‘I wouldn’t stay even if the Chippenham Players cast me as Napoleon. Which might suit me, actually,’ she’d said, and her mother had looked hurt.

‘It’s only that I want you to be safe. After all, it’s nearly all over and it would be so awful if …’

‘I got squashed by the last bomb of the war?’

‘Don’t say it, darling. You joke about the most awful things.’

‘Sorry.’

She wondered what her mother would say if she could eavesdrop on Post 9, the air spiky with swear-words, no topic too delicate for a laugh, sudden death the casual punchline.

Under her mother’s letter was one from her friend Elsie, a Wren stationed in Portsmouth, and having ‘the most smashing time in my whole life, Winnie’, and beneath that was a bundle held together by a paper band, the latter stamped with a Red Cross and signed by the censor. Winnie felt a familiar flattening of the spirits and then she broke the band, and three letters dropped on to the table. That made four from Emlyn in the last fortnight. She chose one at random, and slit the envelope.

Dearest Win, I have been thinking about our garden and I’ve realized something terrible – there is nowhere for us to sit! Of course, we could pick up a garden bench for a song, but I have been thinking along the lines of a little gazebo, nothing fancy, just a raised platform roofed with trellis, perhaps near the orchard, where we could sit and catch the last of the …

She stopped reading, the page drooping in her hand. There had been one letter from him last week and three the week before that, and she hadn’t actually counted them all but if they averaged eight a month since May 1940, when Emlyn had been captured at Dunkirk, then that came to hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of letters, and the green rattan suitcase under her bed was packed tight with them and she was having to put the overspill in a sewing basket, and still they came. Winnie wrote to him once a week, trying to amuse with everyday gossip, and received in return these reams of domestic fantasy, microscopic in their detail – the motor-car the two of them would choose, the breed of dog they’d pick, the gramophone records they’d play, the proposed paint-colour in the imaginary porch of the house that they didn’t own. I think, on consideration, I’d prefer to concrete the drive rather than use gravel; the latter’s very hard on tyres, although there’s something rather swish about the noise, isn’t there?