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‘Have a play outside.’
    â€˜It’s cold.’
    â€˜You always say that. You need a bit of air. Have a kick about with the football. Imagine you’re at White Hart Lane.’
    â€˜You play with me, Dad.’
    â€˜I’ve just got in, son. Just kick it against the wall. But don’t make too much noise about it …’
    Martin stopped staring and went out into the corridor. It wasn’t easy living in that house but I knew Len needed me. I just had to be patient. I would do my best and, if that wasn’t enough, I’d retire gracefully and let other women do the cooking and the housework. After all, there were plenty of volunteers. I wasn’t the only lady in Len’s life.

Martin
    The house filled with women who were not my mother. They came to boil up potatoes, fry cod in batter and bake jam roly-poly. They chopped carrots, rolled out suet and whipped up milk jellies as Dad sat down to his
Daily Express
and milky tea.
    I watched the women measuring out flour on the scales, pouring it into the pale-yellow mixing bowl, asking me to pass the sifter or the egg beater, and I wished they would go away so that I could close my eyes and open them to see Mum back home again.
    Ivy came from the sweet shop with her daughter Linda. She was a girl so we couldn’t really play. Her mother had varicose veins that showed through her stockings. She brought a box of biscuits and a Victoria sponge. I had only ever seen her eat cake.
    The sounds the women made were never the same as Mum’s. They beat the eggs too slowly; they sifted the flour without singing to themselves. They lacked my mother’s way with batter, dough and pastry. I sat in my room reading the
Eagle
, wondering when people would stop pretending to be kind to me.
    When I did go out I went to look at the breaches in the sea wall and tried to work out how and why the flood had happened. I wanted to check if anyone could have done anything to stop it. I looked at the water surging up and hitting the cliff.
    In the beach café a woman was selling sprats, crayfish tails and rollmops on the cheap. She gave me a cup of Bovril and I sat on a bit of sea wall even though it was cold and wet. She told me to look out at the rocks. If they shone, or stood up in the water, it was a sure sign of another easterly gale.
    I watched a relay of soldiers pass sandbags down the line like they were barrels of beer. One of them was singing ‘Gilly Gilly Ossenfeffer Katzenellen Bogen by the Sea’. The other men joined in as they worked. I couldn’t understand why they were singing a children’s song:
    In a tiny house
IN A TINY HOUSE
By a tiny stream
BY A TINY STREAM
Where a lovely lass
WHERE A LOVELY LASS
Had a lovely dream
HAD A LOVELY DREAM
.
    When I closed my eyes the gulls overhead were birds of prey and the strands of seaweed were poisonous snakes wanting to sting or strangle me. A coil of abandoned rope on the beach had become a hangman’s noose. And then, at the end of the dream, I could see a high wall of sea unfurling towards me, held at breaking point, as if it was waiting for me to realise that I could do nothing to escape it.

Violet
    That Christmas Martin helped me with the mistletoe and the decorations while my husband sang songs to himself. Sometimes George would utter phrases that no one quite picked up.
I know what’s right, all right … you put your right leg in, that’s what you do … oh hokey cokey … all present and correct … I wouldn’t quite say that, my dear … where are the ratings?
    He had been on the Arctic convoy taking gunpowder out to the Russians at Murmansk. Convoy PQ13. He was the gunnery officer. They gave him ten pound extra: danger money, they called it. The Germans hit them first with a torpedo and then again from the air. The ship caught fire. Everyone said he must be dead.
    â€˜He’s not quite the same,’ they said to me when they brought him