My Sweet Valentine Read Free

their best to keep it looking as it should, of course, especially Nancy Black, Tilly’s mother’s next-door neighbour, and the sharp-tongued busybody of the Row, but Hitler’s bombs had destroyed so much of the city that even those buildings that weren’t damaged had been afflicted by brick dust and greasy smuts, making everywhere look careworn and down at heel.
    Article Row comprised only fifty houses, built by the grateful eighteenth-century client of a firm of lawyers in the nearby Inns of Court, whose fortune had been saved by the prompt action of a young clerk articled to those lawyers. The three-storey houses curved down one side of the Row facing the rear of the ivy-clad windowless walls of the business premises that backed onto Article Row, making it something of a quietly genteel backwater, its status much prized by those residents, such as Mrs Black, to whom such things were important.
    It wouldn’t have taken much for the flames of nearby burning buildings to be driven towards Article Row, and to consume the buildings there as they had done so much else, Tilly reflected. She gave a small shiver at the thought of suffering the loss of her home. She knew how much number 13 meant to her mother. There was something special about Article Row and the small close-knit community who lived there. Tilly felt even more fond of it now, with Drew living there as well, lodging as he did with one of the neighbours, Ian Simpson. Ian’s wife and their children had evacuated to the country at the start of the war. Ian was a print setter, working for the Daily Express on nearby Fleet Street, which was how he had originally come to meet Drew.

    This new bombing raid on the city was a dreadful end to a dreadful year, and by all accounts they had an even bleaker new year ahead of them as wartime hardship bit ever deeper into their lives.
    It had been trying to snow slightly on and off all day, forlorn white flakes outnumbered by the soot and cinders still raining down from the sky. Now one of them landed on Tilly’s face to lie there for a second before it was washed away by the tears she barely knew she was weeping.
    ‘That’s right, missie, if they’d hit St Paul’s it would have taken the heart out of everyone in London, and not just the city itself,’ said an elderly man emotionally, leaning heavily on his walking, stick, medals from another war barely gleaming on his chest in the grey late afternoon light.
    It was that kind of day: the kind when complete strangers spoke and turned to one another in comfort and in hope that somehow, like St Paul’s itself, they would be saved – delivered from the awfulness of war.
    A heavy pall of smoke and the darkening sky combined to create the illusion that even those buildings still standing were as fragile as cardboard, shifting on every shocked breath of the onlookers. Watchers and workers alike were pulling scarves up round their noses and mouths to block out the raw throat-burning smell and taste of smoke-filled air.
    ‘I shall never forget this as long as I live,’ Tilly told Drew. ‘And not just the way everything looks, but the awful, acrid, destructive smell too. I’ll remember it for ever. First Coventry’s cathedral and now this. Do you think Hitler is deliberately targeting our cathedrals?’

    ‘I think he’s getting desperate enough to know that the only way he’s going to win this war is to destroy the spirit of the British people,’ Drew told her, his arm  tightening round her when she moved closer to him.
    Tilly reached up to touch the chain hidden beneath her plum-coloured polo-necked sweater, from which hung the ring Dew had secretly given her on Christmas Eve – Drew’s own graduation ring from his American university. She might only be eighteen, Tilly thought rebelliously as she felt the comforting weight of Drew’s ring against her skin, but the war meant that people her age were growing up fast. Surveying the full horror of the aftermath of the