Elsie had it all planned. She’d waited until Sunday, when, after roasting the neighbourhood’s Sunday dinners in the falling heat of the bakery ovens, William would have a few hours away from his duties at the bakehouse before scraping out the fat, cleaning and relighting the ovens for the week ahead. Wearing a frock she knew William liked, she had washed her hair with soap flakes and pinned it up and had applied leg make-up and a dash of red lipstick. While working her sixty-hour week on the buses Elsie didn’t have the time to wear make-up, but this was a special occasion. Glancing at her reflection in the bottom of a copper pot hanging on the kitchen wall, she frowned. A lot rested on this day.

‘Are you ready then?’ she said to William when he came into the kitchen on his crutches, newly shaved and dressed in his Sunday best. Because of clothes rationing his Sunday best was now the suit he wore any day of the week – and to do all manner of odd jobs around the bakery too – but he still looked smart. It was the same for most men and they weren’t even allowed turn-ups on their trousers now because it was a waste of fabric. He sat down for a moment and smiled at Elsie, who lifted her finger to her lips as she moved closer to the wireless to hear the end of the Radio Doctor’s advice on salad veg. She joined in with the popular ditty:

With a grin, she held out her hands and stamped her foot as if to say: ‘Ta da!’

‘Ha! Very good.’ William laughed, clapping. ‘Yes, I’m ready. So, are we having salad in our picnic?’

Elsie smiled, nodded, turned off the wireless and picked up the wicker picnic basket, draped in a tea towel embroidered with blue flowers. Slung over her arm was her gas mask case, which she never failed to take with her, even though she’d noticed that some young people were getting lazy about remembering theirs.

‘Just a salad sandwich,’ she said, thinking of the carrot filling she’d mixed with mustard sauce and a dash of vinegar. ‘But it’ll do. Come on, we won’t go far. I know you’re busy later.’

‘I have a whole list of things John has asked me to see to in the bakehouse,’ said William, ‘but we deserve an hour or two together, don’t we?’

With posters pasted up bearing slogans such as ‘Three words to the WHOLE NATION: Go To It!’ on every corner, it was easy to feel guilty about having a few hours off from your war work and duties, even on a Sunday, but this was important.

‘Yes, we do,’ she said, standing on tiptoe so she could kiss him lightly on the lips.

Though she was pretending to be carefree that morning, she felt daunted by the task ahead. William’s horrific nightmares were not abating, and it was time for Elsie to get to the bottom of the problem. She’d made a promise to herself that she’d ask him outright – it was now or never.

‘I’ll leave the door open,’ Audrey called to William and Elsie as they left the bakery backyard and made their way to the clifftop. She was on her hands and knees, scrubbing the back step, and would move on to swilling out the yard.

‘Thanks, Sis,’ said William. ‘Oh, and don’t think I haven’t remembered it’s your birthday this week!’

Audrey stopped scrubbing for a moment and leaned back on her haunches, tucking a stray strand of hair behind her ear.

‘Is it?’ said Elsie, her eyes wide. ‘You haven’t mentioned it, Audrey!’

‘Oh, I don’t want to be bothering with my birthday,’ said Audrey. ‘Too much to do. Our mother never used to bother much with my birthday and that’s the way it’s always been. We might have had a jam tart for tea, but nothing else.’

‘Not a cake?’ said Mary, who was crouching next to Audrey, helping to scrub the baking tins, setting them out in rows on the ground to let them dry in the sunshine. It was a mucky job – the little girl’s face, arms and knees were covered with black smudges and she would need a dunk in the tin bath afterwards – but she was happy to be busy and helping. If truth be told, that had been Audrey’s way of helping Mary endure all the grief she’d suffered since arriving at the bakery as an evacuee – she had learned to keep the girl engrossed in a job, whether it be helping make a rag rug, preparing the rabbit stew or helping to black the range.

‘No, love, even though I make them most days,’ said Audrey, with an amused smile. ‘But I don’t mind a jot.’

‘That might be so,’ said William, ‘but you could at least have an hour off the hard work. You shouldn’t be working so hard in your condition.’

