If there was any sun at all, as there was this bright February morning, the lawn still white with frosted spikes, but the sky a perfect blue, then the warmest place in the whole house was the conservatory, the glass-roofed extension to the kitchen, the joy of every woman Emily had ever known live in Rathdrum.

Even without lighting the tiny oil burning bowl-fire which Alex had made to keep the temperature just above freezing point on very cold nights, it was often warm enough on a sunny winter morning to sit with a rug round one’s knees and write letters, provided you got up and kept busy in between.

This morning, the last Monday of the short month, Emily collected up her materials from the bureau in the dim, shadowy sitting-room, walked back through the bright, cold kitchen and stepped gratefully into the scent of geranium leaves lying on the sun-warmed air.

All around her, their vibrant blooms stretched up and above the canopy of their rich green leaves. She smiled as she wound the rug round her knees, sat down, and immediately thought of the day, years and years ago, when Rose Hamilton had brought her in from the kitchen, presented her with a sharp knife and shown her how to take cuttings, so that a favourite plant would never grow old and die.

Looking round, she was sure some of these plants were descendants of those very cuttings. The bright red and the purple most certainly were, for it was those colours she herself had first carried away to tend on a windowsill in the kitchen of her uncle’s farm at the foot of the hill.

Rose would be pleased to see how prolific these plants were and delighted by the new shades and varieties she herself had added over the years. There was now a tradition that Rathdrum had to have its collection maintained and developed. Alex had no skill whatever as a gardener, but even he had once brought a carefully-wrapped addition back from a machine-buying visit to Manchester. He’d seen it in a flower shop, noted its variegated leaf, and bought it because he was sure there wasn’t one like it at Rathdrum.

Sarah Hadleigh had come to gardening late and always insisted she had no talent for it, till she was left alone in the house after Hugh died and discovered the comfort growing things could bring. Whenever she’d visited before the war, she’d always brought a cutting or two. Not many conservatories could boast blooms whose originals came from Paris, Berlin or Leningrad.

Emily sighed and looked around again, reluctant to begin. At least there was some good news. The Germans had finally surrendered at Stalingrad and Chris Hicks had told them there had been big American victories at sea in the South Pacific. Of course, it mattered terribly. Without battles on land and sea and bombing raids to knock out German industry, the war could not be won, but sitting here on a quiet Monday morning faced with the letters she needed to write, she found no help in any of these world-changing events.

‘Come on, Emily. There’s no use putting it off,’ she said aloud.

She inscribed the address, added the date, 22nd, February, 1943 and began.

My dear Cathy,

I’m so sorry you and Brian have been having such a worrying and unhappy time. A miscarriage, however well handled by midwife or doctors, is still a very upsetting event.

Yes, I did miscarry twice before you were born, but I had the great advantage of having your Granny Rose to help me at the time and afterwards. She herself had miscarried twice, the second time at quite an advanced stage. It meant that the third time she was expecting both she and Granda Hamilton were very anxious indeed.

What she told me and what I’ve now found out from many other women that I’ve met or read about is that an initial miscarriage is very common. Doctors don’t tell women that because they think it would upset them, but I think they are quite wrong. Richard Stewart has always insisted that an initial miscarriage is nature’s way of correcting a mistake, and most women who have miscarried, once, twice, or even three times, will go on and have a perfectly normal birth subsequently.

I think you would be very wise to wait as you had planned till the war is over, but please don’t be anxious that this upset is other than an upset. Do try to put it behind you.

It must be very trying indeed living in digs with so little privacy. There is nothing worse than not being able to get a proper night’s sleep. Bad enough if there is a raid or even a false alarm, but to be kept awake by other people’s inconsiderate noise-making is just dreadful.

That may well be why you are feeling so low. I know I am a real cross patch if I can’t get my sleep. Quiet is never a problem here as you well know, but I often find myself unable to get to sleep at times and I certainly suffer for it the next day.

I’m so glad you’ve joined the WVS. You will meet all sorts of very different women in that organisation, so I’m told. Hopefully you will make some friends. It is hard for you as you say to keep up friendships with everyone moving around all the time but at least the WVS don’t get posted.

