While We're Apart Read Online Free PDF

legal and above board, but Peggy knew him too well and still had her doubts.
    There was also a shed which housed more of Ron’s clutter and provided a hiding place for him when she needed things done about the house, and a chicken coop for the hens who managed regularly to lay enough eggs for everyone, despite the racket of air-raid sirens and squadrons of planes roaring overhead.
    A large store of wood was piled next to the water butt and almost empty concrete coal bunker; a washing line was strung from a post nailed into the flint of the back-garden wall up to the house, and the two bicycles were sheltered from the elements by a sheet of tarpaulin that Ron had fixed beneath the kitchen window.
    Peggy gave a wistful sigh as she thought about her lovely car which was now under wraps for the duration in a friend’s garage, its tyreless wheels propped up on bricks. She did miss it, and now she had Daisy she couldn’t even use her bike to get about.
    She turned away from the dreary view and headed back downstairs. On reaching the kitchen she saw Ron was still entertaining Daisy with her wooden bricks, and Cordelia was engrossed in the afternoon wireless programme while she tried to make sense of her tangle of knitting. Harvey was sprawled in front of the range fire, snoring happily, his ears twitching only slightly every time Daisy knocked down the pile of bricks with a gurgle of delight.
    With a sense of deep contentment, Peggy lit a Park Drive cigarette and sat down at the table, glad for a moment’s respite before everyone came home for tea. She let her gaze drift to the mantelpiece over the range where she kept the framed photographs of her loved ones amidst the clutter of ration books, discarded lists and old bills.
    There was Jim, so handsome in his REME uniform as he smiled back at her; and her two young sons, arm in arm in the back garden, mischief in their cheeky grins. Her spirits faltered somewhat as she looked at the photograph of her eldest daughter, Anne, who stood beside her husband, Wing Commander Martin Black, with their little Rose Margaret in her arms. Jim had been stationed God knew where up north, and Anne, the baby and Peggy’s two boys were down in Somerset for the duration. She felt their absence keenly, for Rose and the boys were growing up without her, Jim’s many letters couldn’t compensate for the loss of his warm and loving company, and she ached to have them all home and to be a proper family again.
    Refusing to dwell on these thoughts, she smoked her cigarette and admired the lovely studio shot of little Daisy who was now just two months away from her first birthday, and then moved on to the one of her nephew Anthony and his fiancée, Suzy, who’d been her lodger since before the war. Their wedding would be next – and as Peggy loved weddings, the thought cheered her up no end.
    She grinned at the snapshot of Cissy, her second daughter, who had just turned twenty-one and looked very trim and glamorous in her WRAF uniform. Peggy was still smiling as she looked at the photograph of her lodgers. It had been taken in the back garden with her rather battered Box Brownie early this summer when Kitty Pargeter was still living here, and it gladdened her heart to see Cordelia and the six girls so clearly happy to be together.
    Kitty’s bright smile told of her courageous determination to live life to the full after having lost part of her leg in a plane crash. Suzy was the quintessential English rose and her fellow nurse, Fran, the fiery-haired Irish imp. Rita was dark-haired and, as usual, wearing trousers and that moth-eaten WWI flying jacket, and the sisters, Jane and Sarah, were fair and pretty. They had escaped Malaya just before the fall of Singapore, and were Cordelia Finch’s great-nieces.
    Peggy fondly regarded Cordelia, who’d given up on her tangled knitting and was dozing before the fire. Cordelia was in her late seventies and this cold, wet