‘You smell of work.’

Angus laughed. ‘Not surprising. I came straight here.’ He looked at me sadly. ‘She’s very bad, isn’t she?’

‘She’s dying. There isn’t much can be done. We just have to keep her as comfy as we can.’

‘What if there’s an air raid? You can’t very easily lift her down to the cellar.’

‘I don’t know.’ The long looking-glass at the top of the stairs showed my face white with exhaustion. My legs felt weak and shaky. I’d just come from a long spell of duty on a women’s surgical ward. ‘We’ll have to think of something.’

We went to join the rest of the family for dinner. It was unusual to have everyone at home. William had asked for permission to leave Oxford to see Granny. The house felt sombre with swathes of blackout material at all the windows. The panes were criss-crossed with tape to shield against blast. There was talk of food being rationed within the next couple of months: bacon, sugar, butter. Even the light in the dining room felt thinner, as if they were diluting the electricity.

As we ate our boiled ham with carrots, potatoes and dried peas, I stopped feeling so low and tired. We sat under the high, coved ceiling with its ornate rose at the centre, all painted white, and the walls a paper pattern of buff and brown. My father was at one end of the table and William at the other, Angus and I sat opposite each other, Mummy next to Angus.

I glanced at each of my parents as we ate. Both of them looked very tired too. Daddy was mostly silent and preoccupied. The war was constantly in our minds, yet of course at that stage no one knew exactly what it would entail. Poland was overrun, the seas had become menacing, trawled by U-boats and malevolent ships, magnetic minds floating unseen just below the surface. It was as if the world had a pall over it. And of course Daddy felt involved in every detail, as well as that of the health care of the city of Birmingham. His eyes were focused far from those around him. If he had taken the trouble to adjust them so that he could see my mother, he should have noticed the pale, pinched look on her face, her tense angry movements, evident even in the way she was eating, stabbing at the ham with her fork like a hen after corn. I watched her uneasily.

‘How’s Oxford?’ Angus asked William, since no one was speaking, though I felt sure he must have asked him earlier. ‘Still doing well?’

‘I’m enjoying it enormously,’ William said. He was looking very well, thinner and alight with the stimulation of it. ‘I’ve got an absolutely first-rate tutor this term, and the chap I’m rooming with is very decent – we fit in a lot of sport together. All in all it’s exceeded expectation. Pity about the war, though. Even if it is only “Bore” War at the moment . . .’