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responsibilities as you have yours. I’ll take care of myself, be assured. You have enough to do.’ And she had rung for Queenie to make more tea, and flatly refused to discuss the matter further.
    Poppy had worried about Jessie too, for she wasn’t nearly as young as she pretended to be. Seventy-five, Poppy had told her very directly, isn’t exactly a youngster. And Jessie had laughed and pooh-poohed her and pointed out that the business had to be kept going and that it was work of great wartime importance, at that.
    ‘Where’ll the poor things go when they’re home from the trenches on leave?’ she asked. ‘They’ve got to have somewhere to enjoy themselves. So Poppy’s and Jessie’s have got to keep going. I’ll supply a canteen too, if you set one up. There – willthat make you feel better? Then you’ll know I can’t just go off to the country like some baby in arms – any more than your Mama will – I’m as stubborn as she is, and a lot more useful – ’
    And Poppy had thrown up her hands and stopped arguing. This war was not going to be at all like the last one, with its trenches and regular troopships over the channel; she knew that, but why try to explain to Jessie? What good would it do?
    So she had set up the canteen and settled to dogged work at the two restaurants, struggling to get food supplies for them, somehow managing to keep going and to look after Goosey and David when he was home; which was less and less often these busy days, for his paper sent him all over the place to report what was happening. He even had to go to France to join the BEF in the early days, but glory be, had been sent home again before the retreat had turned into the danger of Dunkirk’s beaches – and she shuddered now at the memory of those dreadful days in June.
    And then the raids had begun; and Poppy looked around at the few people using her canteen at this time of day, and could have wept for them. Arthur Brook, the warden from the post on the corner of Stepney Way, was sitting half asleep in the corner over a cooling cup of Bovril, his face greyish white with fatigue and the inevitable layers of dust from the piles of rubble, with beside him the lanky shape of his son Freddy, a sickly youth who’d been turned down for the army because of his health and now worked seventeen hours a day helping the rescue teams. He’d have been better off in the army, Poppy thought with compunction, looking at the boy’s sleeping face with its lax lower jaw that revealed his apologies for teeth. He’d have had an easier time with them. The other people in the canteen were in no better shape; exhaustion hung around all of them like a veil that blurred their shapes and their features and Poppy thought – I’ve got to keep going. This is just about the only place they get any time to call their own, between raids.
    And she nodded quietly at Maria and said, ‘I’m going over to Cable Street, to my aunt’s. You’ve got the phone number? Great – I’ll try to see if she can spare some sugar from her supplies, but I know she’s badly off too. Take care of what there is for me, Maria, I can’t manage any more wastage – ’
    Maria nodded and let her eyes slide away from Poppy’s directgaze, but that didn’t matter, Poppy told herself. She’d got the message and she’d act on it.
    The walk to Jessie’s was, as always, a dispiriting experience. The smell alone was enough to plunge a person into despondency. Old buildings don’t break up kindly, she thought, as she picked her way carefully along Coke Street, making for Backchurch Lane on the other side of Commercial Road. They die as noisily as they can, and leave a dreadful smell behind. And then there was the gas and the cracked sewers and sometimes she even thought she caught a whiff of the sickly sweetish smell of dead bodies, so familiar to her from the last war, but she refused to even consider that. The rescue teams were incredible; they got out every last dead