Yes, I have had a letter from Johnny, very lively and happy, but I’ve not had anything from Lizzie since Christmas except a short note saying how busy she has been. The postmark had been obliterated by the censor, but I take it she is nearer to you than to us.

I’d be very grateful to have news of her if you can tell us anything without breaking confidence. As I’ve already told you, she seems quite incensed by Jane’s newfound happiness. I can’t give you details in a letter, but your father and I are quite satisfied that Jane knows what she is doing and there is no objection to her choice in the longer term.

What can be upsetting Lizzie so much?

Now, my dear, my legs are getting cold despite the rug. I am in the conservatory and the sun is bright, but I’ve been sitting too long.

Do take care of yourself and Brian and write when you can.

Your father is well, if overworked, and sends his love with mine.

She re-read the letter, added her signature with hugs and kisses and thought of her daughter in a gloomy bed-sitter backing on to the railway line out of Euston.

No wonder she was feeling depressed and lonely. But there wasn’t much one could do to help. The trouble was that the more down you were and the less you felt like making an effort, the more that was precisely what you needed to do.

Cathy was not lazy, but she did expect things to go right for her, while in the same situation Lizzie would be busy working out exactly what she was going to do and Jane would already be setting off, following her intuitions, which almost always led her in the right direction.

She wondered what she would say about Johnny if she were adding him to that perspective on his sisters. Over the last months, he had surprised her so many times. Even over Ritchie’s death he had not reacted as she might have expected.

It wasn’t that he was unmoved. On his one brief visit home mid-way through training, he’d said he never expected to have a friend again that would be so close and so utterly reliable. But he had also said that Ritchie ‘knew the score’. They had both known that the accident rate in pilot training was very high and that neither of them might actually make it to the frontline. But that was just the way it was.

Emily tried to think how she’d felt about death when she was eighteen, but nothing of any value came to her. Even though her mother had been in her thirties when she’d died and her father not much older when he was drowned, their deaths had still seemed to her utterly remote, something she could make no real relationship to at eighteen.

The most vigorous job she could think off was brushing the stair carpet with a stiff brush to raise the pile, clearing up the mess with a dustpan and a soft brush as she descended and wiping the parts of the treads not covered by the carpet with a damp duster. The vacuum cleaner Alex had bought for them just before the war did a good job lifting crumbs and fluff on the sitting-room and bedroom carpets and the rugs on the woodblock floor in the hall, but it was useless on stairs and it did nothing for trampled pile. Sometimes the old-fashioned methods did work rather better however uncomfortable they might be.

She was half-way down the stairs and was just beginning to cough because of the dust and fluff, when she heard the Austin sweep down the avenue and round to the back door.

‘Any chance of a pot of tea?’ Alex enquired brightly.

Rather too brightly, she thought, as she reached for the electric kettle, her pleasure at seeing him offset by her immediate feeling that all was not well.

‘Have you had your sandwiches?’

‘No, not yet,’ he replied, producing his lunch box from under his arm, ‘I thought you might be having one yourself.’

‘Hadn’t got to it yet, but I can make mine while the kettle boils.’

She broke off.

‘Alex, what’s wrong?’ she asked abruptly. ‘I can see you’re all right and that helps, but something is wrong.’

He nodded. Tight-lipped.

‘Could be worse,’ he admitted, as he watched her add slivers of cheese to buttered bread, press the slices together and cut the result into neat triangles.

He stepped into the conservatory, sniffed the air, and lit the paraffin stove kept there for heating the hall when the house began to feel damp as well as chill.

‘You haven’t been down for the milk, have you?’ he asked quietly, as they sat down together.

‘No, but I’ve got plenty of milk from yesterday if you’d like some.’

‘Tea’s fine. I just wanted to be sure you hadn’t been talking to Mary Cook.’

She put down the sandwich she’d just picked up and looked at him sharply.

‘Alex, will you just tell me what’s wrong before we go any further.’

‘There were a series of bombs at Millbrook,’ he began. ‘One went off in the engine house and caused a fire. Two were placed in the main work areas. Two more were placed under the main staircases and timed to go off five minutes after the others when people were trying to get out. No amateur job like Ballievy.’

