‘He’s not coming, is he?’ said Elsie. Her voice was thin and high, and though the air was warm in the bright midday sun, she visibly trembled. Standing outside St Katherine’s Church in Southbourne in her lace wedding dress, clutching her bouquet of pale pink tulips and fern, her hair carefully pinned to frame her face with a band of delicate and fragrant orange blossom fixing it in place, Elsie looked nothing like the happy bride-to-be she was meant to be. Her expression was one of sober anxiety, her skin pale and her shoulders hunched over, as she peered up and down Church Road squinting in the bright light, desperately searching the cloudless horizon for William.

‘Let’s just give it another fifteen minutes,’ said Audrey, her heart sinking into her shoes because they’d already given it another hour and a half. She put an arm around Elsie’s shoulders, silently and fervently praying that her brother would arrive, his kitbag slung over his shoulder, his smile wide. But that was beginning to feel like an erroneous hope. Waiting for him like this was torturous and she wasn’t even the bride. Goodness knows how Elsie’s heart must be faring. The happiest day of her life was rapidly becoming the worst.

Audrey felt more blood run from her face with each passing minute. She had waited at Bournemouth train station the night before, for the train he’d said he’d be on, and then onwards until the middle of the night, hoping that William had missed his train and had caught the next one, or the one after that, but, when he still wasn’t on the last train, she’d been forced to return to the bakery in low spirits, willing him to arrive by other means, or even the following morning, as long as he was in time for the wedding. But he still hadn’t arrived. She’d gone through every possible reason for him not being there: the travel ban, which made it hard for people to come to the area without good reason, but if marriage wasn’t good reason, what was? A lost identity card? Illness? Money? Surely not a change of heart?

‘He might have had a sudden posting and not been able to get word to us,’ Charlie had said, comforting Audrey. ‘I’ve heard some men have been told they could have three weeks’ compassionate leave only to receive a telegram after just a few days, ordering they immediately return to service.’

Now, Audrey smoothed down her practical but pretty baby blue dress, which touched just below her knee and was neatly belted at the waist, and sighed deeply. Her thoughts went to the food she’d arranged earlier, with little Mary’s silent but enthusiastic help, waiting on platters on trestle tables at the community hall, the colourful banner exclaiming ‘Congratulations!’ strung up over the entrance, the gramophone ready, and the bunting hung diagonally from corner to corner over the dance floor. And of the wedding cake, for which she had used so many donations of their friends and neighbours’ icing sugar – it would be criminal to let it go to waste.

‘Any news from William?’ asked Maggie, who looked sensational in her daisy-print dress and silver shoes. Her guest, George Meadows, was charming Maggie and the other guests, but was clearly restless.

Audrey felt the fight drain out of her as she swept her eyes over the guests, all dressed in their finest clothes, the men’s shoes shining, the ladies’ hats carefully positioned on their hair – they had all gone to so much effort, pleased to have something to celebrate at last.

‘Nothing,’ she said to Maggie quietly, feeling the deepest regret. Perhaps they should have waited until William had returned from the war for good, when it was over and life had gone back to normal. Perhaps it was a hasty and silly assumption to think that you could organise a celebration in wartime when men’s lives were no longer their own?

Audrey forced a smile when Violet, Elsie’s mother, interrupted her thoughts. Dressed in a green suit and perfectly turned out, but clearly in discomfort and leaning heavily on her canes, Violet must, Audrey knew, be consumed by anxiety at having lost Angelo to the prisoner-of-war camp. And now this would only make her heartbreak worse.

‘You don’t think your brother has had a change of heart, do you?’ asked Violet, her eyes darting from Audrey to Elsie. ‘What with Angelo being arrested? Maybe he doesn’t want to be associated with—’

‘Never!’ interrupted Audrey, shaking her head. ‘He doesn’t even know about Angelo and I know he would only feel sadness that it’s happened. William would do everything in his power to be here. There must be a different sort of problem…’

‘I hope he hasn’t come to any harm,’ said Elsie, nervously. ‘There were more raids overnight on the east coast. What if his billet took a hit? I would rather he had changed his mind about marrying me than be suffering in any way.’

The three women looked at one another in despair, observed by the other guests, whose determination to keep positive was rapidly fading. A sense of despondency fell over the wedding party and some guests wondered aloud whether they should stay on and wait or go home.

