Elsie’s worst fears had come true. After all these months of trying to keep her courtship with William going, despite his black moods, he’d called their engagement off. Grabbing her beaten-up Raleigh bicycle from where it was leaning against the bakery wall, she cycled the short journey home in utter despair. Too shocked to cry, and only thinking of how much she truly loved William since the very first day they met, she couldn’t believe it was all over. There were girls she knew who had lost their loved ones in action and, in some dark and twisted way, she envied them the telegrams reporting their deaths. Yes, the man she loved was alive but would now never be hers. She would have to live for the rest of her days with the knowledge that he was living and breathing without her, and that he didn’t want her.

Furiously dumping her bike where the front gate used to be, before the neighbourhood’s metal was salvaged to put towards building Spitfires, she rushed into the house without saying ‘hello’ to her mother, kicked off her shoes and dashed upstairs into her bedroom, where she found her eleven-year-old twin sisters, June and Joyce, making a den. The bedsheet was stretched out from the chest of drawers to the bedpost, as a makeshift roof, and the girls had on their gas masks and were imitating the sound of the air-raid siren and bombs going off. When Elsie lifted up the pillowcase that was the entrance to their den and glared at them, they both screamed ‘Invasion!’ and fell into fits of giggles.

‘Oh, quieten down and get out of here, will you?’ Elsie snapped, pulling down the roof of their den. ‘Go on! Go and help Mother with the potatoes.’

Unused to their older sister’s sharp tongue, the girls fell silent, yanked off their gas masks, discarded them in the corner and scurried off downstairs.

Elsie sat heavily on her bed, angrily looking around the bedroom, wanting to punch and kick the walls. She couldn’t take it out on the house, though. It had been fixed up and repaired since it was bombed last year, with help from the Assistance Board, but much of their furniture and belongings had been damaged or destroyed or burned in the blaze, and so the house felt as if it were a shadow of their former home, held together by safety pins and string. Leaning her head against the wall, she wrapped her arms around her middle and squeezed her eyes shut, images of William rolling across her eyelids, forcing herself not to scream.

‘Elsie,’ said her mother’s voice from the doorway, ‘I heard you rush upstairs. What’s upset you? Well, apart from the news that Russia’s losing, which is enough to give anyone a migraine.’

Elsie opened her eyes to her mother’s face peering into the room, her huge brown eyes watery and eternally kind, with the twins either side of her, also brown-eyed, all of them wearing a worried expression. It took all of her energy, but Elsie made herself smile. Since her dear father Alberto had been taken to a POW camp on the Isle of Man the previous year because he was an Italian national, Elsie had become the family member that everyone depended on. There were things she’d heard about the Isle of Man, from her cousins, that she had never told her mother – the substandard boarding house accommodation behind barbed wire where ‘aliens’ had to sleep, sometimes two to a bed; the poor-quality food and the lack of communication from the outside world. Though their father was permitted to write letters home twice a week, Elsie wasn’t convinced he was receiving their replies at all. She protected her mother, Violet, from all of this because she didn’t want to make her suffering worse.

‘My engagement to William is off,’ said Elsie, matter-of-factly. ‘I don’t want to talk about it or think about him ever again!’

Her mother and sisters gasped, entering the room and sitting on her bed all at once, Violet clutching Elsie’s hands. June held out a precious humbug and offered it to her sister. Elsie shook her head and stroked June’s hair in thanks. Her throat was thickening with the need to cry and she swallowed hard.

‘But why?’ said Violet. ‘Did he explain why, for goodness’ sake?’

Elsie shrugged, gave a quick shake of her head, raised her chin and stared defiantly out of the window. She felt her mother’s shock transforming into anger.

‘That foolish young man doesn’t know what he’s doing!’ she said. ‘How could he break my daughter’s heart? I wish Alberto were here to talk some sense into him. Sometimes I wonder if William had all the sense knocked out of him when his truck was hit that day! I was so looking forward to you and him getting married. It’s what I want for you, Elsie dear, to have a happy marriage like your father and I. Oh, how I miss my dear Alberto!’

At the mention of Alberto, Elsie watched her mother’s eyes mist over.

‘My heart will mend,’ said Elsie reassuringly, taking a deep breath and trying to be brave. ‘I will use the time I have spent with William to work more. We need the money, don’t we, what with Papa away? Apparently they’re taking girls on as bus drivers now, as well as conductresses, so I will register for the training and become a driver.’

‘You don’t always have to be brave and take everything on your shoulders,’ said Violet gently, tucking Elsie’s hair behind her ears. ‘Come here, my lovely girl.’

Elsie’s body was rigid with determination and she resisted the comfort at first, but as her mother gently pulled her into her bosom and her sisters threw their arms around her waist, her resolve weakened and she couldn’t hold in her sadness and crushing disappointment for a moment longer. As she wept in the failing light, she felt she might drown in her own tears if it wasn’t for her little family holding her up, keeping her afloat like a lifeboat.

‘It’s this blasted war,’ said Violet softly. ‘It’s turning all our lives upside down. Hitler has a lot to answer for. How I wish it were all over.’