‘Doesn’t Mrs Owens ever fancy the stroll to ours?’ he asked one evening with a studied disinterest as he dealt the cards. They liked to play a hand or two of whist after supper.

‘It’s trickier for her. She has to uproot the bairn, work around nap times and such. Easier if I visit them.’

‘But wouldn’t pushing the baby out in the pram make sense? Fresh air is good for children, isn’t it?’ His mother wouldn’t comment; she stared hard at her cards. ‘Is she a snob, then, this friend of yours? Our place not good enough for her?’

His mother lifted her lids, briefly betraying her irritation with him. ‘Not as much of a snob as she’s entitled to be, no. It’s not that.’

‘Me, then?’ Oddly, it unsettled him that she was avoiding him. He shouldn’t have expected any different. Miss Hawkins, the woman who had taught him the three Rs, reading, writing and arithmetic, blanked him in the street, as did the lasses he’d played with since before he went to school. He didn’t care about them. But.

His mother wouldn’t answer him; she just glowered. ‘We owe her a great deal.’

‘I’m not saying we don’t.’

‘She does well for someone so young and—’

‘And what?’

Enid sighed; he knew she was reluctant to finish the sentence, torn between her habitual honesty and loyalty to her friend. ‘She was never given any guidance.’ Enid played her first card. ‘Or love, come to that,’ she mumbled. Howard felt bad for probing. It wasn’t what he’d expected his mother to say.

‘I wasn’t trying to be rude. I’m just curious.’

‘Don’t be.’ She met his eyes. ‘Don’t.’

He knew he had to change the subject. He glanced over to where his mother had been painting that afternoon. Her commissions were largely of young men now, rather than children. Soldiers. She often worked from a photograph; the portraits were posthumous. Howard found her work brutally depressing but tried not to show it. She insisted her customers thought they were a comfort. ‘Why are you painting over this?’ She was covering something she’d painted years ago that had hung for fifteen years in the parlour.

‘Canvases are expensive now. The materials are deployed elsewhere.’ Of course: tents. Church bells that had once told of marriages had been melted down; garden gates where children once swung and women gossiped were gone too. Country houses that had once hosted parties now housed the limbless and dying. Everything was to be given over to the war effort. This tremendous effort. Everything except Howard. ‘Things will go back to normal eventually,’ Enid commented soothingly.

She couldn’t comfort him. He was old enough to know that it would not be a normal either of them would recognise.

It was a warm enough day, although the sun kept leaping behind a cloud so he never got too hot: perfect working conditions. He’d obliged everyone by exiling himself to a point far from the village hub, up along the canal. The canal path was not much more than mud, criss-crossed by the footprints of women’s boots, the prints of the village men long since washed away. His own trail was obvious, if anyone wanted to track him. It turned out today that someone did. A group of kids had been following him for the last three miles. They kept their distance, four or five hundred yards away, as he moved around the perimeter of the Owenses’ land. The bravest of the gang occasionally called out, ‘Hey, conchie,’ and Howard looked up once and raised his hand. It wasn’t clear if he was waving at them or shooing them away; anyway, they scattered like pheasants rising from the grass. Giggling and nervous. They were harmless. After that he ignored them. Not prepared to enter into what was after all just an elaborate game of Grandmother’s Footsteps. He felt eyes bore into his back but disregarded them. A polite cough, again, a third still didn’t cause him to look up.