‘Alex,’ she exclaimed. ‘What happened? Were many hurt? Don’t tell me anyone was killed.’

‘We were lucky,’ he said reassuringly. ‘We could have lost quite a few, including Robert Anderson, if he hadn’t been so sharp. He went into the engine house on a routine check and saw something on the floor. It was only a tiny, wee scrap of paper, but it shouldn’t have been there. He was sure that floor was spotless at the end of maintenance last evening and none of the night watchmen would have dropped anything on their inspections. When he listened he could hear something too. He ran over to my office and we phoned the police and the army bomb disposal. But the engine-house went up while we were phoning.

‘Oh Alex,’ she gasped, catching a hand to her mouth. ‘What did you do then?’

‘Got everybody out of the mill. That went very well. Broke our own best record,’ he added with a little smile. ‘Everybody thought it was the usual fire-drill till they got outside and smelt the smoke and heard our fire-engine coming round from the back. Then the police and army arrived and went all over the building.’

‘But they could have been killed too,’ she protested.

‘They could, but that’s their job and they did seem to know what they were looking for and where to look. They found all four devices, as they call them, and made them safe. In fact, there is some good news. They think they know who’s behind it. But that is absolutely confidential,’ he warned, raising his eyebrows. ‘Apparently, if you’re an expert in this sort of thing you can tell by the way a device is made who actually made it. They even questioned Robert in detail about that wee bit of paper and said he’d been a great help.’

‘Is Robert all right?’

‘Right as rain, as the saying is.’

‘Maybe it hasn’t hit him yet,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘If he’d gone in there a bit later he’d have been killed and you might not have known it was a bomb, so you wouldn’t have cleared the mill …’

‘Now, Emily, don’t think what might have happened,’ he said, pausing to demolish a sandwich. ‘Just be grateful for good people like Robert,’ he went on, reaching for his mug of tea. ‘He deserves a medal and I’ll certainly be putting it to the other Directors that he’s saved more than a few lives and weeks of production.’

‘But what about the engine house?’

‘That’s not as big a problem as structural damage to the mill would have been, given our American friends up the road. Don’t forget we have the auxiliaries we’ve been using when we run three shifts in twenty-four hours, but we might be able to use electricity from the grid instead of generating our own for the time being. I’ll be asking Chris what he thinks when I see him,’ he continued as he mopped up the last sandwich. ‘I’ve spoken to him on the phone, but we can do nothing till the police and the army finish their work. I’m heartily glad security is not my job, for there’ll have to be changes at all the mills after this. We just have to find out why, when the mill was working and there were two night watchmen with dogs outside, it wasn’t enough.

‘Have to go, love,’ he said finishing his tea in a long swallow and standing up, the familiar lines of concentration now marked upon his face after the brief respite. ‘Let me know tonight what version you get from Mary Cook when you go down for the milk.’

‘Thanks for coming up, Alex,’ she said, walking out to the car with him. ‘I try not to worry, but you know I do. Do you think all women are the same?’

‘Can’t say. Never paid any attention to any of them bar you and the girls,’ he replied, his face breaking into a great, beaming smile.

There was another cup of tea in the pot and she was glad to sit down again and drink it as she went over again all Alex had told her. She thought of Robert Anderson’s wife and their three young children and of all the wives and mothers working on the spinning floors.

Given there was so much to give thanks for, why did the grim possibilities come to her so easily? Why did she always see the potential for loss and despair?

She wondered what Rose Hamilton would have said if she’d put the question to her. As a girl and young woman it was to her she’d always turned when troubled or confused. Her aunt was a kind and good-natured woman who had given her a home without question, but she was not a thoughtful person and was always uneasy if she should ask a question that didn’t have a known and practical answer.

As she sat, the quiet and warmth soothing her, she remembered some of the things Rose said most often. She had come to the conclusion that some of our earliest experiences left us vulnerable to what happened to us later in life. After what had happened when her own family were evicted, she confessed she’d always feared being homeless, though in fact on the one occasion when it did happen, she’d coped quite well.

Maybe, if Rose were here, she would remind her that she’d lost both her father and her mother and with them the homes and life of her childhood. Her father had been a sudden loss, hitting his head as he was swept overboard from the lifeboat during a rescue, so that he was unconscious as he struck the water. With a heavy sea running the attempts to save him didn’t stand a chance.

