Throughout all this – moving out of London to stay with Auntie Mary in Buckinghamshire, moving back once the Blitz was over, the loss of our house to a V-1 rocket, and having to live in temporary accommodation with another family – I never felt adrift with Mum by my side. Scared of the bombs, yes, and desperately worried about Pa’s safety. But even when I’d had to move school twice in one year, or when bomb damage made it impossible to get there, Mum insisted on continuing my lessons at home, and I never once imagined that everything would not work out fine, in the end.

Jimmy was five when the war ended, and I was ten. Even though he had no physical scars, Pa was like a stranger when he came home. Loud noises made him jumpy, and he snapped at Jimmy when he cried. Mum was worried about him, I could tell. He smiled and joked sometimes just as before, but often looked as though he was only partly with us and would wander off for long, unexplained walks, sometimes into the night, or to the church to pray. At least that’s what he claimed, although I couldn’t imagine anyone being able to kneel for so many hours at a time.

Then came the terrible day when Mum eventually admitted that she was really feeling quite poorly. ‘It’s a bit more than the flu this time, my darlings,’ she said, in a mastery of understatement. After several weeks in hospital she returned as thin and white as a ghost, with all the usual sense of energy and fun knocked out of her. Throughout those gruellingly painful last months, Pa came to rely on me more and more. Slowly, over that time, he began to confide in me and, although I hated the reasons why, at last it felt as though I was doing something useful.

‘It’s you and me against the world now, darling,’ he would say when he kissed me goodnight. Somehow, through all the fear and sadness, I’d felt sure we would survive.

Those first few months in the village, Pa was so caught up with trying to make a good impression in his first proper parish that I’m sure he never noticed how lonely I was.