Keeping the home fires burning

It is 1914 and for fifteen-year-old Ena Scholfield and millions of other young women life will never be the same again.

As she joins the waving and cheering crowds outside the Bijou Playhouse on Rosamund Street, Ena watches childhood pals, workmates and neighbours proudly marching off to War.

Mothers, sisters and sweethearts promise to write and pray for the young soldiers and suddenly Ena feels she has to do her bit too.

She grabs a passing, frightened-looking lad and asks for his name, saying she'll write to him and pray for his safe return.

Ninetten-year-old Albert Tatlock stammers his name and unit number before disappearing into the crowd.

While over the following four years a friendship develops between Ena and Albert, it is Ena's friendship with Mission caretaker Gladys Arkswright that brings her into daily contact with the occupants of Coronation Street and she is welcomed into a community bereft of young men, but one where there is never a dull moment.

At the Rovers Return Inn, landlady Nellie Corbishley is unaware that her resident barmaid Sarah Bridges is slowly poisoning her.

While young Alice Buck from No. 9 faces rejection from her family and the neighbours after becoming pregnant by neighbour Vic Piggott the night before he marches off to War.

She is forced out into the gutter just days before news reaches the Street of the terrible toll the Battle of the Somme has taken on the Weatherfield residents.

The Weatherfield women have endured hardship and tasted more than their fair share of tragedy before.

Larders may be bare, loved onew may lie in foreign fields but the women of Weatherfield have an inbread ability to lift their skirts, stick out their hips and dance in the face of adversity.

As Ena changes from a timid girl into a confident and feisty woman her attitudes towards her close-knit family, her neighbours, love and life are honed on bitter experience.

As Armistace arrives and the battle-weary boys come home, Ena throws her temperant commitments to the wind and, for the first time, enters that satanic hole, The Rovers Inn.

Packed full of wartime romance, emotional hardship and resilient humour, Keeping the Home Fires Burning embraces all that the show's twenty million fans love about Coronation Street.