Dusting behind the nets at the bedroom window the previous week, she couldn’t help but notice the postman deliver something in a cardboard tube to Rex’s front door. A day later, and from the same vantage point, she had spied Rex struggling up the path with a window-sized piece of board, which he was trying to hide under a tartan blanket from the Rover. Maureen was intrigued. She had waited for him in the garden; she even took out a basket of dried washing and pegged it again on the line, but he didn’t come out all afternoon.

She knocked to ask if he had enough milk, and he mumbled through a crack in the door that he did, and that he was having an early night. And yet when she went out to check the back garden at eleven o’clock, the lights were still on in his kitchen, and she could see him pottering about.

The next day a rap at the letterbox had brought her rushing into the hallway, where she found a strange square shape against the bobbled glass, with what looked like a small head floating on top. Opening the door, she discovered Rex behind a large flat brown-paper package tied with loops of string. “Do you mind if I come in?” he said. He could barely get the words out.

Maureen couldn’t remember the last time someone had given her a gift when it wasn’t Christmas or her birthday. She had ushered him inside, and into the sitting room, offering tea or coffee. He insisted there was no time for either; she must open her present. “Tear the paper, Maureen,” he said.

She couldn’t. It was too exciting. She had unpeeled one corner of brown paper and found a hard frame of wood, and then she unpeeled the other edge and found the same again. Rex sat with his hands clasped in his lap, and every time she peeled off a new strip his feet lifted as if he were jumping over an invisible rope, and he gasped.

“Hurry, hurry,” he said.

“Whatever is it?”

“Pull it out. Go on. Have a proper look, Maureen. I made it for you.”

It was a giant-sized map of England mounted on a pinboard. On the back he had attached two small mirror hooks, so that it could be hung from the wall. He pointed to Kingsbridge, and there she found a drawing pin, wound with blue thread, that stretched to Loddiswell. From there, the blue thread crept to South Brent, and on again to Buckfast Abbey. Harold’s route to date was marked up with blue thread and drawing pins, ending at Bath. At the top of England, Berwick-upon-Tweed was marked with fluorescent-green highlighter pen, and a small homemade flag. There was even a separate box of drawing pins so that she could display Harold’s postcards.