Margaret had always known that her father was sensitive, fragile in emotion and crushingly hard on himself. He was a man of urgent convictions of black versus white, right versus wrong. It was their mother who could laugh at things – how could she not, being a Watts? – and keep a balance, a flexibility more characteristic of Congregationalism. She seemed less in dread of the wrath of God which seemed to pursue her troubled husband. Leah was in awe of William and always deferred to him as a good Christian wife. But Margaret remembered her mother’s religion as that of service and kindness to others, of light and laughter, rather than the need to purge her soul.

They grew up as a happy household then – outward-looking and kind. Margaret idolized her father. He was a tall, striking man, wide-shouldered from his childhood labouring on a farm. It was in his father’s Shropshire fields that he had first experienced the strange visions which had made him so certain of being chosen by God. Every Sunday he stood in the high pulpit, urgently entreating his congregation of villagers and farmers to the path of righteousness. So far as Margaret was concerned, he was the source of all direction and rightness. She saw how he spent himself to do good. And she even looked like him, with his large grey eyes and wide, upturned mouth which gave him a permanently amiable look and tempered his severity.

The family prayed together. Leah read to her children as they grew and all of them were vividly affected by Dr Barnardo’s book The Children’s Treasury and Advocate of the Homeless and Destitute, full of inspiring stories. As soon as they were old enough, they taught in the Sunday school, visited the sick and troubled in the area and went to the village school.

It was only John who, had he lived long enough, would have been sent away to the Congregationalist school at Caterham. There were such schools for girls, but their mother refused to let them go.

‘I can’t see any point in having children if you’re just going to send them all away,’ she told her husband. ‘It’s bad enough sending John, but I want my girls close to me – they can learn plenty here and make up their minds where the Lord calls them to.’

So all this particular hope was invested in the boy. Margaret remembered the terrible sense of anguish which laid itself upon the house when John died of a fever at the age of three. They all ached with missing the sweet-natured little boy, but it was William Hanson who seemed to take it as a personal affront, a challenge to the force of his commitment. He became more silent and severe.