She waited for the ceiling to fall in. Sybil glanced round, then back into the glass where she was adjusting her hat.

‘Ah, you’re a Holy Roman, are you? I did wonder, with a name like O’Neill.’ She tidied her collar, putting her head on one side. ‘Queer business, church. Still, I was brought up to it, you see.’ She pressed her hat harder down onto her head. ‘And I do find that if you can stick it out, it can be frightfully entertaining.’

Thirty-Nine

Katie’s regard and fondness for Sybil Routh had increased over the months that she was a tenant in her house, but it was last winter’s freeze that had really created a bond between the two women.

The snow began in late January, so much of it that the country was gripped by a terrible freeze and a state of emergency. The novelty of the first day or two – Michael out in the street with the other children, snowballing and pulling each other along on trays – quickly wore off.

‘Well,’ Sybil announced one morning at the beginning of February. ‘It’s happened – everything’s frozen up. I can’t get any water out of the tap. Don’t go trying to flush any lavatories until I see if the downpipe is frozen as well. We’ll have to think what to do.’

‘Thank goodness!’ she announced shortly afterwards. The downpipe was still working. Soon they were all helping to melt snow in an old tin baby’s bath over the range, for flushing the toilets and having a wash. Basic living became a huge operation: melting snow, trying to get anywhere, buying food. Evenings were spent swathed in coats close to the fire in the dining room, though Sybil had insisted that the Gudgeons must have the little electric-bar fire in their room.

‘She can’t be moved, and the pair of them will freeze to death else,’ Sybil said. ‘They’re like a pair of little birds – no flesh on them.’

Soon, because enough coal could not be brought from the newly nationalized mines, the Government was rationing electricity. By early February there was to be no electricity allocated to industry and thousands of workers were laid off. Those at home would have no power between nine and midday and between two and four in the afternoon. Coal itself was in acutely short supply as well. Even sitting huddled up inside, listening on the wireless to news of twenty-foot drifts in country areas, it was hard to keep warm. The offices where Katie worked kept going on most days, and she struggled in when she could get a bus and worked wrapped in her coat and scarf, blowing on her hands to keep warm.

When she wasn’t at work, Katie did everything she could to help Sybil. She felt responsible, somehow, as the only other woman in the house, and she was always keen to earn Sybil’s approval. Sybil was also a person with resources that she could tap. In the storeroom behind Katie’s attic bedroom there seemed to be a stash of all sorts of things.