‘I don’t know, Paul,’ she said, rather suspecting it was Adam Priestley’s intention to do so. ‘The important thing for his family will simply be that he comes back alive.’

‘I’ll bet he’s a captain, or maybe even a major, the next time we see him.’ Paul helped himself to a cream cake. ‘I hope if he does come to watch me play rugby that he wears his uniform. He looked swell in it, didn’t he?’

‘Yes, he did.’ Wondering if Adam Priestley would get to the station in time to meet his wife’s train and wondering why she felt so oddly unsettled, Vicky poured the tea.

Though the war was only weeks old, the news from the various fronts was already bad. German troops had swept over most of Belgium forcing an Allied retreat to the Marne, the last barrier before Paris. If that was where Adam Priestley was heading, he would be right in the centre of a battlefield hell.

Over the next few days she tried to put the dark thought out of her mind by keeping even busier than usual. She took Paul to York where he was fitted out with his school uniform and sports kits. Then she spent hours marking his name in everything they had bought and in his underwear, handkerchiefs, towels, sheets and pillowcases as well.

She also interviewed several local girls for the position of nursery maid, finally selecting a dark-haired, merry-faced girl whose parents owned Little Ridding’s only haberdashery shop.

In October she gave birth to a daughter.

‘And what is her name to be?’ her father asked, highly delighted to be a grandfather for a third time.

‘Nancy.’

It wasn’t a Hudson family name and didn’t sound to him as if it was a Remer family name either.

‘Why Nancy?’ he asked, bemused.

‘Because I like it,’ she said simply.

‘…and so I have named her Nancy,’ she wrote to Berthold.

I hope you approve. Her hair is fair, like Hugo’s, and her eyes, though blue, are a very indistinct blue. She is very pretty and already showing a strong will of her own. I wish you could see her, my darling. I wish this hideous war was over and that we were together again.

The letter, like all their correspondence, was sent via Zelda’s father in New York.

She waited for a reply with mixed feelings. Berthold would be both overjoyed at knowing he had a daughter and anguished at not being able to see and hold her. When they had parted it had been in the belief that if war came, it would be over by Christmas. Neither of them had imagined that they would be parting for years. The Front had shifted from France to Flanders. Ghent, Bruges and Ostende had fallen. The Belgian government had fled to France and the nature of the war had changed from one of movement to one where both sides were deeply entrenched. It was not a situation hopeful of a short, sharp victory.