‘When you come back to the house, I’ll give you some candles and a box of matches. There’s probably a spare paraffin lantern you can have too,’ she says, reading his mind. She brushes down the front of her housecoat, as if reluctant to take the grubbiness of the tack room back with her. She turns to leave but, with her hand on the door, she pauses. She twists round to face him. ‘They are good people. Kind. Trusting. Don’t you take advantage of that.’

Having delivered her message in no uncertain terms, she leaves him to settle in.

Chapter Twelve

Jack

June 1939

He is not to be trusted yet with the milking.

‘We’ll break you in gently,’ Jim had told him the night before. ‘I’ll get you started on some general chores after you’ve had your breakfast. I’ll make sure you’re up in time to enjoy a good feed.’

True to his word, the farmer taps on the tack room window around seven the next morning, after he has driven the milked herd back to pasture. Jack is already waiting. The sound of cattle shuffling towards the parlour had woken him just after dawn. Stiff from the unrelenting camp bed, he had pulled on his trousers and buttoned his shirt, before heading from the stables to avail himself of the privy, taking the ewer with him. On his way back, he had filled the chipped jug at the cast iron pump that stands at the edge of the yard, the pump handle creaking with every lift and thrust.

Back in the tack room, he used the water to wash, then to shave. He had procured a mirror from Muriel the evening before, having plucked up the courage to enquire after one when she had emerged from the cellar and unceremoniously handed him the ewer and bowl. She had tutted and muttered under her breath before disappearing back through the door tucked under the stairs, returning a short time later with a small mirror of mottled glass. She wiped away the sticky string of cobweb clinging to its wooden frame.

‘That’ll have to do,’ she said, her expression sour.

‘It’ll do well, thank you,’ Jack had assured her, but she proved immune to his gratitude and with a huff had inched past him to retrieve her coat from the hook in the kitchen, leaving the house without so much as a backward glance.

The housekeeper is already in situ when he enters the kitchen now with Jim. She is standing at the range before a frying pan lined with bacon and glances up at them as they come in. Offering no greeting, she cracks the egg in her hand against the rim of a second pan of spitting fat, which hisses angrily as the egg slumps in.