I showed him the door.

Gladys Peck was a pleasant, anxious woman who was perpetually grateful. Although she had to care for her five-year-old, Eric, and Lizzie who was not yet two, she seemed to think that because she had been sent to live with us in a house which resembled the one in which she had first gone into service, she ought in return to act as our maid. We took a lot of trouble to stop her.

But now Gladys came into her own.

‘What you need at a time like this,’ she declared, ‘is help.’ She plonked fair, curly-haired Lizzie down on the floor as if trying to root her to the ground. ‘Good job I’m here now, isn’t it?’

And for several days, with impressive capability, she completely took over the running of our house. While Lizzie slept in our wooden cot upstairs, she scrubbed floors. She settled Eric at the table with crayons, copies of the Eagle and Beano which he was too young to be able to read properly but enjoyed the pictures, and an old toffee tin full of William’s cars and soldiers. He was a quiet, pallid child with cropped, mousy hair. Gladys donned an apron, tied back her thin hair in a pink scarf and set to, humming and singing like someone who had finally found a purpose in life. Then she’d stop, tactfully, remembering that we didn’t have much to sing about. I didn’t mind. I liked to hear her. Mostly she sang hymns: ‘The Old Rugged Cross’ and ‘Great is Thy Faithfulness’, adding her own warbles and fragments of melody.

What was most striking was that Mummy let her do it all. She surrendered control of the house while we made arrangements, sitting in miserable silence in the sombre offices of funeral directors or in the sitting-room at home. She was like a person winded, unable to gather herself up to protest or move into action.

‘Gladys is wonderful, isn’t she?’ I ventured one day. Mummy was sitting with Lizzie on her lap, occupying the child with a string of coloured wooden beads. Her hair was scraped back and she looked exhausted.

‘She’s a great comfort,’ Mummy said, to my surprise. ‘Hearing her singing sometimes I feel . . .’ She trailed off, stroking the little girl’s curls and her soft, spongy limbs.

‘What?’ I asked softly. So far we had said almost nothing to each other about Daddy’s death. We had been to see him, hands across his chest, his face relaxed and strange to us. But the house felt as usual. He had been there so little when he was alive.

‘It’s as if she’s a kind of messenger,’ Mummy said.

‘From Daddy, you mean?’

‘No. I don’t believe that sort of thing. You know I don’t. I meant from God.’

‘I hope so,’ I said grimly. I got little else out of Mummy. We moved round one another, each guarding our own pain.

I wrote and told Livy about Daddy’s death and she wrote me a sweet note in reply, but her letters were still rare. If she was having leave from the navy, she was no longer taking it at home.