‘Er . . . no. No, I can’t say I have.’ He looked rather shocked at such a suggestion and Catherine thought she might as well have asked if he’d ever taken part in a sex orgy or snorted coke.

‘Well, don’t worry about it; it’s not as dangerous as you think,’ she said, giving him an amused and not unsympathetic smile. ‘Try to reserve judgement until you’ve had a go. Look on it as a training exercise for your writing troops. A toning of unused muscles – a drill.’

Everyone laughed, including the Colonel.

‘Hmm,’ he said dubiously, ‘I can see you’re a very persuasive woman. Dangerous!’ But he smiled back at her.

Bunty leaned earnestly towards him, displaying a good deal of crêpey cleavage in the process: ‘I’m sure you must once have had lots of little imaginary friends to play with,’ she said encouragingly.

The Colonel hastily averted his eyes from her bosom and returned to the safety of contemplating his shoes. Louisa had a vision of him in tweed jacket and tightly knotted tie, skipping round a fairy ring with a lot of pixies, and wished Isobel had been present to enjoy this exchange. Glancing up she was surprised to catch Marnie’s eye and see a flicker of laughter there too. Perhaps a thaw was setting in?

‘Do I take it then, Catherine, that you’re of this modern school that doesn’t hold with grammar, punctuation and rhyme and all the well-tried rules that my generation was raised on?’ queried Stanley. ‘Now when I was a lad at school . . .’

‘Not at all,’ said Catherine, interrupting hastily before Stanley could get up a full head of steam and start huffing on about every detail of his education. ‘Of course all those things are very important too and we’ll come to that in a later session, but this morning’s exercise is not about rules. It’s about finding a way to get past that inner censor that so often inhibits us from writing freely – or even writing at all.’ Privately she thought that by the end of the week she might wish that Stanley’s inner censor – if he had one – would shut him up completely. ‘But before we actually start writing,’ she went on, ‘let’s go round the table, name some of our favourite authors and think what it is that makes us enjoy them.’

Bunty said coyly that she still liked to read the Little Grey Rabbit books in bed and added roguishly that she’d always seen herself as Squirrel: ‘I used to be a redhead too.’ Colonel Smithson professed a preference for military history and Stanley said he wasn’t much given to reading other people’s writing, as he didn’t want it influencing his individual style. ‘No plagiarism for me,’ he announced loftily. ‘I don’t hold with it.’