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bedroom. His bedroom, which was as spartan as the kitchen.
    Just his luck to find the perfect girl and have nothing more seductive to offer her than a swag on the floor. Sally was a city girl. She might have enjoyed a canoe trip on the Burdekin, but little giveaways like the pale perfection of her skin and her neatly painted fingernails shouted loud and clear that she was still a smooth city chick.
    ‘It’s a bit of a mess in there,’ he warned, stepping between her and the closed door.
    ‘I’ve never fancied neat freaks.’ Sally smiled up at him, robbing him of breath.
    Seemed she fancied him. This was going to happen.
    ‘All night I’ve been wanting to tell you how gorgeous you are – the most beautiful girl I’ve ever met.’
    With a soft smile, she stepped closer and lifted her face to his.
    I wonder . . .
    Lying in her nursing home bed, Kitty Mathieson couldn’t sleep. She knew it was silly to pin too many hopes on what might be happening in Charters Towers, but she’d been picturing the scene at the ball . . . Sally Piper arriving in the pink georgette dress she’d lent her . . .
    She wondered if her grandson Luke had gone to the ball as well. She knew he’d been invited.
    She would give anything to be there, a fly on the wall, listening to the band play Benny Goodman and watching the dancing couples. Closing her eyes, Kitty could hear the music, faint at first, but coming to her more strongly, bright and brassy, stirring memories . . .
    As the music swelled, the fates of Sally and her grandson were forgotten as she found herself slipping back . . .
    She was nineteen again, in that frantic February when the war arrived on her doorstep.

5
    Townsville, February 1942
    The smells of sweat and fear mingled with train smoke as Kitty pushed her way through the anxious crowds on the station platform. The scene was depressingly familiar. Distraught mothers tried to calm crying babies, hassled porters yelled, ‘Make way!’ as they pushed trolleys piled dangerously high with suitcases and boxes, while bewildered children clutched prized possessions – a teddy bear, a doll, a wooden truck. It had been like this every night for the past week, as Kitty farewelled friends and neighbours. Everyone was leaving Townsville now that Darwin had been bombed. They were getting out of the north while they could. Any day now, the full-scale Japanese invasion would begin.
    ‘I feel as if we’re abandoning you,’ Kitty’s neighbour Jean said as she bundled her children into their carriage and kissed Kitty goodbye. ‘I wish you could come with us.’
    ‘Don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine.’
    Kitty had said this to other friends on other nights. What else could she say? She wasn’t especially brave. She was as scared as anyone else. The spectre of the Japanese terrified her.
    She’d heard the stories about what they would do, but her grandfather had refused to leave. As head churchwarden, he took his responsibilities to the remaining parishioners very seriously.
    ‘If it comes to the worst,’ she said now, ‘the government will evacuate us.’
    ‘Let’s hope so.’ Jean sounded doubtful and looked awkward, her fashionably painted dark-red lips drawing in tightly as she dropped her gaze.
    There’d been horrifying rumours that the government intended to pull out of northern Australia. Apparently, it wasn’t possible to defend the entire coastline, and everything north of Brisbane was to be abandoned to the Japs in the same way that Prime Minister Curtin and his cabinet had abandoned Rabaul in New Guinea. Bert Hammond, who lived in Kitty’s street, had heard it from someone who worked in the government.
    Kitty consoled herself that the Americans had already started to arrive. She’d seen their landing barges on the beach, their noisy convoys of trucks, their sunglasses and spiky haircuts, the money they readily flashed around. They were so smartly dressed and efficient. Surely they would make a