‘All we can do is wait,’ Audrey said, folding her arms across her chest defiantly. And though, over the next hour, some of the guests excused themselves, close family and friends waited for two more hours, before finally – and reluctantly – giving up and trailing off home.

‘I’m so sorry,’ Audrey apologised to every guest, feeling personally responsible for William’s absence. ‘I’m ever so sorry.’

Though Audrey had wanted to stay with Elsie, Violet didn’t think it was a good idea for Elsie to go to the community hall and see the spread that had been prepared for the wedding party and the banners, bunting and balloons. It would only serve to make her feel worse, so Elsie, Violet and her twin sisters went home, defeated and desolate.

‘We can’t let the food go to waste,’ said Audrey to Lily and Mary, linking arms to walk together to the hall. Audrey decided to give the sandwiches and custard tarts to the, very grateful, Children’s Society School for Girls and to take the cake back to the bakery, where it sat in two tins on the counter, just in case William appeared. By nightfall, however, there was still no word from him. It was as if he’d disappeared altogether.

‘Goodness knows how Elsie feels tonight,’ she said to Lily, Pat and Charlie, who were in Audrey’s warm kitchen sharing a pot of tea and a sandwich, after Mary had gone to sleep in her little bed on the floor. ‘Her father interned and now this – it’s too much for the girl to cope with. And where on earth is William? I’m worried sick about him.’

As she lay in bed that night with one ear open in case William arrived, tears slipped down her cheeks and onto her pillow in the darkness. Better to get her disappointment out now in private, because first thing the bakery would be open again – and her customers would be expecting happy news of the wedding. She took a deep, despondent breath, and went to sleep.

---

Elsie wondered if life could get much worse. Instead of spending the first night of married life together with William, she sat alone in darkness on her single bed in the cramped childhood bedroom that she shared with her sisters, her knees tucked under her chin. Tears streamed down her cheeks. It seemed the heartache of war had penetrated every vestibule of her life. Despite being a loyal, honourable citizen, her papa had been carted away to a camp on the Isle of Man and her wedding had been a disaster. Her white dress hung on the back of the door, and on the windowsill sat an old toffee tin containing her ‘something old, something new, something borrowed and something blue’ – and the silver sixpence she’d had in her shoe. She had a good mind to hurl it all out of the window.

‘Don’t be like that,’ she told herself, but it was hard to find anything to feel positive about, it really was.

The room was silent apart from the gentle breathing of her sisters, who had done their best to hide their disappointment at not being able to be bridesmaids, and whose yellow hair ribbons and pretty handmade dresses had been carefully folded away in the drawers.

Violet’s words ran through her head, that William would not have intentionally let her down, and Elsie told herself that was true – she was just desperately disappointed and worried. That evening she’d listened to the wireless, half expecting there to be news of him, a newsflash explaining his whereabouts, but of course there was no mention. The pain of longing was physical and unbearable and morbid thoughts filled her head. What if William was dead? What if she never saw him again? What if he had decided he didn’t love her, or that he had fallen in love with another girl?

She closed her eyes tightly shut and curled up on her bed, waiting for sleep to release her from the day. Tomorrow would be better. Tomorrow she would write to William and try to find out what had happened. She was still and quiet now, her muscles began to relax, and she slipped into a turbulent dream of being unable to open the door of a train at a platform where she needed to get off. A moment later came the dreadful, piercing wail of the air-raid siren and for a second Elsie thought she was dreaming.

Snapping open her eyes, she immediately heard the chilling drone of aircraft directly above, followed by machine-gun fire. Before she’d even had time to move a muscle, a blinding flash of white light and a colossal explosion physically blew her out of bed, followed by the deafening crash of falling timber and windows shattering. Her head buzzed with the excruciating noise and intense heat blasted her face. She was too shocked to scream. Hands over her ears, sitting bolt upright on the floor in the darkness, breathless with panic, Elsie tried to make sense of what was happening. Water was pouring in through the ceiling and her sisters were screaming out hysterically, thick black smoke making it impossible for any of them to see even their hands in front of their faces.

‘Don’t move,’ Elsie warned her sisters, feeling her way across the room to reach their bed. She grasped hold of both girls’ hands and pulled them close into her body, feeling their little hearts racing and their bodies trembling. Her own heart pounding in her chest so hard she thought it might burst out of her ribs, Elsie looked upwards through the smoke and gasped. There was a huge hole in the bedroom ceiling and part of the roof was missing. What was left of it had burst into flames that were leaping and ripping through the wreckage of their home at incredible speed. Realising that a high-explosive bomb had been dropped on the house, she tried to remember what the public information leaflets told you to do in event of an attack. What use were the buckets of water and sand downstairs? Their gas masks were unreachable somewhere, their handy torches lost and it was too late to take shelter.