‘Oh, be gone with you,’ said Audrey, then, when they were out of earshot, whispered ‘Good luck, Elsie,’ to herself. Audrey had told Elsie to talk to William about the death of his friend and she was worrying about how he would take it. Charlie had sometimes used to say she stuck her nose in where it wasn’t wanted, but Audrey couldn’t sit back and watch her brother and his new wife go on suffering. Life was too short, especially in these times. Returning to her scrubbing, but now thinking of Charlie, she physically longed to hear from him. It had been months since she’d written to break the news of her pregnancy, and she’d written twice again since, but there had been no reply.

She couldn’t help thinking about the stomach-churning story she’d heard from one of her customers whose son, held in a Nazi prisoner-of-war camp, had been forced to eat bread made of sawdust. Audrey suspected that this was likely only one of the trials their soldiers were facing, but the thought of strong men starving near to death deeply affected her. Putting a meal on the table, however humble, was what she did, so to think that Charlie might not even have anything to eat… oh, it didn’t bear thinking of.

Keep safe, Charlie, she thought, pausing in her scrubbing again for a moment as she was hit by a bolt of pain in her lower back that made her drop the scrubbing brush. It skittered across the yard. Audrey tried to sit back again but instead fell onto her side. She closed her eyes and drew her knees up to relieve the pain.

‘Oh no!’ said Mary, trying to throw her little arms round Audrey, her brown eyes full of concern. ‘Shall I call Old Reg? Or fetch the smelling salts?’

Seeing the distress on Mary’s face, Audrey gritted her teeth against the pain and forced herself to smile from her ungainly position on the floor.

‘Don’t worry anyone, Mary love, it’s Sunday,’ she breathed, trying to sit upright but failing. ‘Help me up to sitting, will you? I’ll be all right in a minute.’

‘Wait,’ said Mary, jumping up and dashing into the Anderson shelter, from where she extracted a pillow and a flour sack. She gently pushed the pillow under Audrey’s head, then laid the sack over her body, before racing upstairs to the kitchen, leaving Audrey where she had fallen, gripped by terror as she waited, desperately, to feel her baby move. Hardly daring to breathe, she held her hand over her bump, praying and begging for it to poke her with an elbow, knee or ankle. After an agonising few moments, it did. Relief coursed through Audrey’s veins.

‘I’ve got you some tea,’ said Mary, who had reappeared, walking towards her and bending down, with tea sloshing out of the cup and into the saucer that she’d so carefully carried downstairs. ‘Don’t worry, I didn’t make fresh and waste the rations. There was some left in the pot. The “dregs” as Uncle John calls it.’

Audrey smiled, knowing that the teapot had been standing for hours. But now that the pain had subsided a little, she was able to sit up and lift the cup of cold, weak tea to her lips.

‘Thank you, Mary, love, it’s delicious,’ she said, blinking in the sunlight. ‘I think I’ll be all right now. The pain has gone.’

‘You’re awfully pale,’ said Mary, inspecting Audrey’s face so closely their noses almost touched, resting her little cool hand on Audrey’s forehead. Audrey smiled and chuckled. Her heart swelled at Mary’s sweet ways, but she didn’t want the girl to be worrying. Though her own head was awash with anxiety, she knew she couldn’t let the thoughts in her head show on her face.

‘I’m right as rain now,’ she said. ‘Don’t worry.’

‘Are you sure?’ asked Mary.

‘Yes, I’m absolutely fine,’ Audrey said, taking hold of Mary’s hand and squeezing it. At that moment, Lily came into the backyard singing, carrying Joy in her arms. On seeing Audrey under a flour sack with her back against the bakery wall and the tins scattered around her feet, her face fell and she stopped singing.

‘What’s happened?’ she said, gently putting Joy down to toddle towards Mary, who held her arms outstretched. ‘Do you need a doctor?’

Audrey felt her eyes fill with tears, but tutted and rapidly blinked them away. She never cried in front of anyone else and wouldn’t start now.

‘No, I don’t! I can manage perfectly all right on my own. Besides, what would he say?’ she said, wearily. ‘The baby’s still moving, so he or she is fine. I don’t want to bother the doctor. I’ve only a matter of weeks left now, so I think it’s probably just that when the baby moves into a certain position, he or she is pressing on something. The little monkey!’

