‘I called in at the Salvage Depot to see Dad on my way over here, and he was telling me that you’re going to have some girl billeted on you.’
Jean Campion looked up from her annual task of anxiously working out if the Christmas turkey she had ordered that morning from St John’s Market was going to be too big for her gas oven, to look at her son, her hazel eyes warm with maternal love.
She loved all four of her children, but Luke was the eldest, tall and dark-haired, like his dad, Sam, and her only son – a man now, not a boy any longer, with the experience of Dunkirk behind him and a year in the army.
‘Yes, that’s right.’ Jean pushed her still brown hair back off her face, her cheeks flushed a soft pink from her exertions.
The kitchen was the heart of the Campion family’s home. Modestly sized but warmly furnished with all the love that Jean and Sam gave their family, it shone with the pride Jean took in her home.
Her kitchen was her pride and joy, newly refurbished the year before the war had started. A gas geyser on the wall next to the sink provided Jean with hot water for all her domestic tasks, and was ‘extra’ to the electric immersion heater upstairs in its own cupboard next to the bathroom. She and Sam had distempered the walls themselves, painting them a cheerful shade of yellow that made Jean feel as though the sun was shining even when it wasn’t.
Sam had got the well-polished linoleum cheap from a salvage job he’d been on, and had fitted it himself, in the bathroom as well as the kitchen, and Jean kept it as shiny and as spotless as her pots and pans.
Jean was a careful housewife and she’d been thrilled when she’d spotted the remnant of yellow fabric with its red strawberry pattern on it, which she’d bought for the kitchen curtains.
The big family oak table had come from a second-hand shop, and Jean and Sam had reupholstered the chairs themselves.
‘She’s supposed to be arriving this evening, but you know what the trains are like. Your dad wasn’t keen on us taking someone in but, like I said to him, it’s our duty really. We’ve got two spare rooms now, after all, with you in the army and based at Seacombe, and Grace training to be a nurse and living in at the hospital, and only me and your dad and the twins here. Mind you, your dad said straight out that it would have to be a woman, on account of Lou and Sasha.’
The mention of his fifteen-year-old twin sisters made Luke smile.
‘Well, I hope whoever she is that she likes jitterbug music,’ he told his mother.