Though a delicate woman herself, her mother had coped for a time, then she’d lost heart and became ill. Emily and her sister had looked after her for months, knowing all the while she’d given up and had no real wish to live.

‘That’s one answer for you, Emily’, she said aloud, as she finished the last tepid mouthful of tea.

Rose would certainly tell her she’d got to keep up the will to live, whatever the circumstances. Hope was necessary, not just for her own sake, but for her family. She needed to think what her loss might mean to her children. She’d been fortunate in the new home her aunt gave her, but that might not have been so. The loss of her mother could have brought loneliness and misfortune when she was still too young to have the experience or maturity to cope with it.

She sat for a little longer watching the sun begin its descent on the short winter day, and then, thinking it a pity not to make use of the warmth from the stove, she decided against finishing the work on the stairs and turned back to the small sheaf of letters she’d hoped to reply to in the course of the day. She sorted them out into a new pile and picked out a large, heavy envelope postmarked Dublin. It contained a letter and a manuscript. The letter she’d read back in January, but the wedge of flimsy sheets of a carbon copy with its somewhat erratic blue print she had yet to read.

The letter itself was from Brendan, a vigorous scrawl on invoice paper, all he’d had to hand on a cold, January day when no one appeared to be interested in buying books.

She began to re-read it, remembering with pleasure his reference back to their meeting of last April. Of the rest of the letter, she had only the vaguest idea, for it had arrived along with the news of Cathy’s sudden collapse and Brian’s desperate attempts to get back to Cheshire to see her. She had set it aside to re-read later. Only now did she realize how much later.

Emily put the letter down, smiled and realised that she really must not read in the fading light without her spectacles. She fetched them from the sitting-room, and sat down again, reluctant to switch on the electric light till the last possible moment.

The sky was a pale yellow on the horizon, shading into blue if she looked up into the arch overhead and was completely cloudless. There would most certainly be frost tonight. When she moved the paraffin stove into the hall at dusk she’d have to leave the little bowl-fire lit for the geraniums.

‘They’d get a shock if I didn’t,’ she thought to herself, as she settled back to Brendan’s letter again.

Now, you will remember that only weeks after our meeting, I came across a box containing a correspondence with a gentleman named Andrew Doyle who it seems was commissioned in 1875 to investigate the whole question of child emigration to Canada.

It is, of course, a rather curious thing to have only one side of an on-going correspondence, but it certainly stimulated my interest in a subject of which I knew nothing. A strange thing to say, from one whose own country has poured streams of people across all the oceans of the world to populate some of the remotest corners of the globe.

Naturally, 1875 is some twenty years before our good Alex was despatched, but it seems that the general situation of emigrant children was established by this time and despite ‘the highly critical report’ which my correspondent refers to when commenting on Andrew Doyle’s activity, later letters show that, while some changes were made in an attempt to improve the situation of the children, the abuses which Andrew Doyle outlined were only partly addressed and only in some areas.

None of this, my dear Emily, would appear to tell us anything about Alex that we didn’t already know, but by an even stranger coincidence than acquiring the box of letters, when I mentioned the subject to my much older friend and partner, Sean Henessey, I found I had started a deluge.

To begin with, a relative of his was active in the founding of the Fairbridge Child Emigration Society of 1909. He overwhelmed me with facts and figures, though the only one I can at present remember is 100,000. That was the number of children sent to Canada alone between 1869 and 1935. When you add on America, Australia and New Zealand, the exodus of the Irish Famine seems to shrink before one’s very eyes.

However, I digress. Sean is delighted by your interest in his subject and has copied out the most relevant parts of a book he is currently researching on the subject of child emigrants and the people who were responsible for despatching them. It may well be that your sharp eyes will pick out something in the text that I have missed, a hint that might lead us forward in discovering Alex’s past.

What Sean assures me is that copious records do exist. After 1865, it was obligatory for ships to have manifests that recorded all passengers, including escorted groups of children. He himself has obtained copies of some passenger lists as illustrations for the points he is making, so, with patience and time, we might well be able to find one Alexander Hamilton. If we did, Sean assures me, we would also find his age, destination, place of future residence or employment, together with his place of origin and his sponsoring organization.