She managed to raise a smile and held her hand out so Lily could help her up to standing. Back on her feet, the bakery yard seemed to spin around as if she was on a merry-go-round. She blinked several times, focussing on the crop of leeks that burst out of the soil on top of the Anderson shelter like the few strands of hair that stuck up on Uncle John’s head. Eventually, the spinning slowed down and her vision was clear.

‘You should stop working so hard,’ said Lily. ‘We’ve got Betty to help in the shop now and William and Uncle John in the bakehouse. I can do more shifts as well as my work at the library. Albert is out delivering but he could do more in the bakehouse if you needed him. Please promise me you’ll see the doctor. If you don’t promise me, I’ll see him for you.’

Disliking being told what to do and not being able to stand the thought of working less at her beloved bakery, Charlie’s family’s business, Audrey felt a ripple of irritation pass through her.

‘Stop fussing,’ she said, ‘and please do leave me alone to make my own decisions. Right now, I better sort out these tins, sweep out the shelter and bathe Mary before the day gets away from me.’

Lily looked a little hurt, but Audrey hated fuss more than anything and didn’t want her pregnancy to be viewed as a weakness. Hands on her hips, she looked around the yard at the tins on the floor, the Anderson shelter door swinging on its hinges and Joy pulling the head off a daffodil growing in a pot. She sighed, making a mental list of things that needed doing, and reached for the broom. She began to sweep the floor of the shelter, all the while aware that Lily, Mary and Joy were watching her.

‘Are you going to give me a hand then?’ Audrey quipped with a smile. ‘Or just stand there gawping?’

After they’d eaten their sandwiches, Elsie leaned back on her elbows and gazed out to sea. Under the cloudless sky, the sea looked blue and inviting and as the sun warmed her bare legs and feet, Elsie was reminded of courting William during the pre-war days. Picnics on the beach, swimming and a game of beach cricket – she could almost hear the echoes of their laughter.

‘If you close your eyes and listen to the murmur of the sea and the cry of the gulls,’ she said, squinting, ‘you can almost imagine that there are paddlers, rubber floats and swimmers in the sea, and that Bournemouth was back to normal and there had never even been a war.’

Rubbing her toes together, she waited for William to respond, aware that she’d probably said the wrong thing. How could he ever imagine there had never been a war when his body and mind were so badly injured?

‘If I close my eyes,’ said William, quietly, ‘all I can see are ghosts.’

‘Oh, I’m sorry, William,’ Elsie said, tenderly. She sat upright, tucked her feet under her bottom and faced him, her eyes flickering over his scarring.

‘That was stupid of me. I didn’t mean that,’ she said. ‘I know neither you nor any of us can ever forget the war. It’s all around us, every day. It’s on our minds when we wake up and when we go to sleep. It’s become a part of us and it’ll define our lives. It’s turning us into different people.’

William sighed and turned his gaze away from Elsie. She fiddled with the tassel trim of the blanket, her heart hammering in her chest, knowing that she should ask him now, outright, to tell her about what happened in France. Staring at her wedding band, she wondered why she was so frightened to ask. What could he possibly say that would change how she felt about him? Heartened by that thought, she reached for his hand and wrapped her fingers round his.

‘William,’ she said softly. ‘The nightmares you’ve been having, will you tell me about them? Audrey mentioned that something happened while you were away. I mean, something other than the bomb that hit your truck – about a man called David?’

‘Audrey said what?’ William snapped, glaring at her and shaking his hand free of hers. ‘She’d no right to say anything! I talked to her in confidence.’

Inside, Elsie felt dejected and slightly impatient, but she swallowed her hurt and tried again. She wasn’t going to give up on this now.

‘Please,’ she said, tucking her black hair behind her ears. ‘I need to know what’s on your mind. I might be able to help, or at the very least understand you better.’

William pushed himself up to standing with the aid of his crutches and shook his head. Whenever he did that, his shirt came untucked, which she knew he hated. It was all she could do to stop herself from helping him tuck it back in.

‘I just want to help,’ she said quietly, aware that her words weren’t going down well. ‘Let me help you, for goodness’ sake. I’m your wife!’

‘But how can you help?’ he said, his expression dark. He angrily knocked over a cup with his crutch, spilling the lemonade onto the rug, and Elsie bit her lip to stop herself reacting. She picked up the cup and stared up at him, her eyes shining.

