‘Use yer knife and fork, son,’ whispered Peg, looking to his sister for support but she was no better. Netta was sniggering at their lack of table manners when Wilma sprang to his defence.

‘Ma maw says we’re to use oor fingers, it’s mair hygienic. Fingers first and tongue after to lick the juice. No washing up after us.’ She stared at Netta’s gaping mouth. ‘And you’d better shut yer mouth, there’s a train coming.’

‘Well, in this house, Wilma Dixey, you’ll do whit we do. We eat civilised, and I’ll be seeing you two eat civilised too. Just pick up they forks and knives and follow what our Netta does,’ said Peg from the top of the table. The battle to tame the evacuees had begun.

Next came the palaver with the zinc bathtub and the undressing. Netta had wondered if either of the evacuees had ever seen water before, the fuss they made. Wilma was in high dudgeon, squealing for the cruelty man to rescue them from the torture of having knots combed out and searched for nits. They were sewn into their vests, which were lined with more brown paper against winter’s chills, and afterwards Peg lifted up their clothes with a pair of tongs, dumped them in a basket and put them on the compost heap to rot down. Wilma was shown how to scrub the muck out of Malky’s ears properly. Once dried by the firelight, with flushed cheeks and shiny noses, they took on a much healthier glow. After a mug of cocoa and shortbread biscuits for supper, it was up the wooden hill for the tired pair.

Peg had made up two beds in the spare bedroom at the end of the passage, the room she hoped would one day have a cot for her own bairn, God willing. These toerags wouldn’t settle down, though. Peg was up and down like a helter-skelter. ‘Whit’s it the now’?’ she yelled from the foot of the stairs.

‘Where’s our suckies? I canny sleep without ma Mary. They’re in ma paper bag.’ Netta rooted at the bottom of their sticky sandwich bag and pulled out two grubby blue felt circles on which were sewn badges imprinted with the image of the Virgin Mary and Infant Jesus, colours faded with the dribble of years, smelling of nothing on earth.

‘Father in Heaven, spare us such Popery… would you believe the day we’ve taken in idolators to this hoose? The Lord has very strange ways, does he not?’

Angus sucked on his pipe unperturbed. ‘Come on, Peg, any mother who makes sure both her weans have some comfort from their own home is a good one in my book, Pape or Proddy, green or orange. Give me their sucky cloths. It’ll no bother my conscience to take them upstairs.’