When the Lights Go On Again
The tide is turning, but on the home front, the battle is far from over for the Campions…Autumn 1944, the allies are invading Italy. On the home front, the Campion family are doing their bit –working tirelessly in the hope that the end of the war is now in sight.Sasha, newly engaged to Bobby has been tormented by nameless terrors ever since she was rescued from a bomb shaft. But she needs help if she is to face down her fears and look to the future.Lou, separated from her twin Sasha, is breaking the mould in her new role as a member of the Air Transport Auxiliary. But she is shaken to her core when a face from her past shows up, the devilishly handsome American GI, Kieran Mallory.Back in London Katie hopes that she is finally over Luke, the man who broke her heart, until a surprise letter from him arrives. But can they rebuild something stronger on the ashes of their love?Even though today is full of suffering and pain, there is hope that tomorrow the lights will go on again.
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When the Lights Go On Again
Annie Groves
As this is the final book in the Campion series I would like to dedicate it to all the ‘real life’ families and their descendants, who lived through WWII
Table of Contents
Late August 1943
Jean Campion was standing in her kitchen waiting for the kettle to boil. Today was her birthday. Her soft brown wavy hair had been freshly cut and set the previous day especially for the occasion, the last drops of the precious Chanel scent that her son, Luke, had brought her back from Paris the first Christmas of the war, dabbed behind her ears. Jean smoothed down the cotton fabric of her blue floral print summer dress, loose on her now after nearly four years of wartime rationing. She had bought the dress from Lewis’s in Liverpool, when her eldest daughter, Grace, had been working there, before the store had been bombed in the dreadful blitz of May 1940.
The kettle was coming up to the boil. From the front room, with the doors open into the hallway, Jean could hear the voices of her family, come to celebrate with her the birthday she shared with her twin sister, Vi. The voices of her daughters Grace and Sasha, her niece, Bella, her sisters, Vi and Francine. Female voices. Female voices because they were at war and so many men were fighting for their country – and their lives. A heartfelt sigh escaped Jean’s lips.
She was lucky, she reminded herself; many women she knew had lost sons and husbands. Luke might have been injured fighting in the desert, but at least he had recovered now, even if he had made that recovery far from home and, according to his most recent letter – which had miraculously arrived today – was about to rejoin his army unit.
She was lucky too in having the rest of her family close at hand. Grace, who was a nurse, might have moved to Whitchurch because her RAF husband, who was part of the very important and secret Y Section, had been posted there, but she too had her husband living at home with her.
Seb and Grace had come up from Whitchurch today on the train, and right now Seb and Jean’s husband, Sam, were down at Sam’s allotment, no doubt talking about the progress of the war and the recent invasion of Sicily by the Allied Forces, as well as Seb’s desire to turn part of the rambling garden attached to the cottage they were renting into a vegetable plot.
Thinking of that invasion made Jean’s heart thud with anxiety, for Luke, who was with the Eighth Army, and bound to be involved at some stage in the Allies’ push into the Italian mainland to force back the Germans and Italians.
And Luke wasn’t the only one of her children she had to worry about, Jean admitted, lifting her hand to smooth back a wayward strand of hair. There was Lou, who of all things was now learning to fly aeroplanes, if you please, having been transferred by the WAAF into something called the Air Transport Auxiliary service. And Lou’s twin, Sasha, despite having a nice steady job at the local telephone exchange and an equally nice steady fiancé working in bomb disposal, never seemed to be happy.
As she poured the boiling water onto the precious tea leaves, Jean thought how typically generous it was of her younger sister, Francine – a singer with ENSA, and recently married to a major in the army – to have brought her own rations with her for the birthday get-together.
On cue, the kitchen door opened wider to admit Francine, a rueful look of mischief sparkling in her eyes.
‘I thought I’d escape from Vi by coming to see if you needed a hand.’
Francine was by far the prettiest one of the three sisters, with her strawberry-blonde curls and her heart-shaped face. Grace had the same pretty features.
As always, Francine was beautifully dressed, in a floral silk frock. She’d had the foresight to have some new clothes made whilst she’d been posted to Egypt with ENSA. You simply couldn’t get clothes of the quality and style Fran had brought back with her in England now, not with rationing and the rules the Government had laid down for austerity clothing. Not that Jean minded having to stick by those rules, not when she knew the danger the country’s poor merchant seamen had to endure bringing raw materials into the country for the war effort.
No, she didn’t feel the lack of pretty things for herself, but she did feel it for her girls sometimes, Jean admitted, although Fran had been wonderfully generous, not just bringing a whole trousseau of clothes, including her wedding dress, back from Egypt for Grace, but also bringing lovely fabrics that she had shared with them all.
Fran pulled a face. ‘I know that it can’t be easy for Vi with Edwin having left her for someone else, but she doesn’t exactly make it easy for others to sympathise with her, does she? I’ve never heard anyone complain so much, and over next to nothing.’
