Determined not to go back into the kitchen without her mother, Ella waited in the hall. She glanced up the narrow stairs and then began to climb, pausing to listen every time a step creaked. She reached the top and stood on the tiny landing between two doors. Glancing just once over her shoulder, she lifted the latch, pushed open the door to her left and stepped into what was obviously her grandparents’ bedroom, for in the corner on a stand was Grandpa Godfrey’s best Sunday suit.

Like the rooms downstairs, the furniture was old, but solid and lovingly polished to a rich dark mahogany colour. A picture of the Virgin and Child was the only ornament on the stark, white walls. Ella ran her fingers along the multicoloured patchwork quilt covering the iron bedstead and her feet made no sound on the thick peg rug at the side of the bed. In the far corner, a green-patterned bowl, huge jug and soap-dish stood on a marble washstand.

Ella’s darting glance came to rest on a line of silver-framed photographs on the pink-painted mantelpiece above the fire-grate. She tiptoed forward and bent closer to look at them. One was of a little girl with long flowing hair; that must be her own mother, Kate, as a child. She knew now, since meeting Esther Godfrey, that Kate had inherited her hair colouring from her own mother, but where did Ella’s own colour come from then?

‘Such a pretty strawberry blonde,’ the hairdresser always said as she trimmed Ella’s tightly curling hair. ‘But I do wish you’d let her grow it a bit longer, Kate. It’s so pretty . . .’

‘It’s not my fault,’ Kate would laugh. ‘There I was thinking I’d get a little girl I could dress up in pretty dresses with long, golden curls, a bit like Alice in Wonderland, and what do I get . . .?’ By this time Ella would be laughing with her mother, knowing what was coming next but knowing, too, that it was gentle, loving teasing. ‘A tomboy with short hair who’d spend her life in trousers and shorts given half a chance.’

Ella’s wandering thoughts came back to the pictures in front of her. There was another of a young woman in a uniform. That was definitely her mother, because Ella knew she had been in the WAAFs in the last war. Kate’s two best friends from those days – Mavis and Isobel – still visited them quite often and they were Ella’s godmothers too.

Another photograph showed a small child with straight, mousey hair and a sulky face. Perhaps that was her mother’s younger sister, Lilian. Ella couldn’t be sure, for her aunt lived away and they had never met.