‘You’ll be needing some bits and bobs, I’d imagine,’ said Pat, huddling back into the protection of Debbie’s cottage opposite. Some days Debbie would let you wait in her house until the bus came. Today she hadn’t poked her head out the front door. Pat and me were soaked to the bone.

‘This and that,’ I said, and wondered to myself why I was being vague.

‘Aye, I’m short of that meself.’

Pat was in her early sixties with a face like yesterday’s rice pudding. She was small and round and had worn the same burgundy overcoat for as long as I’d known her. She was a hard worker though. Her husband, Keith, had taken ill a few years back and their son had no interest in taking on the family joinery business so it had fallen to Pat to make ends meet. She cleaned at the school and for a few of the big houses out towards Lanercost. Polished the silverware and glassware for the big fancy club on the Longtown road. She usually cycled but the weather had made that impossible. She needed the bus to come. Needed to deposit her savings in the Brampton bank before Keith could find where she kept them and limped his way down Samson’s.

‘Oh, there she is,’ said Pat, suddenly, under her breath. She raised a hand and waved at Mrs Parker, who was emerging from the post office with an empty basket over her arm. ‘I wonder if her halo keeps the rain off.’

‘She’s a kindly soul,’ I said, not really paying attention. ‘All those letters to write. Food parcels to send. She’s one of the good ones.’

Pat gave me a look like I was daft.

‘Short memory, Felicity,’ she said, a bit harsh for my liking. ‘Might be a saint these days but she were a terror when she were a girl. That poor brother of her’s had to bugger off to university just to avoid her. That were a daft thing to do cos he barely came back and he ended up shot to bits in the war. She can send letters and butter and bacon to half the starving families in Germany and she’ll still always be that nasty cow from the big house as far as I’m concerned. Anyways, Germans are doing better than we are these days. All the POWs are making a fortune over there. What’s she still bother with them for, eh? They may have worked her farm but I reckon twenty-two years later it’s time to pack it in.’

‘Maybe she’s being kind,’ I said, and it sounded feeble. I blushed a little and turned to the street, where Mrs Parker was climbing into her expensive car. As usual, she had a face worse than the weather.