I didn’t celebrate VE Day – my husband and thousands more were still fighting out east. I told them that when they wanted me to string up bunting for the celebrations. I stuck out my flags for VJ Day when most of the street didn’t bother. With the war over I did my patriotic duty – got myself looking as good as I could. Begged some stockings from Bloom’s. Scrubbed the house on my hands and knees, poking into corners that hadn’t seen a human face since it all began. Another neighbour Mrs Smith, or Blanche as she liked me to call her then, was waiting too. Her husband was on his way back from somewhere called Rangoon. We were friends at that time. She’d hug me excitedly, ‘It won’t be long now, Queenie. His ship’s arrived.’ Gave me the last of an old pot of rouge she had. Not quite my colour but I took it. ‘All the girls can talk about is their daddy coming home,’ she’d tell me, popping round on some errand or other. And she’d ask me, ‘Have you heard anything of Bernard yet?’ After the umpteenth time I took to saying no before she’d even opened her mouth. I watched her husband Morris turn up. She ran into his arms like they were in some soppy film. And they kissed in that same way right there on the street, him bending her back like Gable and Leigh. Crikey, I thought, I hope Bernard won’t want kissing like that.

Blanche’s two little daughters stood watching their mum and dad. Little mites looked scared to death when this strange man held out his arms to them and said, ‘Come and give Daddy a kiss.’ Both ran into the house screaming.

‘It won’t be long now, Queenie, you’ll see. Then you can get on with the rest of your life. Put this beastly war behind you,’ Blanche assured me.

But two years went by and no Bernard or any word from him. All the men had come home. They were back walking round the streets, chatting in pubs, courting on park benches, riding on buses, taking all the blinking seats on the tube. The War Office swore blind they’d returned Bernard. I made an appointment to see them and a self-important little man stared at me with pity in his eyes. He’s left you, missus, he’s left you, his look said. But they didn’t know Bernard Bligh. He wouldn’t do anything half so interesting.

Blanche wondered if maybe he’d got a bang on the head – forgotten who and what he was. Perhaps he was wandering forlornly around the country looking for a home. A man up the road said he was sure he’d spotted Bernard driving a bus in Glasgow. I’d prepared to go up to Scotland – travel as many omnibuses as I could. But then my brother Harry said not to bother because a friend of his had spotted Bernard sipping beer in a bar in Berlin. And Mr Todd turned up a grainy photograph of a group of harriers walking the Derbyshire peaks. He pointed to a man in the background saying, ‘That’s Bernard, Mrs Bligh or my name’s not Cyril.’ Frankly, the photograph was so bad it could have been anyone – even Cyril Todd himself. Then a fellow arrived – rode up to the house on a filthy motorbike that backfired twice nearly killing several fainthearts. Said he knew Bernard from Blackpool where they’d trained together, but he hadn’t seen him since his posting. Became all flustered when I said I knew nothing about Bernard Bligh’s whereabouts. But he still managed to drink three cups of tea and eat the same amount of currant buns before he rose from his seat saying, ‘I’d better be off now, Dotty,’ and left, puffing foul black smoke from his disgusting machine.

It was Harry who suggested I start proceedings to have Bernard officially declared dead. ‘What if he’s not?’ I asked him.

‘Then it’ll flush him out of his hiding-place,’ he’d said.

I was still young and I had a life to get on with. But I wasn’t ready for that. So when Gilbert turned up at my door I thought, I’ve got the room and I need the money. I took him in because I knew Bernard would never have let me. And if Bernard had something to say about it he’d have to come back to say it to my face.

‘How can you think of being a woman alone in a house with coloureds?’ Blanche said. She warned me that they had different ways from us and knew nothing of manners. They washed in oil and smelt foul of it. Sent her husband round to reason with me because he knew all about blacks. Morris blushed scarlet telling me of their animal desires. ‘And that’s both the men and the women, Mrs Bligh.’ I was to watch out, keep my door locked. ‘You’ll never understand, let alone believe, a word that any of those worthless people say to you,’ he cautioned.

Memories around here might be very short but mine wasn’t. I’d known Gilbert during the war. He was in the RAF. A boy in blue fighting for this country just like Bernard and the blushing Morris. No one else would take him in. I was a little put out when some of Gilbert’s friends, fresh off a boat, came begging. I didn’t want invading. But he vouched for them. Winston was all right but that brother of his . . . Coming down to my flat with excuses so flimsy I could see daydreams in them. Nosing around. Eyeing up my legs even when I was looking straight at him. Animal, like Morris warned. I told Gilbert I didn’t like him and Gilbert told him to go. He left like a scolded dog without any fuss. At least I think he went – he and his brother being so alike.

But Blanche, or Mrs Smith as she now wanted me to call her, put her house up for sale. Furious with me. Told me it wasn’t so much her as her husband. ‘This is not what he wanted, Mrs Bligh. He’s just back from fighting a war and now this country no longer feels his own.’ What was it all for? That’s what it left Morris wondering. And she told me she had her two little girls’ welfare to think of. Gilbert raised his hat to her one morning. She rushed into her house like he’d just exposed himself. Out came Morris who stood on the doorstep to protect her honour. And Gilbert had only said hello. After that she never spoke to me again – crossed the street to avoid walking in my path. She sobbed as the removers shifted her out.

‘That house had been in her family for generations. Her mother, her grandfather, his father,’ Mr Todd told me. Forced out, she felt. All those coons eyeing her and her daughters up every time they walked down their own street. Hitler invading couldn’t have been any worse, she declared. Moved to a semi-detached house in Bromley. Never even said goodbye to me. People were talking about me, that’s what Mr Todd told me. Friendly and smiling like he was only telling it for my own good. People were wondering if I was quite as respectable as they once thought.

‘They’re only lodgers,’ I told him.

‘But these darkies bring down a neighbourhood, Mrs Bligh. The government should never have let them in. We’ll have a devil of a time getting rid of them now,’ he said.

So here is Mr Todd once more standing on my doorstep, wanting to talk to me about my paying guests. I thought he’d come to complain about the racket they’d made taking in that blinking trunk.

‘Right,’ I said. ‘What is it now?’

‘My sister had a very unfortunate incident today . . .’ he starts.

I would have invited him in but I knew he wouldn’t dare step inside.

‘Oh, yes?’ I said.

Turns out she’d been walking along the pavement. It was raining and she’d got her umbrella up. It was crowded up near the butcher’s at closing time. She’s walking along when two darkie women start coming towards her. Walking side by side. Anyway, they reach her and there’s not enough pavement for all of them.

I smiled. I’d like to have seen that. I knew the type – black as filth with backsides the size of buses. Surprising they could fit on two together.

‘And the unfortunate thing is, Mrs Bligh,’ he went on, ‘that my sister was made to step off the pavement and walk into the road to get by them. These two had no intention of letting her pass undisturbed.’

‘Oh dear,’ I said. His point, though he was a long time making it, was that I should see to it that my coloured lodgers are quite clear that, as they are guests in this country, it should be them that step off the pavement when an English person approaches.