Only when walking in the woods and fields with Ruby did he appear to relax. And yet, however gently she posed her questions, he still refused to talk much about what they had been going through. Only at the very last moment did he let slip that this would be his final leave for a while: they were being posted. He would not say where.

They married on the Monday before he left, a hastily convened affair at a registry office. Her mother had been saving for years for this moment and when she saw Ruby in her wedding dress she burst into tears. ‘War or no war, you’ll have a day to remember for the rest of your lives,’ she said.

And what a day it had been: bright sunshine, puffy white clouds in the sky, the smiles of many good friends and such joy that she felt she might burst. Those two nights at the Mill Hotel afterwards – their honeymoon – were the happiest of her life. Although at first shy with each other, she discovered in herself a new world of passion, of intense bliss, that seemed to have been waiting in the wings for all her girlhood years. She felt complete.

They spent the daytime walking the water meadows, stopping to watch the mysterious brown fish languidly swimming against the flow of the river, listening to the larks calling overhead and, once, spying the brilliant blue flash of a kingfisher.

‘I never want this to end,’ she’d sighed, giddy with gladness. ‘Please don’t go, Bertie. I can’t bear to be without you.’

‘I’ll be back soon, I promise,’ he said, and she believed him.

Even when he left Ruby refused to worry, determined to remain strong and cheerful. That’s what he had asked of her, after all. He was doing his duty for King and Country and he’d promised, hand on heart, that he would stay out of danger. Of course she would miss him, of course she cried herself to sleep. But he would come home before long, she knew that for certain. Bertie never broke his promises.

So when, five months later, she received a telegram, followed by army form B104-83, dated September 1917 – We regret to inform you that your husband, Albert Barton, is notified as being missing in action at Passchendaele – she refused to consider that he was anything other than just temporarily out of contact. She built a hasty wall around her heart, not allowing herself to contemplate any other outcome. He’s promised to come home safe and he always keeps his promises, she wrote. He’ll turn up, soon enough. She could even hear him: ‘Just popped out for a fag, officer. Didn’t miss me, did you?’ At school he’d always been in trouble for his cheek.

She would keep calm and carry on, just as the posters exhorted, forcing herself to get dressed each day, to eat the meals which her mother so solicitously cooked for her but which, to her jaded senses, tasted like cardboard. On her way to work she nodded to the regulars on the bus and exchanged the usual pleasantries about the weather. Once there, she applied herself as efficiently as ever, pasting a smile on her face for her colleagues and customers, hoping none of them would ask her about him.