Though the small terraced house in Queen Street was half-collapsed, with bricks and broken furniture spewing onto the pavement, it was impossibly hard for Betty Mitchell to say farewell. Her hopes and dreams, she thought, as she gaped at her bombed-out home one last time, had literally been reduced to rubble. The house that she’d once loved now resembled a doll’s house that had been ripped in half and stamped on. The upstairs bedroom was half-intact, the marital bed upended at a hair-raising angle against a backdrop of floral wallpaper. Broken fragments of her wedding gift teapot and crockery lay in the dust. The smell of burning lingered, and if she closed her eyes for a second, the backs of her eyelids filled with flames. After months of standing like this, abandoned and precarious, the house would soon be demolished. All traces of her life would be eradicated, which was – Betty had bravely convinced herself – for the best.

‘This is all your fault, Robert Mitchell,’ she muttered to nobody, lifting her moist eyes to the sky, which bulged with rainclouds. Thinking about what she’d secretly discovered about her husband, Robert, after their house had been bombed by the Luftwaffe months earlier, she was resigned to the fact that she had no choice but to disappear. Gulping back tears at the memory of the sight, which had felt like a knife through the heart, she swallowed hard and wrapped her arms round her narrow waist. Despite being tiny, at just under five feet tall and as thin as a reed, she was going to have to be stronger than she had ever been. Her life in Bristol was over. She was going to wipe the slate clean and start again, in a new town where nobody knew her name. In the chaos of wartime, with swathes of the population evacuated out of cities to safer areas in the countryside or on the coast, she would have to erase all memory of her former life as if it was a spelling mistake in a school exercise book.

She blinked away the tears in her grey eyes and tucked her long honey-blonde hair behind her ears with trembling hands, then stared in horror as a large brown rat scuttled into a mangled bread bin in the pile of bricks before her. She pushed her toe into a pile of gravel.

‘More rats than people round here now,’ piped up Frankie, one of her neighbours, who, in among the debris of her own house, was erecting a sign appealing for scrap metal for munitions, in aid of the Red Cross.

‘Are you not working today?’ she went on. ‘Haven’t seen that husband of yours in a while. At the docks, is he?’

Betty smiled sadly and smoothed down her blue day dress that had been patched and darned more times than she cared to admit. At breakfast that morning her pale complexion had burned scarlet when she’d told Robert and his great-uncle, with whom they were staying, that she was working a long shift at the tobacco factory and wouldn’t be back until late. She’d expected Robert to look up from his porridge, slam his rough hand on the kitchen table, look into her eyes and accuse her of lying, but he simply stirred more than his fair share of sweetened condensed milk into his tea and nodded. In truth, of course, Betty hadn’t gone into the factory at all, but had instead sent a scrawled handwritten note to her superior to say she was unwell with a high fever.

‘I’m not due in today,’ she lied to Frankie, before shrugging. ‘And Robert is… well, he’s an essential worker, isn’t he? All the dockers are part of a scheme where they’ll go wherever their labour is needed, so I don’t know where he’ll be from one day to the next.’ Registering the irony of her own words, Betty tried to keep the emotion from her voice, before sighing. ‘Let’s just say he’s keeping busy,’ she finished with a shrug.

‘Course he is,’ said Frankie. ‘Everyone’s busy with the business of just surviving. Every day I come back here, and more bits and bobs have been looted, and nobody’s doing a thing about it! It’s as if all the rules have been turned on their head since this war started, ain’t it, lovey?’

Betty nodded, taking one last glance at her old house, now a flattened dream, and said goodbye before Frankie could ask any more questions.

She walked briskly towards Stapleton Road railway station with a pounding heart and one word on her lips: Bournemouth. She’d been there on a seaside trip once as a child, with the orphanage, and remembered how the sea had glittered like an open jewellery box and the ice cream had melted in the sun faster than she could lick. It would be as good a place as any.

She had been unable to bring luggage with her and had only a liver-paste sandwich, a pair of sharp sewing scissors, one change of clothes, her identity card, gas mask case and Robert’s life savings stuffed into her small bag. There was enough money to get her a train ticket to Bournemouth and pay rent for new digs for a month or two. Course, she’d need a job, but she was a hard worker and would quickly prove herself wherever help was needed.

Approaching the impressive station building, Betty passed row upon row of houses that, like her own home, had been destroyed by heavy bombing. She stared in surprise at an old man who was boiling up soup on an open fire. Of course, she thought, the gas mains have been destroyed. He gave her a cheerful wave and she waved back.

‘Luck be with you,’ she whispered. The people of Bristol were undeniably ingenious and resilient but lives everywhere had been turned upside down and shaken about. It was as if they were all living inside a broken snow globe. Frankie was right: the rules had changed. You only had to think about the moon to realise that. Before the war Betty had adored the romance of moonlit nights in the city, but during the Blitz she had come to dread moonlight because the moon’s reflection on the River Avon gave the Luftwaffe a guide to the heart of Bristol, like traitorous torchlight. Night after night she’d prayed for cloud and rain, a cloak of darkness to hide under. And of course, before the war, Betty had believed Robert was a fine, upstanding, dependable husband whose heart was as strong and capable of love as his hands were of hard physical labour. A husband she could trust with her whole self, and who cherished her as he’d so passionately proclaimed on their wedding day. How bitterly wrong she had been. Well, she thought as she arrived at the railway station platform, where girls were waving their handkerchiefs to their sweethearts through a veil of steam, now it was her turn to break the rules.