Katie began to relax and realize that she and Michael could have a safe, settled life here. Sybil had a gift for uniting this rather unpromising group of people into a household with character. Katie also began to have time to take more interest in the outside world. Sybil was forever listening in to the news. When the Mahatma, Mr Gandhi, had been assassinated earlier that year, Sybil was so upset that none of them could have avoided hearing and learning about the man, and all that he had meant.

The other thing was that Sybil soon cottoned on to the fact that Katie could sew. Anxious to please, Katie offered to do various bits of mending.

‘I was always a cack-handed seamstress at the best of times,’ Sybil admitted. ‘But now of course my hands are no use for anything delicate at all.’ Both her hands and feet were gnarled and painful with arthritis.

‘Oh, I’m quite happy to sew,’ Katie told her.

‘In fact, if you’re that keen . . . Can you tailor garments as well?’

‘Yes, my mother taught me! She was – is . . . a seamstress . . .’

Sybil bypassed an opportunity to be nosy here, for which Katie was very grateful. ‘There’s an old Singer out in the privy at the back. We could bring it in and get it cleaned up and oiled. You’re welcome to use it. I expect you could do with making things for the boy.’

Katie soon turned her hand to getting the machine working. It was perfectly all right, apart from dust and cobwebs and in need of a dash of oil.

‘Thank you so much, Miss Routh!’ she said. ‘I’d thought about trying to get hold of one somewhere, but I shan’t have to now. And if you’d like me to sew anything for you, you only have to say.’

‘Well now,’ Sybil said, ‘I do have some cloth that would make a frock – so if you wouldn’t mind . . . And do call me by my Christian name, for heaven’s sake. I feel like a schoolteacher being “Miss Routhed” all the time.’

‘Of course, er, Sybil,’ Katie said. ‘I can make you something based on one of your other ones, can’t I?’

Sybil produced a bolt of cloth from somewhere upstairs, of dark-blue swirls on a yellow-and-white background.

‘I’m sure it’s meant for curtains really,’ she said. ‘But beggars can’t be choosers, can we?’

‘She thinks you’re marvellous,’ Maudie told Katie a few weeks after she’d moved in. ‘She was singing your praises to several of the others after Communion on Sunday.’

Katie wondered nervously whether Sybil would expect her to go to church as well, and what she’d think if she knew Katie was a Catholic. One Sunday, when she saw Sybil getting ready to go out, in her large straw hat, she took courage and said, ‘I haven’t been very good about keeping it up, as I’ve been so busy. But I might start taking Michael to Mass soon.’