Her figure was slender, almost too much so, which would have pleased many girls. But they didn’t have the constant comparison with Sylvia’s ripe curves. Dee didn’t appreciate her own shape-with all the yearning of seventeen, she wanted Sylvia’s.

She wanted to be beautiful, she wanted boyfriends trailing after her, and a throaty, seductive voice. Instead, she was ‘the bright one’ and ‘pretty enough’. As though that was any comfort. Honestly! Older people just didn’t understand.

‘I wonder what this one’s like,’ her mother said, returning with a duster that she put into Dee’s hand.

No need to ask who ‘this one’ was. Yet another of Sylvia’s conquests. There were so many.

‘She’ll get a bad name, having a new young man every week,’ Helen observed.

‘But at least she’s got some choice,’ Dee observed wistfully. ‘Not like being stuck with Charlie Whatsit down the road, or the man who comes round with the pies every week.’

‘I don’t want this family being talked about,’ Helen said firmly. ‘It isn’t nice. Anyway, what about all those doctors you meet at the hospital?’

‘They don’t look at student nurses. We’re the lowest of the low.’

‘The patients, then. You wait, you’ll meet a millionaire. He’ll take one look at you and fall madly in love.’

They laughed together and Dee said, ‘Mum, you’ve been reading those romantic novels again. That’s just dreaming. Real life isn’t like that-unless you’re Sylvia, of course. I wish she’d hurry up and get here. I’m longing to see her latest.’

Sylvia worked in an elegant dress shop on the far side of London. As Christmas neared, business was booming and her hours were longer. Today she was arriving home late, along with her new young man.

Mark Sellon was a mechanic, newly out of work because his employer had lost all his money. Sylvia was bringing him home for Christmas in the hope that her father could offer him a job in the tiny garage he owned beside the house in Crimea Street. In that shabby corner of London, Joe Parsons counted as a prosperous man.