‘Then if you’ve made yer mind up I dare say there’s nothin’ I can say to change it, is there?’ Ivy answered resignedly.

Holly shook her head. ‘Not really, but don’t worry, I shall be fine, and so will Marcus. Everyone is saying that the war will be over in no time then hopefully everyone can get back to some sort of normality.’

Ivy could only pray that she was right.

By November, word from the soldiers at the front was grim. They were being forced to spend hours in dirty trenches ankle-deep in icy water and frostbite had become a real danger. It was reported that men’s toes were turning black and dropping off, and they were the lucky ones, for others, as infection set in, there was no hope. Men all along the front were dropping like flies and the rats that infested the trenches were feasting on their bodies. The field hospitals were struggling to cope with the number of casualties each day and mass graves were having to be dug for those who died at the enemy’s hands.

The conditions that the men had to live in left a lot to be desired as well. Rows of tents with no protection from the bitter cold were their only shelter, not that it troubled them much. Usually by the time they returned to them after fighting they were too exhausted to care where they slept.

A continuous line of trenches full of weary soldiers now stretched from the North Sea to Switzerland but there had been little movement since the Germans had failed to reach Paris. It seemed that there was a stalemate amid the mud and barbed wire and nobody had yet developed a tactic to break the deadlock; the number of dead continued to rise, and every day now, the telegram boy could be seen furiously pedalling about the town delivering the news that someone’s loved one had fallen in battle.

At home, the chancellor, David Lloyd George, announced in his war budget that income tax would be doubled to one shilling and sixpence in every pound in the year ahead, beer and tea duties would also go up to help pay for the war. Already there were shortages of certain goods that could no longer be shipped in from abroad and now everyone was having to tighten their belts. Claridge’s Hotel in London had opened its doors to sewing guilds where women congregated to make clothes for the servicemen and other women were busily unpicking any old woollens they could get hold of and reknitting the wool into socks for the troops. Even the Boy Scouts had been given jobs to do, and they were placed on what was termed Special Service, which involved them guarding gas works, electric substations and telegraph lines, although as Holly’s grandfather quite rightly pointed out, what were the boys supposed to do if they were under threat of being bombed?