glad she had been at Julia’s for the announcement. She had left the air force three years before and now lived up the road, but visited Julia’s often, as Len was still stationed in London.
‘We did it, girls!’ screamed Julia, hugging both her friends tightly. ‘We made it through.’
They all whooped with joy.
‘I couldn’t have done it without you two,’ said Julia, her voice quivering.
‘Women of endurance,’ stated Lizzie.
‘A three-strand cord,’ added Diana. ‘We all held each other together.’
‘Yes, we did,’ whispered Lizzie thoughtfully. ‘Yes, we did.’
Epilogue
Once she was demobbed, Lizzie returned to Scotland with her daughter, whom she had now officially adopted. After the bomb at the train station, the authorities had allowed Abigail to stay on with Lizzie for a while, and it wasn’t long after that, with so many orphans, that the government had relaxed their rules about who could adopt. So, she had finally become Abigail Mackenzie in the summer of 1944. Not long after Lizzie left for Scotland, Diana had moved back to Birmingham to be close to her family, with her first child, Carolyn, and her new son, whom she’d named Jack in memory of their friend. Which left only Julia in London. Reunited with her family, she continued to make a home for them all, while still having a successful career in the civil service after her time in the war rooms.
Over the years, the girls stayed the best of friends. Lizzie had never gone back to Barra but had returned to her uncle and aunt’s farm to work. She had married a salesman who came to the farm to sell animal feed, and who was devoted to both her and Abigail. Dick was so much fun and accompanied Lizzie often when she came down to London to visit. He had brought joy back into Lizzie’s world, though she confessed to her friends she always kept a tiny part of her heart just for Jack.
‘Whenever I hear Al Bowlly, I think of him,’ she confessed to them. ‘He was the best of men.’
They all agreed.
John had pulled up the Anderson shelter after the war, and in its place, he and Julia had planted a beautiful garden with hollyhocks and delphiniums, old roses and poppies. And every year on Julia’s birthday, all the girls would meet up again in London to celebrate not only Julia turning a year older, but that birthday of hers at the end of the Blitz when their relationship had been truly cemented.
And on those days after they’d had cake and talked and caught up with each of their lives, the three women would walk outside where John would put out three chairs for them in the garden. And they would sit in the place where the bomb shelter had been that was now a place of peace and beauty. They would sit there with their glasses of wine and talk about their time during the war. Talk about their bond of friendship, the people they’d lost, the people they’d loved, and the people they’d become.
Then they would look up at the sky above them, peaceful and endless, sometimes with a full moon. And they would remember the nine months of the London Blitz, especially those first fifty-six out of fifty-seven days, from 7 September until 3 November 1940, when they were under attack every single night, and tens of thousands of bombs were dropped out of the same sky. They had lived every night in fear, the fear of death, the fear of losing loved ones and the fear of emerging into a world of unknowns. Then when the stories were told and the healing continued they would make a toast, to the British spirit, their own bond of friendship and the hope of a peaceful tomorrow which had been forged in that fire. Then they would thank God for the beauty and the quiet that now surrounded them, vowing never to take it for granted, and then they would pray that what they had lived through would never happen again.
‘We have to keep these stories alive,’ vowed Lizzie as they held up their glasses in a toast one year. ‘The world must never forget, otherwise the same mistakes will happen all over again.’ The girls nodded their agreement.
They carried on this tradition until they died, Lizzie being the last one to go. She came down to visit John and his growing family of grandchildren one last time on Julia’s birthday when Julia would have turned ninety. Lizzie sat