He would become so upset when Dad was due to leave after dinner on Sunday night that Dad would promise to come to see him after the evening meeting to say goodnight and sit with him until he went to sleep. I only know this because Aunty Maisie told Sister Everude who told Sister Jack who told Anne King’s mum who told Anne who told me.

Caleb wrote a letter to Daniel and asked Ruthy to post it for him. It was already sealed when he handed it to her, so Ruthy didn’t like to open it. I was quite happy to do so, but she told me it wasn’t our business and what could it say anyway? Suddenly there were more letters from Daniel than ever before, and all of them were handed over by Dad to Ruthy on Sundays. Ruthy said some of them didn’t make sense to her. It was as though Daniel thought he had explained things to us when he hadn’t and was referring to situations he’d never written about before. She handed them on to me, and I studied them carefully. After reading a few I had a suspicion that at first I didn’t want to consider, but did seem pretty obvious to me. I thought Daniel had written to us a lot more than we knew, and something had happened to some of his letters. And I had a horrible feeling I knew what it was.

It prompted me to write to him myself. I sent him all three of our addresses just to be sure he knew where to find each of us, and I wrote the following:

Dear Daniel,

First, we miss you like mad. I hope you are impressed that I started with ‘first’ and not ‘firstly’. As you can see, Ruthy is rubbing off on me.

I have read the last three letters Ruthy passed on to me. I’m not sure if you know this, but we usually only get a letter from you every six weeks or so. I now think you’ve been writing to us much more often than that. I wouldn’t like to say what happened to them, but the good news is at the moment Dad is handing them straight over to us, so you can be pretty sure we will see them all at least for the time being.

I don’t want to worry you because I am sure you have enough to worry about as it is, but I don’t know what’s going on. We don’t know when Mum will be back, and it is very hard on Ruthy, and Caleb in particular. If you have any news, can you send it to me, or ring me on the number I put on the back of the envelope? If you know anything hard, can you tell me first so we can work out how to tell the little ones?

Dad is getting very skinny and he doesn’t sing the tenor bit in the hymns anymore, and he doesn’t have a hanky in his pocket, even a snotty one. I am sorry I haven’t written to you before but you know what I’m like and I know Ruthy does it for all of us. Please ring me if you can. We are sad, but we are okay so don’t worry.