare place on her ring finger. The pain she thought she had under control could sneak up on her to catch her unawares and stab her with such agonising sharpness. She ought to be over it by now. After all, it had been three months. Three months, two days and ten hours, an inner voice tormented her. Resolutely Diane ignored it. She had known other girls, any number of them, who had been stationed with her at Upwood, Cambridgeshire, who had gone from being desperately in love with one chap to clinging happily to the arm of another when they had lost him. So there was no reason why she shouldn’t be doing the same. Only she wouldn’t be clinging – not to any man – not ever again. There was no danger of her repeating that mistake. Sometimes, when she was at her lowest ebb, the horrid thought wouldn’t go away, the thought that it might have been easier to accept things if Kit had been killed instead of…

      ‘You’ll be heading for that Derby House, then, like as not?’ the woman leaned towards her to whisper, interrupting her reverie. ‘Saw Mr Churchill himself standing outside of it one morning, I did. Smiled at me, an’ all. Hitler might have ’is ruddy SS but just so long as we’ve got our Mr Churchill we’ll be sound, mark my words,’ she added stoutly.

      She was a good sort, Diane recognised, a bit shabbily dressed, but then who wasn’t these days, with the war in its third year and new clothes only available if one had enough coupons with which to purchase them. Luckily she had joined the WAAF before clothing coupons had come in, and so she had not had to part with any of her own precious coupons in exchange for her obligatory WAAF uniform of black lace-up shoes, grey lisle stockings, which none of the girls wore during the summer months if they could help it, a skirt, a tunic, a peaked cap – which the girls loved as much as they hated the lisle stockings –an overcoat, which came in jolly useful in the winter, and even regulation underwear, with its horrid bubble-gum-pink ‘foundation garments’, although none of the girls wore these either if they could get away with wearing their own underwear instead.

      More seriously, the whole country was now feeling the effect of the food rationing that had been brought in at the beginning of the war, but if Hitler had hoped to destroy the fighting spirit of the British by attempting to sink the ships struggling across the Atlantic to bring in the supplies on which the country depended, he had omitted to take into account the sturdiness of the nation’s spirit, Diane recognised proudly.

      Her