Peggy bent over the picture and then nodded. ‘Yes, dear. That’s him.’ She raised her eyes and said, ‘That’s your father.’

Almost reverently, Ella took the photograph back into her own hands and stared down at it, drinking in the sight of the man, trying to imagine what his voice sounded like, wanting, desperately, to know all about him.

‘I tell you who you ought to go and talk to. Mavis.’

‘Oh, yes,’ Ella murmured, her concentration still on the face in the photograph. ‘Uncle Danny said Mavis, or Isobel, might be able to help.’

‘She and Isobel were with your mum all the time at Suddaby. I think Isobel’s abroad at the moment. But of the two, I would say Mavis was your best bet anyway.’ Peggy smiled. ‘If anyone knows about him, Mavis will!’

‘Oh, Ella, he was a lovely man!’ Mavis clapped her fat hands together and beamed delightedly when she had listened to all that Ella had to tell her, about everything that had happened to bring her to this point. ‘Are you going to get in touch with him, to see him?’

‘Oh, yes,’ Ella answered promptly.

‘I’m sure he’ll be thrilled. Such a kind man, he was. Only . . .’ Her face clouded.

‘What, Aunty Mave?’

‘At the time – in the war, I mean – he was married.’

Ella nodded. ‘Well, I’d guessed as much. There had to be more than just the fact that he was a high-ranking officer and she a lowly corporal to stop them getting married. Unless, of course,’ she added bitterly, ‘it was just a fling and she meant nothing to him.’

Mavis shook her head vehemently until her chin wobbled. ‘No, no, he wasn’t like that. I mean, he wasn’t that sort of man. Very honest, very honourable.’

‘It wasn’t very honourable to have an affair with a WAAF if he was already married, was it?’

Mavis’s eyes were troubled. ‘We could never get anything out of your mum. She was incredibly loyal to him. She never actually told us who it was, we just guessed.’

Ella stared at her. ‘Then you mean, you don’t really know that it was Philip Trent? Not for sure?’

Mavis wriggled her shoulders in embarrassment. ‘For a time – we – we thought it was someone else . . .’

‘Who?’

‘I’d rather not say.’

‘Aunty Mave . . .’ Ella began warningly.

‘Oh, very well,’ Mavis said, capitulating at once. ‘We thought it was Danny Eland. She was always talking about him, always writing to him, and when he married someone else – I forget her name – well, your mum nearly went berserk.’

‘Rosie,’ Ella said, almost absently. ‘He married Rosie. So you don’t know then,’ she said slowly, ‘just why Danny and my mum didn’t marry?’

Mavis shook her head.

Quietly, Ella said, ‘They were half-brother and -sister.’

Mavis’s face was a picture. ‘Brother and sister!’ Her huge frame collapsed into a chair, conveniently close.