It was rare, though, that she could come home and enjoy the luxury of a bath. Like electricity and gas, hot water could no longer be relied upon and now that she had been miraculously able to run a tub full, she doubted if even an airraid warning would persuade her to abandon it.

She slid lower down in the water, trying to ignore the fact that bath foam was now a commodity impossible to come by and that it was highly unlikely she would get any decent lather from her bar of soap. For months now, deprivation had been the name of the game. Food was rationed to a stringent degree. Everything needed coupons—and coupons did not go very far. She wondered what sort of rationing was taking place in England, knowing that whatever it was, at Shuttleworth Hall Vicky would be supplementing it with home-grown produce.

Shuttleworth Hall. She closed her eyes and conjured up its image. Even in wartime Shuttleworth Hall would be a haven of peace and comfort. It was too deep in the Dales for it to be anything else, for the Luftwaffe would certainly not be wasting time and bombs on village hamlets such as Little Ridding. It was October and the leaves on the trees down by the river would be beginning to change colour. She could see them in her mind’s eye, gold and yellow and every shade of copper. The blackthorn bushes would be heavy with sloes—and no doubt Emily Elise would be picking them with gusto.

She wiggled her toes in the water, remembering how, whenever she had visited Shuttleworth Hall in October, Vicky had made sloe gin, pricking the sloes and dropping them into half-full bottles of gin until the remaining gin reached nearly to the top of the bottles. Then Vicky would add a wine glass of sugar and, over the next few weeks, would turn the bottles daily until, by Christmas, the gin was a rich magenta colour and ready for drinking.

It was only one of the many activities that would be taking place in Shuttleworth Hall’s big, roomy kitchen, for every October Vicky launched into a frenzy of culinary activity, preserving jams and jellies, chutneys and pickles, all made with produce that either grew wild, like blackberries and crab apples, or that she grew herself, like damsons and plums.

At the thought of her aunt’s spiced pickled plums, Lotti’s mouth watered. Sometimes Vicky served her spiced pickled plums with home-baked bread and cheese, sometimes with cold meat. Both ways were equally delicious, and thinking of them now, when her lunch had been a mean portion of unadorned inedible meat and her dinner a sausage, was a torment.

The water was beginning to cool, and reluctant to emerge from it to the icy chill of the unheated bathroom, she focused her thoughts on Ilse’s recent telephone call to her. ‘An old theatre friend of mine who is now a pilot, Otto Schott, has just been awarded the Oak Leaves to his Knight’s Cross for valour,’ she had said in fizzing good spirits. ‘He had to go to Hitler’s HQ to receive the Oak Leaves from Hitler personally and you’ll never guess, Lotti, he wasn’t asked to relinquish his handgun before going into Hitler’s presence! Isn’t that amazing? If it had been one of Nicky’s friends who had found himself in that situation, Germany’s future would have been altered in an instant!’