My Sweet Valentine. Annie Groves

was going to have to stand firm and refuse her permission.

      Marriage … a child … widowhood – Olive knew for herself all about the pain and loneliness that brought.

      Loneliness? She hadn’t been lonely in her widowhood. She had had her mother-in-law and father-in-law to live with and then later to care for. She had had Tilly to love and cherish. She had had a busy life and one that now, with the war and her WVS work, was even busier. Indeed, it was thanks to the WVS that she had made what was turning out to be such a good growing friendship with Audrey Windle, the vicar’s wife.

      It was a life without the kind of love that came from having a husband, though; a man to turn to, to share things with, to laugh with, to love …

      Olive could feel her face starting to burn at the dangerous direction of her private thoughts.

      Mother and daughter looked at one another, Tilly’s chin lifting with determination – which to Olive looked like defiance – before she deliberately moved closer to Drew and nestled into his side.

      Once, not so very long ago, it would have been her side that her daughter would have run to, Olive reflected.

      Standing with Drew, Tilly surveyed the scene. Whilst the Germans hadn’t managed to destroy St Paul’s, the fires resulting from the bombing raid had damaged much of the heart of the city. Those streets with their ancient religious names – Paternoster Row and Curie Street – the solid guildhalls built by its rich merchants, its learned seats of justice, all had suffered damage.

      Initially it had been the photograph in the Daily Mail of St Paul’s seeming to float above the smoke of the fires that had drawn Olive and Tilly, along with so many other Londoners, to come to see for themselves that the cathedral was indeed still standing and not just a mirage.

      In the dull light of the grey day Tilly could still see the fairer tips of Drew’s mid-brown hair, a legacy of the outdoor life at American summer camps during his growing-up years, Drew had told her. They had lived such different lives; grown up in such different circumstances. She was an only child; Drew had four sisters. She had only her mother; Drew had both his parents. But the differences between them didn’t matter. What mattered was how they felt about one another. Their love was still new enough for Tilly to feel almost giddy with a mixture of joy that they had met and horror at the unimaginable awfulness of them never having met at all.

      ‘At least Article Row has escaped being bombed,’ Drew offered comfortingly now.

      ‘Yes, thank heavens,’ Tilly agreed. She didn’t know by what good fortune her own home at number 13, and in fact the whole of Article Row, had been spared the conflagration. She was just glad that they had.

      Prior to the start of the war Article Row had been an immaculately neat-looking and well-cared-for row of houses that wound its way between closely interweaving streets. Chancery Lane lay to the west of the Row, Farringdon Road to the east, Fleet Street to the south and High Holborn and Holborn Viaduct to the north.

      The residents of Article Row still did 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 air raid, Tilly’s heart ached for those whose lives would be changed for ever. The very thought of anything happening to her Drew made her heart pound with anxiety.

      In an attempt to distract herself she asked him, ‘Will you write about this in one of your newspaper articles?’

      ‘Yes,’ he confirmed. ‘And about how brave you all are.’

      ‘You’re brave too, because you’re here with us when you don’t need to be, when you could be safe in America,’ Tilly reminded him.

      ‘No,’ Drew said softly, shaking his head. ‘There is only one place I can be, Tilly – only one place I want to be – and that is here with you.’

      ‘Oh, Drew.’

      For a few precious seconds the intensity of their love wrapped a protective coat around them that excluded everyone and everything else. Within that protection Tilly gave Drew a look of burningly passionate love that made his heart turn over – with male desire for her, yes, but also with a need to protect her from that desire.

      To distract herself from her anxiety over Tilly, Olive turned towards her friend Audrey Windle, who had stood back when Tilly and Drew had first appeared. She had seen the look on Olive’s face and guessed she was anxious about her young daughter and the handsome American reporter.

      Now as they