Cassie soaked up our love, with no suggestion that there could ever be too much of a good thing. She didn’t shut herself in her room, or give any of us cause to ask each other if she needed more space or less space. She ran away and hid, but she let us know where she was with squeaks and rustles if we took longer than one minute to find her. She held up her arms to tell us that she wanted to be carried, and when she was hoisted up she sat astride the bearer’s hip and gave an angled-wrist wave like the Queen’s.

I knew that if I crossed the yard from the bindery to the house at lunchtime, or at the end of a day’s work, I could spend a few minutes drawing pictures with her or reading her a story. She divided her favours between her admirers fairly even-handedly but I liked to think that she was particularly attached to me. She called me Sadie-lady, after Evelyn warned her once when they very first moved in not to get egg on the lady’s lovely coat.

Evelyn and Penny were both in the kitchen when I called in on the evening after my trip to Ted’s house.

It had been another long day and Colin had only just gone home after a lengthy visit to check up on the progress of his book. I had given the job to Andy, who made up most of our boxes. He had made a start on cutting the boards, but this wasn’t nearly fast enough for Colin. ‘My mum’s waiting to see it,’ he shouted.

‘It’ll be another week or so yet, Colin.’

‘A week? It doesn’t take a week to publish other people’s books, I bet.’

‘No,’ I said irritably from behind my bench. ‘It takes months to publish a real book.’

He ignored this. ‘I don’t like being without my recipes, you know. What if I wanted to cook one of them?’

‘You could take it away with you right now,’ Andy offered.

He wasn’t enjoying the job – it involved a lot of work and the end result wouldn’t deliver much satisfaction to the binder. The plan was to paste the greasy pages to sheets of stiff card, and the resulting sheaf of card would then be stitched and cloth-bound into a thick volume, which would have a substantial matching slipcase with Colin’s name on the front. I had decided to give the job the full treatment, on the grounds that he would have nothing to complain about once it was finished. Andy took the view that as we’d never be paid for the work anyway, the standard didn’t matter too much.