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hand. The newlyweds kissed lightly and, holding hands, they began to descend. Halfway downstairs, however, Josephine broke free and ran back.
    Dottie was slightly startled as she ran to her, laid both hands on her shoulders and kissed her cheek. ‘Thank you, Dottie darling,’ she whispered urgently in her ear, ‘thank you for all you’ve done.’
    ‘It was nothing,’ protested Dottie mildly.
    ‘Oh yes it was,’ Josephine insisted. ‘And if I’m half as happy as you and your Reg have been, I shall be a lucky woman.’ With that she turned on her heel and ran back to her new husband and they both carried on downstairs.
    As soon as she’d gone, Dottie went back into the bedroom. As happy as you and your Reg have been? Had they been happy? If they had, it was all a very long time ago. She could hardly remember their courtship, but they had been happy in the beginning … hadn’t they?
    Even her own wedding day had been rushed. The phoney war was over by then and Reg was nervous, afraid he’d be sent abroad. Under the circumstances, Aunt Bessie had been persuaded to let them marry by special licence on August bank holiday weekend. The gossips had a field day. She knew the rumour was that she was pregnant, but she was a virgin when Reg took her to bed that night.
    Remembering all that the boys had gone through at Dunkirk, when Reg wrote to say he was being posted to the Far East, she’d been pleased. ‘At least he’ll be out of all this,’ she had told Aunt Bessie.
    But after he’d gone, she’d felt bad about saying that. She had little idea what happened out there, but if the newsreels were to be believed it looked far worse than what happened in Germany. He didn’t want to talk about it when he came back, at the end of ’48, and he had been a changed man. His chest was bad and he needed nursing. Reg didn’t seem to want her for ages but when he recovered and tried to make love to her, he was so rough she hated it. It was hard not to cry out with Aunt Bessie next door. And that was another thing. He and her aunt didn’t see eye to eye but funnily enough, when she died, Reg had been deeply affected. The shock of it left him with another problem: he couldn’t do it. She wished she had someone to talk to, but it wasn’t the done thing, was it? A married woman shouldn’t talk about what went on behind the bedroom door.
    Dottie sighed. She was still only twenty-seven and if things went on the way they were, she was destined to be barren. There would never be any babies.
    She put Josephine’s wedding dress on a hanger and, hanging it on the front of the wardrobe door, she spent a little time smoothing out the creases, until the overwhelming need for tears had passed.

Four
     
    It was cool in the shed. Reg pulled the orange box from under the small rickety table behind the door and sat down. He kicked the door closed and the soft velvety grey light enveloped him. This was his haven from the world and, apart from the occasional passing chicken that might have crept in to lay her egg under the bench, he knew the moment he shut the door he would be left alone. Dot would never come in here uninvited. This was the place where he kept his pictures. She didn’t know about them of course, but when the mood came over him and she wasn’t there, he’d come out here and have a decko. They were getting dog-eared and yellow with age but he wouldn’t part with them for the world. Although he still burned for the love of his life, he might have forgotten what she looked like if he didn’t have the pictures.
    They weren’t the only pictures he had. He’d still got the ones he’d bought off some bloke at the races. Now they really got him going. Those tarts would pose any way the punters wanted them. They got him all excited and when Dot was around, doing her washing or something, he’d watch her through the knothole on the shed wall and have a good J. Arthur Rank. It wasn’t as exciting as the real thing, but he liked