Like a nightingale at dusk, the sweet sound of William’s harmonica drifted from the open attic window of the bakery, stopping Audrey in her tracks.

‘Are my ears playing tricks on me?’ she asked Elsie, William’s fiancée, as she paused from pushing a sodden apron through the wooden rollers of the mangle to listen, staring up at the window in disbelief. It was the first time in six months since her brother William had returned home from the front line, severely injured, that she’d heard him play, and his mournful notes plucked at her heartstrings. Her cheeks pink with the exertion of scrubbing dirt from the bakery’s aprons, caps and overalls, Audrey’s eyes misted over. Hearing him play loosened the knots across her shoulders; in truth, she had been worried sick about William for months.

‘I’ve never been more pleased to hear the blues in all my life,’ said Elsie, a huge dimpled smile exploding onto her pretty face. ‘When he starts playing boogie-woogie, we’re going to throw a party.’

Audrey smiled at this remark and watched as Elsie quickly dropped the apron she was wringing soapy water out of, dried her hands on a towel and pulled the red headscarf from her black curls, which fell around her face in soft ringlets. Walking away from the mangle to go inside the bakery and see William, Audrey gently caught hold of Elsie’s wrist.

‘Wait,’ she said, her eyes sparkling as his mournful music continued. ‘Let him play a while undisturbed. That harp will be better for him than any dose of medicine.’

Elsie nodded her agreement and the two women shared a glance that conveyed a myriad of emotions. Since William had come home, Audrey knew only too well that life had been difficult for him and Elsie, to say the least. The couple were supposed to have been married the previous year, but William’s injuries had kept him away from Bournemouth on the wedding day. Thinking of the tension that day – not knowing whether he was going to turn up or not – made Audrey feel quite sick. When he had finally come home, they’d discovered that his right foot had been amputated and the right side of his face, including his eye, severely burned, so he’d misguidedly thought Elsie would no longer want to be his bride. He couldn’t have been more wrong, but expecting the couple to take up where they left off was a mistake. It wasn’t just William’s body that had been injured. It felt, to Audrey, as if part of his soul was lost in no man’s land. Not knowing what he’d seen in battle, or exactly how he’d suffered in France when his truck was hit by a bomb killing all the men travelling with him, meant that she and Elsie tiptoed around his dark moods as if the floor were covered in eggshells.

The knowledge that William was up in his room at the bakery, a mere shadow of his former self, while Elsie struggled to keep their relationship going, pained Audrey immensely. Though he volunteered as one of the neighbourhood’s fire-watchers, struggling on his crutches, with binoculars pinned to his eyes, for several hours every night, on the lookout for incendiary bomb fires, he was otherwise sullen and distracted. Her lovingly made hotpots and casseroles seemed not to tempt him, her freshest, warm cakes too indulgent in a time of austerity, and long walks along the coast too physically painful for him. She’d tried discussing the news with him – with Yugoslavia and Greece under his belt, in an operation with the codename ‘Barbarossa’, Hitler had now invaded the Soviet Union – but William seemed to shrink even further inside himself. He preferred to stay in his room writing letters to soldiers in his regiment, or would sit out in the bakery yard absorbed in simple tasks such as podding broad beans or scraping clean the carrots. The doctor said it was a matter of time – and warned that some men returned from war in body but not in mind. It certainly seemed that William’s mind was elsewhere, perhaps Audrey feared, trapped in a memory too horrific to fade, but maybe, just maybe, there was hope.

‘When he plays it’s almost like before the war, isn’t it?’ said Elsie. ‘When everything was normal and ordinary. Can you remember those days? Feels like a different lifetime.’

Before the war, William had worked alongside Charlie in the bakery as his apprentice. When he wasn’t hard at work, he’d perch on a flour sack to drink a cup of tea and play on his mouth harp, earning him admiring comments from their customers and neighbours on Fisherman’s Road. He’d fallen for Elsie and everyone was delighted to hear they were to marry. Just the thought of him as the sorry soul he was now, who had opted out of the world and who spent far too much time stewing on his own, made Audrey blanch. Where had her valiant, bold and musical brother, who was desperately in love with Elsie, gone? Well, she’d be damned if she was going to let him disappear forever.

Audrey took a deep breath as she listened to him play, enjoying the fragrance of the red geraniums bursting out of pots in the yard and mingling with the scent of the onions, tomatoes and lettuces growing in soil, disguising the roof of the Anderson shelter. Perhaps his playing was a sign that better times were ahead.

