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Peter sat with his head on his arms on the kitchen table. His tea went cold. Maudey moved around quietly and Dad picked up a paper from the side. Peter could hear the pages turning slowly, as if Dad was trying to be quiet.

‘Maybe outside for some fresh air would be good right now,' Maudey suggested.

‘Aye, it's nice round here. Why don't we go for a walk, lad, like she said?'

Out in the sun Peter shivered, his face cold and wet. He rubbed his face with his hands to dry it, then followed Dad up the lane. Dad whistled under his breath, walked on ahead with his hands behind his back, approving of the tall banks of laurel hedges with his cloudy eyes, sniffing the clean air.

‘Am I going home with you now, Dad?'

He turned. Seemed surprised to see Peter still there.

‘Best you stay here.'

‘But her funeral.'

‘Funeral's done. No, lad, you're best here. Nothing to do for her now.'

‘Dad, I don't have a picture of Ma. Can I have a picture of her, Dad?'

‘I've only got the one, Peter. Only one we ever had took.'

He stopped and took out his cracked wallet, frayed to canvas at the edges. He slid out a small brown snap. Him and Ma in front of a church. She was young and shining. She had her head bent under a cloche hat and was holding a small bunch of lilies of the valley. She looked away to one side, shy, like she was keeping a secret that made her smile. Dad was standing small and foursquare, legs apart and beaming with a smile to light up all Manchester.

‘If you'd but seen her then, Peter. She were best-looking nurse in all the hospital, that's the truth. And clever. Clever in the way you are. Here. You have this.'

‘But don't you want it?'

‘You have it. It's yours now to keep.'

Peter stared at Ma, the picture blurring over. Then he put it in his pocket carefully. He ran to catch up with Dad who was whistling a tune that sounded sad. He knew the words: ‘Let Me Call You Sweetheart'.

After more of Maudey's tea Dad was gone, restored for the journey back, he said, by her bread and butter and cake.

Coming in from waving Dad off he found Alice in the hallway, going back to college early. Her bags were packed and waiting there by the door.

‘Oh Peter, I heard. I'm so terribly, terribly sorry.' She leaned in and hugged him. ‘We'll look after you, Peter dear. Study hard for me. We're both going to be so busy reading and writing essays. Yes?'

He swallowed, nodded.

Mr Hanbury was calling her from the car.

That autumn term he came top in all his exams. He would be a doctor, or a judge, or a vicar. Alice posted him books from a shop in Oxford, with his name written in the front in her very best handwriting.

CHAPTER 13

Buxton, 1940

Peter was going home for Christmas once again – a pang of loss when he remembered that Ma wouldn't be there. But he was longing to see Bill and Kitty; and Dad, when the mood took him, could be matey and funny. With the first couple of drinks in him Dad was still good at stirring up fun. Later it was best to let him be.

Maudey had packed a small cardboard suitcase of clean clothes and fitted in a boiled fruitcake, a jar of damson jam and a greaseproof packet of sandwiches. He was to take the train by himself to Manchester and someone from home would be there to meet him.

‘It's a shame you couldn't be here with us for Christmas. I'll be doing dinner for my brother over in the dale. You could've spent the day over there with us.'

‘Won't you be here with the Hanburys?'

‘I don't live here all the time you know, Peter. I do have a home to go to, over with my brother in Baxendale. Mrs Hanbury makes a big thing of how she does the Christmas dinner, once I've set it all ready for her, but it'll be me who's back here on Boxing Day to clear it all up, right enough. Well, I've put in sandwiches for the train and there's your spare jumper. Aye, I'll miss you while you're away, that I will.'

She gave him a hug that smelled of flour and baking. Since Ma had passed way Maudey had been almost tender with Peter, keeping an eye out for all the little things, if he was hungry or needing his
clothes mended, money for something at school. They played cards at the kitchen table in the evening, long games of Gin Rummy, listening to the old set that had been demoted to the kitchen when the new radio was delivered to the drawing room. Maudey liked the big bands and Vera Lynn's hopeful, teary-eyed songs. But she let Peter tune it to the Radio Three concerts while he was doing his homework at the kitchen table. She stood and looked at the radio when he told her to listen to this bit – no, really listen, Maudey – in the middle of a Mozart symphony. Wiping her hands on a tea towel she would stand and wait to get on with something useful. She was so familiar to him now, her soft creased face and grey hair wound back in a bun with wisps of hair curling up in the damp warmth of the scullery; her shapeless pinny with crossover straps and her big red hands with cracked skin round the nails. She would have been a good mum. He was sorry for her: there'd never been a Mr Maudey. Sometimes he was aware of playing a role, standing in for a boy she might have had, in a different life.

It was cold on the train. The soldier on the opposite seat was bundled up in a greatcoat. Using his canvas kit bag as a bolster to sleep against, he took off his boots and stretched out along the bench.

At lunchtime the train stopped. The soldier produced chocolate and Peter shared his egg sandwiches and gnarled farm apples from Maudey's cellar store.

‘We'll miss Christmas Day at this rate,' the soldier said, as a joke. He went off to find a guard. He came back blustering with anger.

‘Going the bloody wrong direction.'

Peter looked at him, alarmed.

‘I've only got a two day pass and it looks like one of them's going to be on this effing train.'

