‘One, two, three, pull!’ we cried, hauling the little boat along the beach with exaggerated effort. Several times we fell over backwards and lay side by side, helpless with laughter, the sharp words forgotten, our hair getting thick and gritty with sand.

‘Come on, you daft thing,’ Olivia giggled weakly. ‘Or we’ll never get it up there.’

The beach was in shade now except for a slice down one side. Picnickers were packing up their windshields and Thermoses.

‘Girls!’

Shading our eyes, we saw Alec Kemp moving towards us with his long stride, the dark trousers flapping round his legs in the breeze. I was squatting down next to the boat. Olivia stiffened.

‘Don’t move.’ He grinned at us. ‘That’ll make a lovely picture.’ He raised his Brownie camera, legs bent slightly and elbows out to get the angle right, and clicked down the shutter. ‘One more.’ Another click. ‘There. That’ll do nicely.’

He helped us position the boat up by the sea wall and we went to the hotel. As we crossed the road, quiet as it was, he took our hands as if we were small children before walking across. I was thrilled.

We ate each evening in the dining room of the hotel at tables with stiff white tablecloths and vases of miniature silk roses. It was a family hotel, not a posh establishment, but it had a wine list and tried to keep up certain standards. I was allowed to drink wine – wine! Alcohol was something my parents didn’t hold with.

It was several evenings into the holiday and it had been raining most of the day. We’d woken to a fine mist of it over the sea and had barely been out all day. And it was mackerel, shiny metallic blue across our plates, the eyes still in. Fish made Alec Kemp irritable, if he hadn’t been already. He liked to do everything properly and with style, but boning fish defeated him.

‘Blasted things,’ he said, pushing small bones out between his teeth with what seemed to me disproportionate fury.

Elizabeth had come down to the meal with her face clearly blotchy and pink from recent tears which even the carefully applied powder could not hide. I hadn’t heard her crying again since that first day and had tried to forget what had happened, but seeing her that evening, the sound of it resurfaced disturbingly in my mind. She had composed her face now in its habitual lines: gently upturned lips, her glances towards Alec conveying, so far as I could make out, only attentiveness and appreciation. But her left hand fiddled restlessly with the string of seed pearls at her neck.

Elizabeth usually spoke very little as we ate. Alec liked to perform. Elizabeth would watch him, the smile fixed on her lips, letting him entertain us all.

Alec would tell stories about his Birmingham childhood – he and his two brothers – or the way he had taken over the firm, Kemp’s Foundry Supplies Ltd, from his father and built it into something that really counted. There was no doubt he was doing well. The 1930s were such a desperate time for many people, but while laid-off miners were demonstrating on Birmingham’s streets and queues reached round the corner from the Labour Exchanges, Kemp’s Foundry Supplies was prospering. We’d all heard much of what Alec said before, but we let him talk. The couples and families at the other tables were talking quietly, except for one where the children were squabbling over bread rolls and cutlery.