Thinking about Betty-next-door made her think about Nellie Bet, who, in turn, made her think about Glyn. It was for him she was making the effort; buying a new rig-out when she had a wardrobe full of Jaeger and Viyella. It was a shame that Nellie Bet hadn’t lived to see it; she’d done nothing about that diabetes for years and in the end she’d just let herself go until the gangrene was stinking… But then, had she lived, none of it would be happening in quite the same way and she wouldn’t have been sitting on the train going to Shrewsbury. Of course she’d missed Nellie Bet these past eighteen months; they’d known one another all their lives… It was she who’d told her, after the telegram, that she had to get on with her life…

‘Milli’, she’d said, ‘War is war and your Jack’s dead. You don’t owe it to him to be a mourning virgin for the rest of your life.’ But what she’d given to her Jack she couldn’t give to anyone else and despite many an overture it was as Mrs Jack Roberts she’d remained, until, hardly without noticing, Jack was forgotten by most of the town’s folk as they took to calling her Mrs Amelia Roberts.

Nellie Bet never forgot. She always made sure that ‘Our Milli’ was part of her family; matron of honour at her wedding, godmother to Lois and Griff, and always expected for Sunday dinner and Christmas Day. And then, when Glyn had come along, a real after-thought at forty-two, Nellie Bet took to leaving him for hours on end with her in the shop. The summer visitors who came to Morgan’s Woollens to buy hand-knits and yarns, and skirt lengths from the mill in Trefriw, knowing no better, used to think she was his mother. Even if she did sometimes secretly think of Glyn as her own child, as Nellie Bet’s gift to her, Amelia Roberts had never claimed him as her own.

Certainly she’d wiped Glyn’s bottom, fed him Ostermilk and burped him more times than Nellie Bet had ever done. She’d read him stories and helped with his homework, and taken him on his first visit to Chester Zoo because he wanted to see real elephants. It was to her he’d come to be tutored in his recitations for all the different local eisteddfods because his Mam had said that Anti Mill had got more patience, and she’d taken him to the Dragon Theatre to see summer shows, pantomimes and Gilbert and Sullivan. Hadn’t it been the comfort and reassurance she offered, not his mother’s, that Glyn had sought when there were crises in his life? Like the time after he’d fallen from the rocks near Tŷ Crwn (playing best-for-dying a bit too earnestly), his fractured leg held stiff in plaster of Paris for two months. He’d stayed the whole time with her, and when he’d got bored with jigsaws and reading she’d taught him to knit after he’d become fascinated by the cables and diamonds that hung from her needles… And it was to her he’d come, straight from the train in the first weeks after he’d gone to the secondary school in Harlech all bloodied and crying after the Penrhyn boys had taunted and punched him because he was a sissy.