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had kept both her small hands in his during the confession. He said he understood how much she liked to go to the pictures, and he didn’t blame her for taking a night out. He was sorry he couldn’t leave work to take her more often himself, only they were still building up the business, getting known beyond Duke Street, down Union Street and Bear Lane. It was wrong of him to neglect her, he knew. There was really nothing for him to forgive.
    After this, Sadie felt worse. For a start, she might have welcomed a small show of jealousy on Walter’s part; there was her female pride at stake. Second, her confession had only been partial, to save Walter’s feelings, she told herself. But she’d deliberately missedout the tumult in her heart when she kissed the silent, infuriating Richie Palmer. From now on she must keep out of his way, as a safeguard to her own peace of mind. Her stolen night out with him would be the one and only.
    Duke and Annie approved when they saw her and Walter back together. Walter was part of the scenery; steady as they came, loyal and true, a big support to Rob when he first came home wounded.
    Walter’s own war had been spent as a motor-bike dispatch rider around Ypres. It had kept him out of the thick of things on the front line, but he stored many terrible memories which he would forever keep to himself. His belief in the justice of the Allied cause had kept him going through thick and thin. Later, he’d trained as one of the first drivers of the new military tanks, and was in the last push of the autumn of 1918. He came home a hero to a country exhausted by war, unable to offer him a means of keeping body and soul together. So he and Rob resorted to their boyhood dream of setting up by themselves. They took casual employment on the docks and markets, working like navvies to scrape money together. Over the years, their meagre savings of one pound a week rose to thirty shillings, or on a good week, thirty-five. Still, their target seemed miles off.
    Help came along for the pair of them at last in the unlikely shape of Mrs Edith Cooper. She heard of their struggle to start up from one of the girl assistants in her husband’s drapery store. Mrs Cooper held a soft spot for Robert; he’d come to talk kindly to her on the death in action of her only son, Teddy. She’d seen in Robert all the maimed and wounded victims of the war, the wasted youth, the terrible price of victory. This dainty, fastidious woman, an East Ender herself in the days before her husband’s success, had once more requested Rob to visit her at home. She offered him a loan of £200 to be paid back according to a set plan at a low rate of interest. She wished him well, shook his hand and stood at her window, shielded by a long net curtain, watching him to the gate. Rob went with his head high, eagerly in spite of the impediment of his leg. Tears stood in her eyes. Her husband, Jack, sneered and told her she’d be lucky if she ever got back a penny of her investment.‘Throwing good money down the drain,’ he complained. ‘And times are this bad.’
    Cock-a-hoop, Rob and Walter sat up late debating whether to spend their cash total of £350, £150 of which they’d saved for themselves over a three-year period, on one brand-new Morris Cowley with its revolutionary American engine, or on two older, used Bull nose Morrises. They’d gone for the latter; two cars meant twice as much business when there were two of them able to do the driving. They found premises to rent at the old carter’s yard under the railway bridge, installed a telephone and put up their nameplate. For two years now they’d struggled to repay their loan and to make ends meet. Each month, with a gleam in her eye, Edith Cooper unsealed the brown envelope and held up the five-pound note to show her disbelieving husband.
    It was a rare Saturday when they decided to take time off, but the Derby