This was all done in silence so as not to wake the drunken man who was quietly snoring on the settee in the small parlour nearby.

Lily smiled at her mother but they both knew it meant nothing, these were two people who had realised that there was no real connection between them many years before.

Lily knew that she looked like her mother. They had the same thick hair and the same grey eyes, their builds were similar enough for people to mistake them for each other from the rear, and they were both blessed with a fantastic bone structure that belied her mother's advancing years, and reassured her daughter that her looks were probably going to last a lot longer than the majority of her friends. But other than that, they were as different in temperament as a dog and a cat.

They had only one thing in common and that was a hatred for the man who ruled their lives, and who terrorised their every waking moment.

Mick Diamond was not her father and she thanked God for that every day of her life, but he had married her mother when she was already pregnant with another man's child, made her respectable and then waited for the children of his own that had never arrived. Consequently, she had not only been resented by him, but also been a constant reminder that it was his fault there were no sons around his table, no children to look to in his old age and no other wages available to assuage his unhappiness by providing him with the alcohol he so desperately craved.

His name would live on through a bastard, through someone else's child. The fact she existed was proof positive that the blame for his wife's childless state must lie with him.

Lily had grown up in a household devoid of any kind of love, or any kind of normality. She had learned at an early age that keeping quiet, staying in the background and trying to be as invisible as possible, was the only way she could hope to survive.

She was a constant reminder to her mother of her shame and a constant reminder to her stepfather of his inability to sire any children of his own. By five, she was a diplomat, already understanding the need to keep both these unstable people happy by not ever making any noise, never demanding their time and most importantly, never bringing any attention to either them or herself from anyone outside their scuffed and well-worn front door.

Now, as a wage earner, she had gained a certain grudging respect, but it had been a long time coming. At fifteen, she understood her life better than people three times her age; she needed to keep the peace until she had enough money to set up on her own, or marry herself out of it all.

As Lily ate, she felt the oppressive atmosphere that always pervaded her home, and she swallowed quickly and quietly as she always had.

Meals were not something to be enjoyed in this house, they were just a necessary part of life, and the social element of eating had never been made apparent to her until she had gone to friends' homes. Seeing them eating leisurely whilst talking about their day or about what was in the newspaper, she had felt as if she was experiencing a revelation not unlike those of St John the Divine.

Until work had claimed her, she had never played outside her house, had never interacted with anyone, at school or otherwise, and she had never realised that her home life was so different to everyone else's.

At school she had been timid, and she had not made friends because her mother and stepfather had never seemed to make any friends either. It was a social skill she had only procured for herself since work had opened her eyes to a world she had never known existed.

At school she had been ridiculed, because of her clothes, her shyness and her terror of mixing with the other children. Her fear of them had given them all the power, but her greatest fear had been of bringing any kind of intrusion into the house she had been brought up in. The fear of someone knocking on the front door for her had caused her to almost faint with fright. Her loneliness had been so acute it had made her ache inside as if she were suffering from some kind of physical illness. Even the most hardened nun had been, to her, a contact with someone other than her parents, and she had relished even the wicked onslaughts of their tongues because at least someone was acknowledging that she existed.

Being part of a crowd was something she now understood, in fact now needed, and more than anything else, it was something she knew was actually keeping her sane. The 'you never had it so good' era had come and gone without anyone in her household mentioning it. But then again, apparently her mother and granny had sat under the kitchen table or in the Anderson shelter in the small backyard and had not once made any kind of comment about the Germans, the war or Hitler himself; they were proud of that fact.

Nothing of note had ever been addressed in this house; it was as if the outside world didn't exist for them. Her granny had died suddenly one night and her mother had hardly mentioned it; she had been slid out of the front door in a wooden box and it had been just another day to them. But at least Lily's burden had been eased a little; her fatherless state had never failed to be mentioned at every available opportunity by her granny, so it was with relief that she mourned her passing.

Lily was scared, all the time she was terrified, but she had never really known what of. It was jumbled inside her head and as no one ever addressed her unless absolutely necessary, it had stayed there.

Her fear had been ignored in the same way she had, and not once had anyone tried to still the terrified beating of her heart, or explain to her that it would all be over soon. It was only at school, when she had eavesdropped on other kids' conversations, that she had an inkling of what other people's lives were about.

Now, the need to escape these people was all-encompassing, the need to cut herself off from them was so overpowering she wondered how they could not hear her thoughts, so loud were they at times, and so vicious, she was frightened of what she might be capable of doing to the pair of them while they slept.

Her mother cleared her plate away and refilled her cup without once speaking to her, and, as always, Lily took her cup of tea up to her tiny bedroom, undressed herself in the dark and lay down in the cold bed to sleep. She was shivering from the cold, and from her deep-seated fear of having to live a broken and lonely life like this for the rest of her days. So stunted were her emotions, though, that even now, at her lowest ebb, it did not occur to her to cry.

Crying had never gained Lily anything, even as a baby it had never brought her mother to her side, and so she did not understand that to most girls of her age it was a powerful weapon to be used, was a tool to be harnessed and eventually unleashed on the men in her life, both old and new, to guarantee that she got exactly what she wanted.

Her life was all wrong, and she knew it, had always known it deep inside, but her foray into the real world had made her not only aware of how it could, indeed should, be lived, it had also made her impatient to leave these two people in her past, and start living her own life in her own way. Without them.

The first thing she would do when she had enough money and confidence to branch out on her own, was to buy herself a wireless.

She was going to surround herself with noise and with people, she was going to make her life mean something, if not to anyone else, then to herself. She wanted colour and sound and laughter, she wanted to feel easy inside, wanted to experience the love of another human being and, most of all, she wanted peace of mind. She needed to feel a part of something bigger than her, bigger than the world that had been forced on her without her knowledge or her permission, wanted to be part of what was happening in the world. Lily Diamond had finally had a taste of reality and she was heady with the feeling of freedom it evoked inside her budding breasts, and she was suddenly beginning to understand just what life was really all about.