Appreciating the sight of the bright white washing on the clothes line flapping in the warm July breeze against the blue sky, her heart lightened a little. This moment was a welcome relief from the last few months of running the bakery without Charlie – an arduous task. Uncle John had gladly come out of retirement to take over his nephew’s baking duties and Barton’s had reduced the numbers of delivery orders it took on, but even so, the old man was tired, Audrey knew that. She was tired too, she thought, staring at her fingers that were red raw from all the scaling, moulding, baking, serving, scrubbing and cleaning she did. Not that she was alone in running the bakery. Maggie, the shop girl, was a good egg and Audrey’s stepsister, Lily, who’d arrived in a ‘fix’ last year, now lived at the bakery with her baby, Joy, and helped out whenever she could. So why did Audrey feel as though she’d been through the mangle herself?

‘It’s the sleepless nights in the shelter and all the worry,’ she muttered to herself, running her eyes over an advertisement on a sheet of newspaper on the floor, where earth-covered spuds were piled up, ready for scrubbing and preparing and cooking for tomorrow’s dinner. The typeface was bright and bold, its message clear: Your courage, your cheerfulness, your resolution, will bring us victory.

Audrey gave a gentle laugh. There was no time for tiredness in wartime, was there? And she had no right to be tired, she told herself. Not when Charlie was away facing goodness knows what, and folk were having to live in shelters because their homes had been bombed out.

She began pegging out more washing. The strange thing was, despite being exhausted, when her head hit the pillow she couldn’t sleep. Instead, she lay there awake, worrying. Oh, there was so much to worry about – not least when the next air-raid siren would sound. Since the beginning of the year the siren in Bournemouth had sounded dozens of times. There had been heavy air raids all over Britain – and though Bournemouth hadn’t suffered a pounding like London, Coventry or Bristol, the Woolworths building in the Square had recently taken a hit, and swathes of Westbourne, Branksome Park and Moordown had been destroyed by parachute bombs. Churchill had been on the wireless, warning that Hitler may try to invade Britain ‘in the near future’ too and that civilians should prepare for gas, parachute and glider attacks. It didn’t bear thinking about.

‘No wonder we’re all tired!’ Audrey said to herself, shaking her head.

Then there were the wedding cake orders, of course. Audrey often made wedding cakes at short notice, because sweethearts had just days together before the groom had to return to active service, and often didn’t know, until the last minute, when those days might be. She never turned down a customer; Charlie always insisted they pull out all the stops for the customers.

Charlie. Of course, what she worried about most was whether Charlie was safe. She missed him dreadfully. Painfully. It was a difficult and complicated thing: love in wartime.

Looking sympathetically at Elsie, who was leaning with her back against the wall, her arms gently folded, listening to William’s harp, her eyes closed in relief that he’d started playing again, Audrey was heartened. Elsie would never give up on William, that was clear.

‘Go on up,’ said Audrey to Elsie. ‘You should be together. Of course, you should. It’ll do him more good to be with you than anything. I’m sorry to have delayed you.’

Watching Elsie rush inside to see William, hoping he would welcome her with open arms, Audrey’s crowded thoughts were interrupted by the arrival of little Mary running into the yard, leaving the wooden gate swinging and creaking on its hinges. Dressed in her blue school frock, one sock up and the other down, her fringe sticking up from running, she pushed aside the sheets hanging on the washing line, gasping for breath.

‘What is it, Mary, love?’ said Audrey. ‘You look like you’ve run twenty miles.’

Mary was a different girl from the silent creature who had arrived at the bakery a year ago, refusing to speak a word. She’d had so much to cope with for a girl of seven, what with witnessing the death of her little brother, Edward, when a bomb hit their house, and then, poor girl, her mother taking her own life at Christmas. Finding the words to explain that to Mary had been one of the hardest things Audrey had ever had to do. Mary’s high-pitched, horrified scream was etched on her memory for the rest of her life. But, despite her losses, away from the smoky chimney pots and the slum district she had previously lived in, the sea air, busy bakery life and simple kindnesses were doing the little girl good. Other women she knew hadn’t taken to their evacuees, but Audrey, unable to have a baby of her own, felt vehemently protective of Mary and had grown to love her as if she were her own flesh and blood.

‘It’s Lily,’ Mary said, in tears now. ‘She’s in trouble! She’s lost the baby!’

Lost the baby? Audrey’s stomach somersaulted and her jaw dropped.

‘What on earth do you mean, “lost the baby”?’ said Audrey, the clean washing slipping from her hands to the muddy ground. Mary gripped hold of Audrey’s hand and pulled her towards the gate.

‘Please,’ said Mary, tears spilling. ‘Help her!’

And just as suddenly as William’s sweet music had started, it stopped.