I packed up what I could. It almost seemed a kind of … a sort of betrayal not to clamber down the slope and retrieve what lay just beyond reach (my best teapot, a bottle of good shampoo, a collection of tape cassettes …) and then another kind (if not of betrayal, then a small defeat) to carefully pack up an egg timer that had never worked, a painting of Camber Castle that I had been given by an old neighbour and had always secretly loathed, a rusty frying pan – the trusty little Le Creuset I inherited from my mother now apparently gone for good.

Ross and Marian Seaton and their grown-up son Jeremy – from around the corner – helped me pile up their old Land-Rover and we drove three full loads over to Shimmy’s. Marian had kindly prepared a flask of tea and a round of ham and egg sandwiches which we ate on what remained of the front lawn. She asked if she might take some of the plants from the garden. There was an old honeysuckle she had always admired and a small jasmine and a wonderfully florid pink English tea rose.

Some of the stuff went into Shimmy’s front parlour, some into a shed, but we were obliged to take the final load (mainly Tilda’s stuff) over to Mulberry and store it, temporarily, in the air-raid shelter. This wasn’t an easy task: access to Mulberry isn’t generally good, and there were still quite a number of vans parked illegally on the lane, oh … and a succession of overexcited children running about, several of whom were baiting poor Joyce – Mrs Seelinger’s spaniel – (they’d dressed him up in an old yellow cardigan and had tied a blue hydrangea flower to his tail; heaven only knows whose garden they’d acquired it from) and so they had to be quickly apprehended (Mrs Seaton – a former tree surgeon, who can be quite terrifying on her day – undertook this mission) and then strictly reprimanded.

It was heavy work, and a warm afternoon, and Mr Seaton, Jeremy and I were just in the midst of working out the appropriate angles at which to manoeuvre an especially large and unwieldy dresser through the two tiny doorways when our calculations were disrupted by a series of strange creaks and thuds (interspersed with a succession of loud and quite dreadful hiccups).

It was Mr Huff, of course – who else? – struggling manfully down the garden path, barefoot, on a pair of (actually rather fine, if not entirely functional) old brown-leather-padded wooden crutches. He was wearing his pyjamas. His glasses were on askew and his hair was all lopsided.

‘Miss Hahn! Hic! What is this? Hic!’ he demanded, lifting an irate crutch to gesticulate.

The Mr Seatons promptly put down the dresser. On my foot.

‘It’s a dresser, Mr Huff, from the bungalow …’ I tried – and failed – to remove my foot. ‘It belongs to …’ I paused. ‘I’m sorry, Mr Seaton, but you’ve placed the dresser down on to my …’