‘You’ve got no idea about anything, Elsie,’ he continued. ‘You think you’re helping with the war effort, punching tickets on that bus of yours, but you’ve never dodged death by running into foxholes like a terrified animal, you’ve never watched men get blown up into bits all around you, your friends decimated before your very eyes! You’ve never collected up their body parts with shaking, blood-soaked hands, just so there was something to bury! You’ve never, you’ve never…’

Elsie’s throat thickened and she swallowed hard, feeling the colour rise in her cheeks. Instructing herself to be strong enough to shoulder his blame and anger, despite it being misplaced, she stood to face him, a gentle breeze lifting her skirt to her knees.

‘I’ve never what?’ she said firmly. ‘Tell me, William.’

With his good leg, he kicked at a stone on the floor.

‘You’ve never made a dreadful decision and been responsible for your friend’s death!’ he roared, now throwing one of his crutches onto the floor and collapsing back down onto the picnic blanket, covering his face with his hands. ‘You’ve never been a yellow-belly coward! It’s worse than being a dead man! I would rather be a dead man!’

Crouching beside him as his body shuddered with angry sobs, Elsie rested her palm on his back and, lost for words, tried to communicate through the heat of her hand. When he looked up again, his eyes were bright red and haunted with images of violence. He wiped his nose on the back of his hand and glared at Elsie, but his eyes were unfocussed, as if he were looking at something else. Elsie was taken aback by how pitiful, how pathetic, he looked.

‘I don’t understand,’ she said quietly.

‘I made a terrible mistake,’ he said, his voice flat. ‘I came face-to-face with a young German soldier. I was inches from him. I didn’t shoot him, I let him go. He looked so young. Moments later, he turned back and shot my friend, David, in the stomach and chest. I watched David die in agony. He was so young. His mother’s only son. It was my fault that he died, Elsie. I’m a coward. You married a coward.’

‘No,’ she said, her voice breaking as tears spilled from her eyes. ‘I married a good man. That… that was a moment, a split-second decision. You chose to be compassionate and it wasn’t reciprocated.’

Elsie swiped at her tears, not wanting him to see how his story had affected her. Her head ached, and her thoughts were foggy. She tried to put herself in his shoes; she could completely understand his guilt. She would feel the same, she knew that. Was there any escape?

‘I’ve been trying to put it behind me,’ he said, staring at the horizon. ‘I feel cruel, telling you all of this. I’ve been trying to be a man and not lay this dreadful story at your feet, but his image haunts me. The sound of David’s cry as he lay dying rings in my head like the toll of a church bell. I keep telling myself to keep a stiff upper lip and get on with it, like the older generation who fought in the Great War do, but the truth is I feel wretched. I can’t stop myself returning to that dark place, to try to make sense of it. Of course, I never can.’

‘Perhaps it’s braver to let yourself go to that dark place and experience those dark feelings,’ said Elsie. ‘You don’t have to hold it all in. Let yourself grieve.’

William shook his head. Elsie knew her words were falling on deaf ears.

‘It’s his mother,’ William said. ‘She doesn’t know that just before he died he was talking to me about his home and how he’d always be grateful to his mother for giving him a happy childhood. I keep thinking that I should visit her to tell her, but I expect it’s a terrible idea. Perhaps she’s better off for not knowing the truth. She would despise me, at the very least.’

Elsie thought about it for a few moments before reaching for his hand.

‘I’ll come with you if you decide to go,’ she said. ‘I think a mother would want to know the facts, no matter how painful for you and her.’

William’s face paled. He stared down at the picnic blanket.

‘What you said earlier, about the war changing us,’ he said, ‘you were right. I have changed. The war has near ripped out my heart and replaced it with stone.’

Elsie felt the weight of William’s misery bearing down on her like lead as she folded up the picnic blanket and tucked it under her arm. Delving deep into her own reserves of strength, she found a reassuring smile for him.

‘We’ll find a way,’ she said. ‘We’re in this together. You’re not alone.’

William’s nostrils flared. He was obviously stopping himself from getting emotional and, eventually, he managed a small smile, a dim light flickering in his eyes. He opened his mouth to speak but clearly couldn’t find the words.

‘Let’s walk back to the bakery,’ Elsie suggested, ‘and make a plan.’