She thought of past Christmases, army Christmases with all the laughter and entertainments. Faces flashed before her mind, especially from that final Christmas, in Belgium. They knew it was all coming to an end, and that had that lightened the pressure on everything. She remembered a group of them singing round an old piano in a school hall; Cath’s face, pink and joyful, knowing that soon she might be with her beloved Derck; the pianist, a plump girl called Susan, so close to being helpless with laughter that she struggled to play; and in the background – as usual – Phoebe Morrison, singing, her face alight as she watched everyone with an almost maternal air. She had looked happy. Molly thought of the dulled, almost bitter woman she had seen in London, the gruff cards she had received with sardonic references to ‘keeping on keeping on’.

It was that scene among many memories that floated through her mind as sat on her bed and stared at the bottle. Johnnie Walker. It was the same spirit that her brother Bert had plied her with that night during the war when she went to the house, until she was almost too drunk to know what was happening. She saw his bony face in her mind, then her mother’s bloated one. She thought of the men whom she might have ended up with, had things been different, had she been different – Tony, and Len. All the sadness and regrets of her life, which she usually tried to run away from, welled up in her today and she couldn’t seem to stop them. Look at me! I might as well go and walk the roads like a proper tramp – I’m living like one anyway. Tears came, sharply, making her sob. The rest of the day was a haze. She slept for most of it. On Boxing Day she woke feeling terrible and her first thought was: I’ve got to get out of here.

She left the Gaumont and her lodgings and got a job as a school cook. Her landlady, in a little terraced house, was a Marion Letts, a petite, dark-haired woman in her thirties whose husband had deserted her, leaving her with two young sons, Jimmy and Alan. Though harassed, she was keen to have a bit of company, and the boys, who were six and eight, liked having Molly in the house, especially as it was also at their school that she worked. Together they struggled through that bitterly cold winter, knitting balaclavas for the boys while pipes burst in the school where Molly worked, and spent every evening sitting on top of the fire, in all the clothes they could find, smoking all the cigarettes they could get hold of, to keep warm.

‘You’d make a nice mum,’ Marion said one evening, head on one side. ‘Haven’t you got anyone in your life, Molly? You’re so pretty, I’d’ve thought they’d be swarming around you.’

‘Oh, there’ve been one or two,’ Molly said lightly. She didn’t go into any real detail about her life to Marion. ‘But I’ve been moving about a fair bit lately. I’ll be off again, come the spring.’