A couple of months later, in swept Pamela. She was from Edinburgh and she was very large, very pale, had orange hair, and ate for Scotland. I spent most of the time cooking for her. She was also ruthless in her insistence on a strict regime for Peter. I wasn't allowed to feed him when he cried; he had to go for four hours at a stretch before she would present him to me, clasped to her huge white starched bosom in a tight shawl, and then she timed him for exactly ten minutes each side, popping him off my nipple with a finger as she checked the second hand of her pocket watch, before announcing: "Bairn's had enough!"

I went along with it in a haze of hormones and exhaustion, and so did Mum, initially. She'd sounded surprised when I'd told her what was happening, but then, as ever, said exactly the right thing: that it was terribly kind of Belinda and Roger. Mum never made trouble. But when, after two weeks, she arrived one day to find me sobbing in a heap at the kitchen table, Pamela meanwhile pacing her room with a screeching baby, she went in for a word and shut the door behind her. A few minutes later she appeared with a still-shrieking and hungry Peter in her arms and gave him to me. I can still see his red, tearstained face as I unbuttoned my shirt and he pressed against me, fastening furiously to my breast, still making hiccupy sobs as he sucked, as if trauma lingered.

A few minutes later, Pamela swept down the passage in her coat, suitcase in hand. She clattered down the stairs without a word and slammed the front door.

"What will I say?" I breathed over Peter's downy head to my mother.

"Leave it to me. I'll speak to her. She'll understand."

I never knew what she said, but Mum was made of deceptively stern stuff. She'd had to be, with Dad's job, and her own, unofficial role in those days of looking after the wives of Dad's men. Wives who were often alone without their husbands, scared, or even, on occasion, grief-stricken. So one Belinda Chamberlain, as was, of 26 Milverton Gardens, Truro, Cornwall, would not be a problem.