With a jolt the train pulled taut and began to move, slowly, stopping in the middle of nowhere, then starting again for a little way. People walked up and down the corridor trying to find out what was going on. It was getting colder. His hands numb. The winter afternoon was starting to turn dark. The dim blue light bulb came on and made the face of the soldier in his compartment look unearthly. Wrapping his coat round like a blanket the soldier huddled back in the corner of the carriage and looked at photographs of his family. Showed them to Peter, a wife with wavy black hair and a baby girl.

He went off to find why they had stopped again. ‘Happen we've been delayed because Liverpool got hit last night. Got hit hard, poor buggers,' he said.

It was dark when the train passed Crewe. Searchlights stretched for miles into the sky above the Cheshire plain. Barrage balloons like grazing elephants in the sky. In the distance a strange red dawn over the horizon.

‘Ayup,' said the soldier. ‘That don't look right.'

As the train drew closer they saw the black shapes of a long townscape spread out along the horizon. Above it the underside of the clouds reflected an eerie red light, their forms sharply defined like a vast, inverted landscape.

‘Is that Liverpool?' said Peter, awed and scared by this vision of a world upside down.

‘That's bloody Manchester.' The soldier opened the window and craned his head outside.

The train crept into Manchester Piccadilly, an acrid smell of smoke, the din of sirens and clanging ambulance bells. Across the far side of the station the roof had come down in a twisted mess of girders.

Peter got off the train and looked up and down the platform for Dad or perhaps John, but there was no one there. Underfoot the platform crunched with broken glass. Hard to know who to ask,
everyone rushing away fast. There was nothing for it but to walk back to the house. It was maybe two miles; he'd done it before.

Outside the station the front of the grand bank building was on fire, a black cut-out with the windows filled with roaring flames. He had to walk past it to go down the main road and kept as far back as he could but the heat made his face prickle. A top corner of the edifice tipped over and crumpled. It fell, exploding on the ground, sending up billowing waves of smoke and black dust. The ARP warden yelled for everyone to get back.

Peter backtracked down a side street in the red darkness and made his way out onto a wider road, picking his way across tarmac rippled into crests of cracked asphalt and rubble. Above him black plumes of smoke boiled up through a sagging net of tramlines.

The end of the road was glowing with fires. He came out on a main road of high buildings filled with more roaring flames. Between them arcs of water met together like the transepts of a cathedral. He had to step carefully, watching for the fat water hoses that snaked across the road.

A man yelled at him. ‘What you doing here? You can't go that way.' A loud explosion and the ground shook.

Peter slipped away between two buildings. His heart was beating a tattoo in the dark. He passed three firemen in rubber suits with the hoods down like giant collars. They were ashen-faced and drinking mugs of tea, staring at Peter as if he were a phantom from another world.

The air raid siren began to wail again, but Peter had no idea where to go other than to keep on heading in the direction of home. Singing the ‘Our Father' loudly, he walked on and after a long time chanced on a road he knew.

Two hours after he left the station, and feeling sick with relief, he reached the end of his road and saw the familiar terraces of low
red-brick houses. A deep bomb crater sat at the entrance to his street, perfectly round, even and smooth as a newly dug grave, the bottom white with a chemical dust. Along one side, houses stood on a precipice, their windows blown out, and the curtains lazily flopping in and out in the breeze.

Walking further down the road he saw with a sob of relief that his own house was still standing. He knocked on the front door. A few moments later Kitty opened it.

‘It's Peter. How did you get here? We thought you'd have heard.'

‘Is that Peter there?' said his dad. ‘I'm sorry you came, lad.'

No sign of Ma. Why had he expected to see her? He knew she wasn't there. But all the same, he wanted to cry.

‘So this is Peter then? Let me have a look at him.'

A woman he'd never seen before pushed through into the narrow hallway. She was short and dumpy, already in her coat as if about to go out.

‘Nice-looking lad. Hello, Peter. I'm Ivy.' She said it as if he would know who she was and put out her hand for him to shake.

‘And just how the bloody hell did you get here?' asked Dad.

‘I got on the train at nine this morning.'

‘Well, we'd best get to shelter. Siren's already gone.'

Ivy ignored dad. ‘Have you had your tea?'

Peter shook his head.

‘He should have a bit to eat first, Kitty, eh? You must be starved, our Peter.'

Kitty made him a doorstep of bread and jam. Then they set off for the shelter at Hulme, Peter eating and trying to mind the scattered cobbles and broken glass as they walked. It was dark but there was a red glow across the sky to see by.

‘Jerry will know the way back tonight sure enough with this lot burning like a lamp,' said Dad.

By the time they got to the shelter the ARP man in his black steel helmet was turning people away.

‘It's packed in here. You'll have to find someone with a cellar or an Anderson,' he said when Ivy asked him if he was happy about them all dying that night.

Ivy took charge. ‘We'll go to the Dog and Partridge,' she announced. ‘I used to pull pints there before war. Landlord's always had a soft spot for me. Your mother might not have held with doing herself up, but a bit of lipstick goes a long way in this world, our Kitty; you mind me.'

A warning growl of plane engines, an explosion to the south, the ack-ack of an aircraft gun somewhere in a street close by. They walked faster, began to run.

The cellar of the Dog and Partridge smelled cold, of coal and spilled beer. The landlord's wife ignored Ivy, but made a big thing of welcoming Jim and his motherless children. Got the boys to go up to the bar and fetch down chairs. She seemed to know dad well enough.