Pushing the newspaper aside, she rose from her seat, saying only, ‘I’d best go and give Maggie and Kitty a hand with the cleaning. Now that the maids have left to work in the factory, the house won’t clean itself, will it?’

Ruby was too absorbed in her grooming to even answer so Miss Fox left the room to find Kitty mopping the hall floor while Maggie polished the banister rail. Both girls had been marvellous in that respect now that she only had Mabel left, although Maggie did the lion’s share of the housework if Kitty was off to Richard’s, which was far too frequently for Foxy’s liking.

The older woman padded off to the kitchen to make sure that Cook had all she needed for the main meal. Certain foods were becoming harder to obtain, but thankfully their cook had a canny knack of being able to produce a meal from the most meagre of supplies, so up to now they had continued to eat well compared to most, although Phyllis wasn’t sure how they would fare when the produce that Arthur had grown in the garden ran out. A mental picture of him in his uniform, looking ridiculously young and vulnerable when he had come to say goodbye to them all, flashed in front of her eyes and she had to swallow the lump in her throat. Miss Fox was not a sentimental woman, but the thought of that young lad going off so bravely to fight for his country had touched her deeply, and she prayed that one day he would return safely. It was also only now that he had gone that she realised just how hard he had worked about the place.

Miss Fox suspected that the cook only stayed on because she was rather too old to change her ways, which was one blessing for them at least. Foxy dreaded to think how they would have fared if the cooking had been left to her, for she openly admitted that cooking had never been her strong point. In fact, long ago when she had been just a child herself she could remember that her mother, Katherine, had used to tease her and tell her that she was the only one she knew who could burn water if left to her own devices.

Downstairs, she found the cook chopping a large cabbage for dinner, and after checking that all was well she went off to the laundry room to do some washing. It certainly wouldn’t do itself, and now that the girls were busily engaged in the cleaning it was a case of all hands to the pump! Thank heavens for the hot weather, thought Phyllis Fox, as she soaked their drawers in the copper and fed sheets through the mangle before pegging them onto the line. War or no war, the washing had to be done.

As the year crept on, news from the front did not improve. The soldiers were dropping like flies in their thousands – mass slaughter – and being forced to live in atrocious conditions. The battlefields were a sea of mud, and corpses sank into it, some never to be seen again. When the Prime Minister broadcast that yet another half a million men were needed, once again there was a surge to enlist. Training camps were springing up all over the country and the women left behind raced to work in the armament factories.