‘I did, as a matter of fact,’ Katie laughed, as to her the dress seemed drab now. ‘But a long time ago – before the war. It’s quite faded.’

‘Well, it looks very nice on you,’ the woman said wistfully. ‘You’ve kept your figure, haven’t you? Oh, I wish I could sew. I’m like a bull in a china shop with a needle.’

The two lads were getting along quite nicely and their mothers passed the time for a while, sitting on a bench nearby and drinking in the sun. An ice-cream barrow came into the park and Katie and her new acquaintance bought wafer sandwiches for themselves and their boys. The ice cream, still always made from substitutes like evaporated milk, tasted a bit odd. But it was better than nothing.

‘I have to come out with Peter to get him out of my husband’s hair,’ the woman confided. ‘He says he has enough going on in the week without having his Sunday disrupted. He likes to sit and read the paper after his dinner – and of course Saturday’s his cricket, in the summer anyway.’ Without actually complaining, she sounded wistful. ‘What about your husband? Is he having a sit-down as well?’

‘Actually I’m a widow,’ Katie said. It was her story, for most people.

The woman’s good-natured face creased in sympathy. ‘Oh, I am sorry. And there’s me having a little moan . . . Was it the war?’

Katie nodded, feeling guilty. ‘Yes – at Arnhem.’

‘Oh, and your poor little lad as well. Well, I do hope you meet someone else – I’m sure you will.’

‘Oh no, I doubt it,’ Katie said. Her voice came out bitter. ‘I don’t want to – we’re all right as we are.’

‘Well, I think you’re very brave,’ the woman told her.

When they had said their goodbyes and ambled back home, Sybil was just coming in from the vegetable patch in her wide-brimmed hat, secateurs in hand and Archie at her heels. She met Katie in the hall.

‘Ah, hello, dear – I’m just battling the brambles. Did you hear our callers earlier? I’ve got replacements for the room. Two Poles – not long demobbed. About time too, one might add. Still in uniform, after all this time . . .’

‘Poles?’ Katie said, alarmed. So that explained the strange accents!

‘Yes – two chaps. They seem pleasant fellows. They’re coming tomorrow.’ She was drifting through to the kitchen. ‘Actually one of them is waiting to meet his sister, so his friend is bunking up with him until she arrives.’ She vanished out to the back.

Katie led Michael upstairs, suddenly feeling cross and out of sorts. She wasn’t pleased to hear about the new lodgers. Somehow her safe little haven here felt threatened and she found herself wishing that Sybil was a bit more choosy about who she allowed to live in her house! Nervously she remembered the sound of the deep, ringing voice she had heard rising from the hall. All she had heard about Polish servicemen was quite contradictory – that they were rude and rough on the one hand and terrible womanizers and that, on the other, they were charmers who were forever kissing women’s hands.