‘My brother Wilfred is the black sheep of the family. What with Daddy being a headmaster, of course, there was always a lot of school and a lot of bossing about. Being a headmaster did make Daddy rather pompous, I’m afraid. And Wilfred reacted badly. That wife of his, Glenda – well, you won’t meet her because they’ve moved away – but she was well on with their first baby before they tied the knot. Mummy and Daddy were furious with him. You can imagine! Anyway – oh, bother, I’ve lost a stitch again – there was this awful shotgun wedding, and she’s clearly not at all right for him. Simply ghastly woman! They’ve two children now, but oh my goodness, Mummy and Daddy loathe her, even though they try to be polite!’

Katie was astonished to be told such family secrets, but somehow hearing about them like this made them seem not quite so bad. Maudie seemed to regard most human foibles with a detached amusement, rather than sitting as judge and jury. Ah well, her attitude seemed to be, it’ll all be the same in a hundred years! People, compared with geology, are very short-lived – and aren’t people funny?

Katie started to see just how obsessed her own mother had been with keeping things secret: Uncle Patrick’s condition, and even the details of her husband’s death, which was hardly something to be ashamed of. As the weeks passed, under Maudie’s interested questioning Katie found herself, for the first time in her life, beginning to talk.

At first it was about her father dying, and about sharing the house with Uncle Patrick. For the first time ever she voiced the words, ‘I suppose you’d have to say he wasn’t really very well . . .’

Maudie put down the mending she was doing that afternoon and listened raptly. ‘It sounds as if he was a manic depressive,’ she said.

‘A what?’ Katie had never heard the words before. If only she could have turned to that medical dictionary in Sparkhill Library and known what to look for. Would it have made any difference?

‘I couldn’t give you chapter and verse,’ Maudie said. ‘But I know Daddy worked with someone once who was like that. Sometimes he just sat in the darkest corner of the staffroom as if he had no life in him at all, then next time he’d be brim full of energy, fomenting revolution! He drove all the rest of them round the bend. It really became very difficult – you know, beyond managing. They had to ask him to move on in the end.’

Katie could feel things falling into place in her mind. Tearfully she described what she knew of Patrick’s life to Maudie, his suddenly leaving the White Fathers, the dark days when he would barely move, the over-excitement and pacing at night, the long walks, his coming home soaked to the skin and famished, with his shoes worn through.

‘And he was so kind,’ she found herself sobbing. ‘He was like a father to me, even though he wasn’t. You know, I still make sure they say a Mass for him every year, round the anniversary of his death.’