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the twins and home. The twins, Gemma and James, were now two and a half years old, and children of delight to Polly. Sometimes she could still not believe they were hers, that in her forty-eighth year she was actually the mother of two bundles of fun and mischief. She spoke constantly to them of their father, for she was determined they would not see him as a stranger when he eventually turned up.
    Her erstwhile help and companion, Kate Trimble, was now in the WAAF. Kate’s young man, Boots’s nephew David, was working on a farm in Devon prior to his own call-up, and he intended to opt for the RAF. All Kate’s visionary wartime heroes were RAF pilots, and David had promised he’d do his best to fill such a role. He hoped, he said in a letter to her, that German pilots would help him achieve that status by not shooting at him. Kate wrote back to say she quite liked him as he was, that he didn’t have to be heroic as long as he looked the part.
    Polly made light of being without her. She never allowed the twins to be an encumbrance instead of a blessing. She was more than a match for their childish tricks and tantrums. She had lived through the country’s most difficult years, the years of the decimating Great War, the years of economic depression and demoralizing unemployment, the rebellious years of the wild Twenties, and the years of this war against Hitler. There were also her years of frustrated longing for a man whose marriage kept him apart from her until Goering’s bombers robbed him of his wife, his Emily.
    As Boots’s second wife, all her frustrations vanished. The scourge of London bobbies in the wild Twenties, she became almost soppy with happiness, and such an uncritical wife that his mother told her it didn’t do for any woman to put her husband on a pedestal. It was bound to make him believe he was her lord and master, which was never what God had in mind. Polly said she’d never had it in mind herself, but somehow it happened. His mother, registering shock, said she’d never brought her only oldest son up to be any woman’s lord and master, and something ought to be done about it. Polly said she was doing her level best to get on equal terms, but everything bounced off him, as one might expect with lords and masters. Chinese Lady, as his mother was called, registered more shock. Well, I don’t want to interfere, she said, but I’m going to have to talk to him. Which she did, with Polly eavesdropping.
    ‘Now just look here, Boots, I won’t have you treating Polly like you were the Lord of the earth, which she says happens every day.’
    ‘Come again, old girl?’ said Boots.
    ‘Don’t call me old girl, it’s airy-fairy and disrespectful,’ said Chinese Lady. ‘Polly’s a very nice woman and a good wife to you, especially considering her worries about the war. Now I know she thinks highly of you, but I won’t have you taking advantage of that to make her bow down to you.’
    ‘Come again, old girl?’ repeated Boots.
    ‘Don’t keep saying that,’ said Chinese Lady, ‘you know what I’m talking about. Of course, it’s not my place to interfere, but some things have to be said. Polly says she didn’t think you’d act like her lord and master, but it happened somehow, she said. She told me she’s trying to change you, but that you don’t take a blind bit of notice.’
    ‘Old lady, I’m lost for words,’ said Boots.
    ‘H’m, that’ll be the day,’ sniffed Chinese Lady.
    ‘I’ll talk to Polly,’ said Boots, and did so at a suitable moment. The only response he received came in the form of shrieks of laughter. There was no way any lord and master could get the better of hysterical glee by mere dialogue. So, in a manner of speaking, he dragged the lady up the winding stairs to the bedroom. Polly liked that.
    ‘What happens next?’ she asked when they arrived at the bedside.
    ‘Something heavy’s going to drop on you from a great height,’ said Boots.
    ‘Oh, yes please,