‘We’re going to die!’ wailed the twins.

‘We’re not going to die,’ said Elsie calmly. ‘We’re going to get out of the house and go to safety.’

Moving cautiously through the house, holding her sisters’ hands, Elsie registered that whole walls had collapsed and their destroyed home was suddenly exposed to the outside world like a bizarre version of a doll’s house. The Auxiliary Fire Service had arrived, sirens were sounding, but she needed to get her mother and her sisters to safety.

Outside, she heard a man calling, ‘Is there anyone in here?’

‘Four of us in here!’ she yelled back. ‘We need help!’

‘Elsie?’ She heard her mother’s weak voice. ‘Girls?’

Elsie pushed on through the smoke and debris, aware of flames ripping through their front room, her sisters whimpering. Elsie became aware of a fire warden with a pump and buckets of sand. He was calling out instructions, but Elsie couldn’t hear his words. She pushed the girls out towards him, shouting that she was sending out her sisters, and went back for her mother.

‘Mother!’ she called to Violet, pushing her shoulder against her mother’s bedroom door, which was wedged shut. Finally she forced it open and saw Violet had been injured. Her head was bleeding from the impact of ceiling panels that had fallen in.

‘Elsie,’ she said. ‘Help me will you? My legs…’

Cutting her bare feet on broken glass strewn on the floor, Elsie helped lift Violet and support her weight as they staggered through the smoke and debris and out into the street, choking and coughing. A first aider came to their immediate help as firemen tried to control the blaze. Buoyed with adrenalin, Elsie ran next door to help her neighbour, Sidney, who Elsie knew had difficulty breathing.

‘Stay away from the property!’ commanded a fireman, but Elsie, now followed by the fireman, ran to the back of Sidney’s house where she knew he kept his spare key and unlocked the kitchen door to find Sidney collapsed on the floor. She ran towards him.

‘What’s his name?’ said the fireman, now beside her.

‘Sidney,’ she answered. ‘His lungs are weak.’

‘Let’s get him out,’ he said.

Stumbling over a paintbrush and pot of something black and sticky in the darkness, a deeply disturbing realisation cut into Elsie’s heart, but she didn’t hesitate. She looped her arm around Sidney’s frail waist and helped the fireman walk him, barely able to get his breath, out to safety.

Sitting in the ambulance in their nightclothes, Violet and the twins looked helplessly at their home, which was now half-collapsed, smoke billowing from the windows. After escorting Sidney to another ambulance, Elsie joined them in the van, throwing her arms around her family, wanting to hold them tight and never let go, wishing their papa was there to protect them.

‘God help us,’ Violet said in a stunned voice, holding a bandage to her head wound. ‘Everything… all our possessions, our memories, our home… it’s gone.’

‘I know,’ said Elsie, hugging her. ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry.’

The street was now full of people who had come out of their homes, with buckets of sand and blankets and offers of help.

Those families whose homes had been badly damaged were taken to the rest centre at All Saints Hall, where volunteers from the Women’s Voluntary Service supplied them with emergency clothing, hot soup, tea and a bed. Elsie collapsed onto a camp bed, but her mind was ablaze with the day’s events. As the night wore on, her feelings of anger intensified and Elsie convinced herself that the war was personal.

By dawn she was so filled with fury and frustration that at the first hint of daylight, she walked determinedly towards the cliff top, wearing borrowed shoes that were too big and a wool coat that must have belonged to a woman twice her size. She knew she wasn’t supposed to be near the beach at this hour, but she sat on the cliff scrubland regardless, surrounded by the yellow flowering gorse, glaring out at the sea, where scaffolding jutted from the water like a mouthful of ugly black teeth.

The chilly early morning breeze whipped her hair across her face, but Elsie left it there, to mingle with her tears. This morning, more than at any other time in her life, she felt that everything she held dear was under threat: her home, heart, family and liberty – and she was powerless to change anything. When the sun began to rise and glow in the sky like a giant peach, she made a pact. She might not be fighting on the front line, but she would fight on the home front. Whatever she could do to help put an end to this war and get the men she loved back home, she would do it. Her gloves were off.