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He was a scruffy old Irish rogue who went his own sweet way, and he and his lurcher, Harvey, were the cause of most of her troubles, but she loved him, and knew that this house of women relied upon him.
    Despite the homeliness of this little scene Peggy was rather distracted, for her thoughts were scattered, and she was filled with a restless, nervous energy. Her husband Jim was coming home on leave tomorrow, and although her best dress had been carefully pressed, her shoes polished and Daisy’s outfit was folded and ready, she was certain there had to be something she’d forgotten to do in preparing for it.
    The house had been in chaos following Kitty Pargeter’s wedding to Roger Makepeace, and she’d spent the last six days dashing about trying to clean and tidy and make everything perfect. Not that it was easy in a house this size, for it was getting shabbier by the day and needed a thorough renovation – which was neither affordable nor practical in these times of strict rationing and seemingly endless raids by the Luftwaffe. All the frenetic activity had kept her too busy to think how she might feel if Jim’s leave was cancelled at the last moment again, but now she’d begun to dare to hope that he really would be coming home.
    Peggy gathered up the pile of freshly ironed laundry and carried it upstairs to the linen cupboard before checking that Ron had cleaned the bath properly, and not left damp towels all over the floor, or whisker shavings in the basin. Satisfied that everything was tidy and clean, she inspected each of the bedrooms, and then paused a moment to look out of the top-floor front window which had the only view of the sea. It was as grey as the sky, the murky waves whipped into white, crashing foam as the rain came down like stair rods in the wind that howled across the Channel.
    Beach View had been Peggy’s home all her life, for it had belonged to her parents, and she and Jim had taken over the business once they’d retired to a bungalow further along the coast. They were gone now, and she still missed them, but at least they’d been spared yet another awful war, and had lived long enough to see most of their grandchildren come along.
    As the threat of war had become reality, the once thriving boarding-house business had died, and with only the two nurses, Suzy and Fran, and the elderly widow, Cordelia Finch, as lodgers, Peggy had been at her wits’ end to know how to keep the place going. But with every dark cloud comes a silver lining, and with the help of government grants to supplement the low rents, her empty rooms had been filled by the billeting office. The past three years had been interesting, to say the least, with all the comings and goings, and she still got the occasional letter or card from those who’d stayed for a while before moving on.
    Beach View Boarding House stood three streets up the hill from the seafront in one of the many terraces of Victorian houses that were such a feature of Cliffehaven. Four storeys tall, it provided five bedrooms on the top two floors, another in the hall, and two more in the basement which Ron filled with all his clutter and shared with his dog, Harvey, and his two ferrets. Apart from the kitchen and basement scullery, there was a dining room which was rarely used now, and Peggy and Jim had scrimped and saved to have a bathroom put in upstairs. It was a luxury that had been worth every penny, even though strict rationing meant the days of soaking in deep hot water were gone.
    In the long narrow back garden Ron’s vegetable patch had taken over most of the space between the house and the ugly Anderson shelter. The outside lav had been rebuilt after the bomb blast from two streets up had flattened everything, and although the new lav and cistern were very posh, Peggy still felt guilty every time she saw it, for Ron had liberated it from the rubble of a bombed-out hotel. He’d assured her that it was all