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Anne’s forehead.
    ‘No. So that’s settled,’ she smiled triumphantly.
    ‘It is not.’
    ‘You just said you didn’t want us to go, I don’t want to, and Anne certainly doesn’t.’
    ‘Jane!’ he exclaimed in exasperation.
    ‘It’s time for her feed,’ she declared, effectively closing the argument. Taking the baby from his arms she held Anne’s face close to her own for a moment, before tucking her back into her pram. Refusing to be mollified, the baby fought free from the covers. Pounding the air with her small fists she screwed her face into the wrinkled, crimson ball that generally preceded an outburst.
    ‘She was perfectly happy where she was.’ Haydn kicked the brake free on the pram.
    ‘In her father’s arms? If you have your way she’ll have to get used to doing without your cuddles.’
    ‘I’d come down to see you every chance I’d get.’
    ‘That wouldn’t be very often when you work every day.’
    ‘I’d demand a weekend off a month,’ Haydn asserted unconvincingly, glancing at his watch. He had a busy afternoon ahead of him in the studio. Requests and letters from the troops to wade through with the researchers; an ENSA tour of the North African front to plan that he hadn’t dared mention to Jane – yet; three new songs to rehearse, and that was before he even began his four-hour broadcasting stint on the Overseas Service.
    When he’d been commissioned into the army as a second lieutenant purely on the strength of his singing voice and popularity, and ‘temporarily’ assigned to the BBC’s Overseas Service, the idea of talking to the men who were actually doing the fighting had been awesome and exciting, but familiarity had long since extinguished any sense of wonder; and since Anne’s arrival even the excitement had worn off. It wasn’t that he was disenchanted with his work, rather that he was more enchanted with family life. An enchantment that must have overcome his common sense, he reflected soberly as he pushed the pram towards the spot where the park gates would have been, if they hadn’t been salvaged for scrap iron. How else could he explain to himself, or his family, why he hadn’t frogmarched his pregnant wife to Paddington and put her on the first train to Wales when France had fallen and the blitz had started in earnest.
    ‘I really want you to go this time, Jane,’ he murmured, deciding that the dripping tap principle of wearing her objections down was the best option left open to him.
    ‘We’ll talk about it.’
    He remembered the tiny corpse. ‘There’s no more talking to be done.’
    ‘Just look at your daughter. How can you bear to send her away?’
    ‘Because I love her. And her mother’s not too bad either.’ He slipped his arm around Jane’s waist as they walked past the vegetable and potato beds that had replaced last year’s geraniums. ‘I hate working afternoons, but there’s nothing I can do about it. You promise, the minute the siren sounds …’
    ‘We’ll go down the cellar. But I can’t understand why you’re so edgy, there hasn’t been a raid in weeks. Besides, you’re the one taking all the risks by travelling through London, not us. We’ll be as safe as houses, won’t we, sweetheart?’ Jane rocked the pram handle in an attempt to still Anne’s whimpering.
    Haydn glanced up at the jagged, roofless houses silhouetted against the skyline like hollowed-out, rotted teeth. He wished Jane hadn’t used the hackneyed expression. It had an ironic ring to it now that so many of London’s buildings had been reduced to rubble.
    ‘Looks like we’ve had the quietest part of the day.’ Jane said the first thing that came into her head in an attempt to divert Haydn’s attention from the subject of evacuation. The park was filling up with people on lunch breaks, the streets outside clogging with queues that snaked out of the shops; all of London seemed to be engaged in the endless quest for increasingly rare foodstuffs, preferably