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to look at them, and her mother would sit brooding and hunched, reading them, and afterwards lock them away in the mahogany bureau. The night after a letter came there was always a row between her parents, and Sophie had come to dread their arrival with the tell-tale Irish stamp and postmark.
    ‘But we’ve never even seen him! He doesn’t know us or care about us! Why should we have to go to bloody Ireland?’
    ‘Sophie! He is your grandfather, after all, your flesh and blood. Libby did keep in touch with him, you know. She told me she wrote to him sometimes,’ her aunt said earnestly. ‘You could go off and be evacuated to God knows where and to anybody, like you were in Oxford, or you have a chance to go to Ireland to someone who’s related to you. It’s where your father was reared, and besides, Ireland is a safe place. The prime minister, Mr De Valera, has declared its neutrality.’
    Sophie sat, silent.
    ‘Kids!’ muttered Aunt Jessie, pouring herself another cup of tea.
    ‘I’ll think about it!’ Sophie said grudgingly.

CHAPTER 7
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    Sophie hated the war! It had changed everything, turned her world topsy turvey, upside down, like sand shifting beneath your feet.
    She thought about it all as she sat in the local park. It wasn’t a big important park like Hyde Park, or Regent’s Park, but it too had changed. They had taken all the railings down, and melted them. Imagine using the park railings to make guns and weapons to kill people! She wondered if they did the same thing in the parks in Germany. The whole world had gone crazy.
    Normally at this time of year, when the cherry blossom drifted like snow through the air, the park would be crowded. Today it was half-empty – only a few old people, and a couple of mothers and toddlers, and a nurse, in her starched uniform, pushing a big fancy pram up and down in the spring sunshine.
    Sophie sat on the wooden bench, watching the small collection of ducks paddling in the pond, every now and then darting their heads beneath its murky surface.
    She had so much to think about: Mum sick in the hospital, her head swathed in bandages, and no nurse or doctor able to say for definite how long it was going to take for her to get better. Dad had put on his uniform and marched away like a thousand other dads, to fight in thisbloody war. Mum had begged him not to go. ‘You’re Irish, Neil. It’s not your fight.’ But all he said was: ‘I have lived and worked here in England for almost twenty years, the woman I love is English, my children have been born and reared here – no madman is going to destroy the people and place I love. Libby, I have to fight. This is my fight, I have to protect me and mine.’ And so her Dad had gone, like all the other dads, like Mr Brown the park-keeper – normally these beds would be a riot of colour by now, but there were only a few straggly tulips and some freesia here and there, and clumps of daring weeds pushed their way up all over the place. And the lawns were in dire need of a cut.
    Even St Martin’s Academy, Sophie and Hugh’s school, had changed. The children came in late and most of them spent half the morning yawning. Some days classes were almost full, and on others only a few pupils would turn up. It all depended on the pattern of the bombing the night before. And then children began to disappear – evacuated, or worse? Sophie couldn’t bear to think of it. All her friends going.
    Homework was meant to be done, but what teacher was going to scold someone who had spent most of the night in an air-raid shelter? Sophie found that it was hardly worth the bother of making an effort to work. And usually every year the school put on a big show, the summer show, but that too had been cancelled. It was silly and selfish, Sophie knew, to be upset because she hadn’t the chance to audition, the chance to sing. There was no guarantee she would have got a part anyway – but she was a good singerand everyone praised her