As Vicky watched him, her heart in her mouth, Hugo said innocently, repeating information contained in his father’s last letter to him, ‘The idea of Christmas trees comes from Germany. They’re pretty, aren’t they?’

‘Aye, and Big Bertha and Long Tom come from the same place, and they aren’t,’ a grizzled man in a wheelchair, old before his time, said savagely.

Vicky saw the blank incomprehension on Hugo’s face and, before anything else unkind was said to her son, she crossed swiftly towards him, saying with a wide smile, ‘Josephine has a plate of mince pies ready for you now, sweetheart. And ask people if they want a slice of cheese with them, will you?’

‘Yes, Mama,’ he said, still looking confused. ‘Mama, who are Big Bertha and Long Tom and why doesn’t Sergeant Smith like them?’

‘Later, darling. You don’t want the mince pies to get cold, do you?’

As he trotted off with them she wondered how she could explain that Big Bertha and Long Tom were not people, but giant guns that could fire shells fantastic distances, nine miles in the case of Big Bertha. They were Krupp-made guns and whether the House of Remer was manufacturing anything remotely similar she didn’t know. Hoping that Hugo would forget what had been said to him and that no explanations would be necessary, she led a round of applause as Paul, wobbling dangerously, placed the angel at the top of the tree.

Sergeant Smith’s remark had been ill timed. Tonight, Christmas night, she wanted no reminders of the war.

As Josephine supervised the handing round of glasses of mulled wine she reflected on how lucky they were that the war so rarely intruded on their daily life. Being deep in the Dales they suffered no Zeppelin raids, and though food was now short in the towns it wasn’t short at Shuttleworth Hall where vegetables, fish and game were plentiful. Most of the local farmers had Land Army girls seconded to them and their familiar green-smocked figures in the fields were often the only reminder of the ghastliness taking place in northern France.

There the armies were paralysed in a terrible deadlock it seemed nothing could break. Adam Priestley had long since returned to his regiment, but where his regiment now was, she didn’t know. She could only pray that William Priestley would not join the hideously growing ranks of her father’s friends sporting black armbands.

‘Excuse me, Vicky, but Sister has an emergency,’ Josephine said to her apologetically. ‘Jonathan Rouse’s stump is leaking and it needs two hands to put a new drainage tube in. I’d help her myself but she’d prefer you. You have steadier hands.’

‘Take over here for me, then, Josephine. The next thing on the agenda is the carol service. Paul and Max are to sing “Away in a Manger” as a duet.’

Minutes later, as she helped Shuttleworth Hall’s nursing sister insert a new drainage tube in the mangled stump of an eighteen-year-old boy’s leg, the rousing strains of ‘Once in Royal David’s City’ could be clearly heard.