‘Given all the bloody big houses round here, you’d think the soddin’ Army could pick somewhere else!’ one bold girl protested.

‘Yeah!’ another cried as she supported her enormous tummy. ‘Why pick on us pregnant women?’

Holding up her hand, Matron calmly tried her best to assuage her patients’ fears.

‘Please, you must understand, from what I can gather this is nothing but speculation, nothing is official. Mary Vale, along with several other establishments in the district, is under consideration by the Army.’

As cries of protest and dismay echoed around the sitting room, where staff and residents alike had gathered, Sybil appeared to be the only one who registered no emotion; in truth she found it hard not to stand up and start cheering. Could this apparent rumour be the answer to her prayers? Sybil’s brain whirled with all the possibilities that the closure of the Home would bring about.

‘I could relocate to the kind of expensive nursing home I envisaged in the first place,’ Sybil thought feverishly. ‘One with an en suite bathroom, carpeted floors, maids to serve me breakfast in bed, a private telephone line in my own room, no damned chores! And a sound-proofed nursery that I need never enter.’

In the days that followed, Sybil, almost delirious with joy, wasted no time in doing some research into select nursing homes at the very opposite end of the country. She had had more than enough of the North, with its smell of wet sheep, endless rain, gloomy mountain ranges and people talking in a grating Northern accent. This time, free of manipulative Monty, she would make her own personal arrangements, informing Monty only of her transfer when it came to the point of handing over money, which as far as she was concerned was his moral obligation and nobody else’s.

‘Paying for this unwanted confinement is the least the brute can do,’ Sybil thought with great satisfaction. Determined, galvanized and happy for the first time in months, Sybil took the local train to Grange-over-Sands, where in the little town library she read every nursing magazine that she could get her hands on. With several addresses jotted down in her diary, Sybil returned to Mary Vale intent on immediately writing letters of application to the nursing homes she had singled out as exclusive enough for her purposes. So focused was Sybil on her plan that she failed to notice a car parked up by the front door, so it was an enormous shock when she walked slap-bang into Brigadier Baldwin in the Home’s entrance hall.

‘MONTY!’ she gasped.

‘Sybil, darling!’ he cried, as he gathered her into his arms and squeezed her so hard it hurt.

Quickly disentangling herself from his arms and stepping away from him in order to avoid his dreadful bad breath, Sybil was flustered. ‘What on earth are you doing here?’