When Vera was eight, he disappeared for two years, almost to the day.

Vera’s mother, Jean Porter, a tiny, doll-like woman with curling auburn hair and porcelain skin, told no one that he had gone – not even herself.

‘I haven’t seen your Harold for a while,’ her friends might remark. Vera could remember them, in the parlour with the net curtains, drinking tea and eating dainty scones and cake.

‘Oh, I know,’ Jean would say in a vexed way. ‘It’s so naughty of him. He will take on these big jobs that keep him away from home. He was home earlier in the week, but you missed him, I’m afraid. He’s had to go away again on urgent business overseas.’

At this, her voice would sink to an awed whisper and the other women would look suitably impressed. If they ever asked exactly what he was doing overseas, Jean would laugh in her girlish way, fiddling with a curling strand of her hair and say, ‘Oh, you know – it’s all to do with buying and selling. I don’t interfere too much in his work, to tell you the truth. You know what the male of the species is like, don’t you? They don’t like to be interfered with!’

She would tell her friends that he was due home in a few days, and that then they would be away, taking a little holiday – perhaps by the seaside?

Vera, whose ninth birthday came and went without her seeing her father, did start to doubt things. When Mummy said to people that Daddy had been home for a few days last week, she started to think that yes, perhaps he had been? Hadn’t he come in and kissed her goodnight? And when Mummy said in the holidays once or twice that they were not going to go out of the house for a few days, because so far as everyone knew they had gone on a little holiday to the seaside, hadn’t she joined in when Mummy asked for this to be their game of pretend?

‘You can tell your friends about the cliffs, and the rock pools – you know, going out with your net on a lovely sunny morning, and catching crabs and sea anemones and tiny fish, with the sand between your toes and the sound of the waves in your ears . . .’ By the time she had spun her story, Vera almost felt as if she had been to the seaside. To confuse things further, on one of ‘Daddy’s’ holidays by the sea, they had taken a train all the way down to Bournemouth and spent a few days with Jean’s mother in a little boarding house looking over the sea. It was blissful for Vera, as her grandmother was a kindly woman, but there was still no sign of Daddy, even though Mummy told her to tell her friends that he had been there with them, but had now had to go on a long journey.