I am quite overwhelmed by this impressive bureaucracy which I myself would have thought entirely an innovation of the twentieth century.

Good luck with your researches. I shall continue my random pursuits here in the brightly-lit capital where some Northerners at least come to find food, drink and solace from the woes of war. I do hope you and yours fare well. At least it looks as if we ‘neutrals’ are not now to be invaded by our current enemy or our traditional one, apart, of course, from local excursions back and forth across the border where the smuggling of everything from milk cattle to packets of Rinso at least provides some entertainment amid the gloomy realities of the time.

My loving good wishes to both you and Alex and my greetings to all the members of my extended family.

Brendan.

Hungry, dirty and ill-treated children were nothing new to Emily. She was old enough to remember the crowded cabins in Galway, followed by those of Ballyshannon, Derry and Donaghadee, the ports where her father had served, and she knew that she and her sister were fortunate to have beds to sleep in, food to eat, and parents who neither drank nor abused them. But reading about the gangs of street children in London and the big cities of England who survived by stealing, the children beaten to death by harsh masters or left to die when they became ill, deeply shocked her. She had known it was bad, but had never imagined it was quite as bad as this.

Sean Hennessy had begun his work with an account of two women, Maria Rye and Annie McPherson, each driven by a fierce commitment to remove children from the destitution in which they were found, but even more from the moral corruption which they perceived. Following the stories of both women, Emily found herself admiring the zeal with which they pursued their objectives, but wondered if they looked at the children themselves.

It came as an even greater shock to discover that many of the children sent to ‘grow in moral strength in the unpolluted air of Canada’ were not orphans at all, but children of poor parents who could not afford to feed them and had been forced in despair to bring them to the workhouse.

As Sean Hennessy pointed out, it was easy to show how unfortunate the circumstances of these children were, but what was not pointed out was what the ‘bright, new open-air life’ might actually mean for a child adjusted to the city streets, to poverty and to the company of its own people.

The more Emily read of the true situation of many of the emigrants, the more she agreed with Brendan’s Andrew Doyle. After 11,000 miles travelling round Canada to see what had happened to at least some of those sent out, no wonder his criticisms were so severe. Children as young as one year old carried off from the ship at Quebec by unknown people, boys and girls from the same family separated by the width of Canada, girls abused and then returned pregnant and in disgrace to the orphanage for punishment …

Emily had to stop. She could not bear to think of what the reality had been behind all the pious words, the fund-raising, the support by members of the government and the aristocracy. Children raised to be slaves, badly fed, badly housed, but expected to be grateful for this new life an ocean away from any familiar face or well known place.

No wonder Alex had never talked about what had happened to him. Apart from the story about him going in a ship across a grey sea with a label on his coat collar that irritated him, in all their years together she had gleaned from him only the merest fragments.

He’d spoken of a woman who was kind to him, a young woman with an old husband. He used to bring her flowers from the meadow or the riverbank, but he had to be careful not to get caught in the little garden where she used to sit. If he was, he’d be beaten and sent back to his work, or kept working half the night when his companions were let go to their beds in the straw.

The light had gone now and Emily could read no more without putting on the light. But still she didn’t move. He must have been five or six when he went to Canada, but by the time he was eight he was speaking French and had ‘forgotten’ his English. And then he had learnt German. And where exactly was this place called German Township where he had met Sam McGinley?

She gathered up the letters, the blue carbon copy of Sean’s manuscript and Brendan’s letter, stepped back into the kitchen and laid them on the table. She drew the blind, pulled across the blackout and switched on the light. As it spilt down on the bare, scrubbed table, she saw that Brendan had added a P.S. to his letter on a separate sheet which she hadn’t seen.

She took it up and read it twice through in quick succession, not able to grasp it the first time.

He said that it was possible the label Alex wore was not actually his name, but his Christian name and his destination i.e. Alex to Hamilton. (Hamilton, Ontario).

She paused, put the paper down and thought about it. Given all she’d read about the collecting and the despatching, it was a real possibility.