Some of them were short stories, begun and finished in an evening, fairy stories and animal stories and stories of good and bad children, the good ones rewarded and the bad ones punished, according to the convention of that day. A few of these were part of the stock-in-trade of all tellers of stories to children, but far more of them were of her own invention, for she said it was easier to make up a tale than to try to remember one. The children liked her own stories best. “Something out of your own head, Mother,” they would beg, and she would wrinkle up her brow and pretend to think hard, then begin: “Once upon a time.”

One story remained with Laura long after hundreds of others had become a blur of pleasurable memory. Not because it was one of her mother’s best, for it was not, but because it had a colour scheme which appealed to a childish taste. It was about a little girl who crept under a bush on a heath, “just like Hardwick Heath, where we went blackberrying, you know,” and found a concealed opening which led to an underground palace in which all the furniture and hangings were pale blue and silver. “Silver tables and silver chairs and silver plates to eat off and all the cushions and curtains made of pale blue satin.” The heroine had marvellous adventures, but they left no impression on Laura’s mind, while the blue and silver, deep down under the earth, shone with a kind of moonlight radiance in her imagination. But when her mother, at her urgent request, tried to tell the story again the magic was gone, although she introduced silver floors and silver ceilings, hoping to please her. Perhaps she overdid it.

Then there were serial stories which went on in nightly instalments for weeks, or perhaps months, for nobody wanted them to end and the teller’s invention never flagged. There was one, however, which came to a sudden and tragic conclusion. One night when it was bedtime, or past bedtime, and the children had begged for more and been given it and were still begging for more, their mother lost patience and startled them both by saying, “and then he came to the sea and fell in and was eaten by a shark, and that was the end of poor Jimmy,” and the end of their story, too, for what further developments were possible?