There was Wally Ryan’s dad, Arthur of Ryan’s Antiques and Restorations, who had been to some rollicking ‘knees-ups’ in the hotel as he described them to Rob when he bumped into him on Main Street not long after chatting to Wally.

He had seen the very best days of the ballroom, when people came from miles around to dance and hear the best show-bands in the region. He had danced there with his wife May, until she died fifteen years back. ‘And of course myself and the boys played our best sets up there, back in the day,’ he added fondly, reminding Rob that Arthur used to play in a band with some of the other locals, Johnny Chips being one of them, from what he could recall.

Vivian, who ran The Grain Store Bakery, had celebrated the fifth birthday of her granddaughter in the hotel’s gardens. She and her granddaughter, who was now nineteen, still remembered how wonderful that day was. ‘It was autumn and the trees were strung with yellow lanterns that looked like giant flowers, a long table was covered in fairy cakes, jelly and ice-cream, red lemonade. Oh,’ she gasped breathlessly to Rob, clutching her chest as she remembered, ‘it was everything a little girl could dream of.’

Elle’s old friend Hazel had been married to her husband Glenn at the hotel, before they settled down to the business of running The Orchard Garden Centre and Karen of The Wonder Room Accessories had met her future husband at Hazel’s wedding. Inspired by the Gatsbyesque drama of the evening, the beauty of the sugarloaf in the distance and the feeling of joy and magic that the night had held, they had locked eyes during the ceremony and that, as Karen put it, was that.

Joe, the town’s general mechanic and handyman, had gone to the hotel almost religiously every Sunday to partake of Anna’s generous helpings of Sunday roast, but also to chat with her about the goings-on in the town, and to confide in her about how he missed his wife, Cora. ‘Anna’s passing has made a big enough hole in my week,’ he told Rob gruffly, ‘but the hotel not being there any more is simply unthinkable.’

Even Rob’s own mother, Grace Callahan, had fond memories of the hotel, ‘before it went to scrap’ as she acidly put it. She had taken Rob and his sister to the annual Easter picnic that had been held in the hotel’s heyday, an event of sack-races, egg-in-the-spoon, treasure hunts for children and adults alike. Elle recalled that those days had always ended in a big picnic in the gardens, Anna handing out hot meat sandwiches to one and all.

One thing was clear: the hotel was irreplaceable to Mulberry Bay and its people.