Each day she relaid the open fireplaces in Pa’s study and the living room with careful pyramids of screwed-up newspaper and twigs or kindling, topped with a few lumps of coal. There was plenty of wood to be had in the countryside, but the fireplaces were only fit for burning the expensive coal that was delivered in sacks and emptied down a chute into a coalhole in the dark, cobwebby cellar. Being so unused to managing open fires, and Pa being too mean to stoke them up properly, we shivered through that winter, missing the gas fires that had kept our London flat so toasty warm. I’d never really appreciated the convenience of gas, until we didn’t have it.

In addition to her duties at the vicarage, Mrs Diamond was a pillar of the church community and a mine of information about everything and everyone in the village. She organised the cleaning and flower rotas, and chivvied the volunteers who mowed the grass and weeded the graves and paths in the churchyard. Despite having lost a leg in the war, her husband, George, was still very active and always available to do odd jobs, she told us. And it was she who suggested that ‘the Rev’, as she called him, should hold a small sherry party after the morning service on Christmas Day.

‘Nice for them to meet you personally,’ she told him. ‘Just a small glass does wonders, with orange squash for the children and the Temp’rance lot. And they won’t linger long. They’ll be hungry for their dinner.’

Thinking back, all the people who would come to matter to me, for better or worse, came to the vicarage that Christmas Day. Kit and his parents, the Blackmans, Robert, the Timpson twins, the redoubtable Miss Calver. Everyone except Eli.

4

Christmas in a vicarage is never much of a family time, which is just as well, because with only the three of us we didn’t make much of a family. Any aunts or uncles or cousins were too far away, and Pa was too busy for us to travel back to London to be with friends. It was only our second Christmas without Mum, so it was probably a helpful distraction to have the house filled with guests.

Around thirty members of the congregation took up our invitation and came back for the promised glasses of sherry. I did my dutiful-daughter bit, taking people’s coats, circulating with the heavy sherry decanter – ‘Only an inch,’ Mrs D had instructed me, ‘or they’ll never go home.’ Jimmy passed around bowls of peanuts and potato crisps until he got bored and disappeared upstairs.