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cruelly unfaithful – there had been some other woman, Mother had once said, a brazen, common creature – but he had been a failure as well. The firm he had owned in the City had crashed and he had been made bankrupt. Soon after that had happened he had left them. Abandoned them when Virginia was eight years old. The big house had been sold and the servants given notice. She and Mother had moved into this dreary ground floor flat in a semi-detached house near Wimbledon Park station. She had been taken away from her private school and sent to the High School instead. When she had matriculated, the headmistress had tried to persuade her to stay on to take her Higher Certificate and go to university. She had wanted to badly but Mother had said she could not afford it and so she had left school and started work asa clerk with the Falcon Assurance Company in Holborn, travelling into town every day on the District Line from Wimbledon Park. Perhaps she ought to feel bitter about Father too. She had never found it in her heart to be so, until now.
    If Father had not deserted them, Mother would never have felt like this. She would never have become the sad and lonely person she was, and there would not have been this awful burden to carry. Mother had been right when she had called her selfish . . . she
was
only thinking of herself. She had said that she wanted to do something worthwhile in the war but, if she were really honest about it, the chance of getting away from the Falcon Assurance Company meant a lot too. The work was deadly dull. Sometimes she could see herself growing like Miss Parkes who had been with the company for more than thirty years and had grown as drab as the office files she sat among. She could see her own thirty or more years stretching ahead of her . . . the daily journey in on the District Line, changing at Earls Court to take the Piccadilly Line to Holborn, the hours spent in the fusty gloom of the filing department, the solitary lunch at Lyons Corner House, and then more hours with the files. Rush hour back in the crowded Underground and the District Line train rattling out to the suburbs, the walk up the hill from the station to the drab house in Alfred Road, Mother resentful in the kitchen, dinner at the table in the front room, the nine o’clock news on the wireless, the knitting or sewing or reading, and so to bed in this depressing, narrow back room . . .
    The rain was splashing down noisily on the concrete yard outside the window, where the dustbins stood. It sounded as though the gutter above was blocked again, which would mean more arguments with the landlord. Virginia lay listening to it and thinking her thoughts, until, at last, she slept.

Two
    GETTING UP AT six didn’t worry Winnie. She was always up by that time at home on the farm and so she didn’t moan or groan like most of the other girls in the hut. Nor did she have much difficulty, like some, in stowing her bedding just the way the sergeant had shown them – the three biscuits stacked at the head of the bed, the blankets folded and put on top with one of them wrapped lengthwise round the rest to hold them together, with the join underneath. The bolster topped the pile. Sergeant Beaty had bellowed the instructions the night before, as though they were out on the big parade ground.
    â€˜Folds of the blankets to the
foot
of the bed with the edge of the pile
exactly
on the edge of your biscuits . . . Are you paying attention, Potter? I’m not telling you again. You’d better get it right if you don’t want to find yourself on a charge.’
    Of course Enid had started to cry again and Winnie had had to help her make a proper job of her bedding in the morning. At breakfast she sat down beside Winnie and gave her a wan smile. Her eyelids were still red and swollen.
    â€˜I don’t know how I’m going to cope, really I don’t. I wish I’d never