Mrs Overs had beckoned him aside the day before, just after breakfast; she’d been biting her lip with anxiety and he’d prepared himself for a rent increase, or another plumbing disaster. What she’d wanted, though, was a favour. ‘I’d be ever so grateful, Mr Jepson, I couldn’t think of anyone else to ask, Miss Appleby’s off seeing her Australian again, and Noel’s – well, to be honest, he’s in a bit of a huff with me at the moment. You’d only need to be on the stall between seven and eight, and if you could just tell Mrs Claxton – she’s the one in charge, you can’t miss her, Monty with a permanent wave – if you could just tell her that I’m feeling a bit off colour.’

‘Oh, I’m sorry about that.’

She’d darted him a look to see if he was serious. ‘Well, obviously, I’m not really. I’ve had a … well, an unexpected invitation.’ If she’d had a different sort of face, she’d have dimpled; instead, a smile – a rather lovely one – had briefly surfaced and then disappeared again. ‘But I don’t want you to feel you have to tell an untruth.’

‘Oh, I’ve told a few white lies in my time,’ he’d said.

The prizes for the tombola ranged from a fruitcake to a tin of pre-war talcum powder, speckled with rust. Each had a numbered ticket attached, and for sixpence, you could buy the chance to dip into a drum and pull out a matching ticket. ‘The thing is, Mr Jepson,’ said Mrs Claxton, in confidential tones, ‘we have a little system. If certain of the prizes were to go early on, then no one would buy any more tickets, so what we do is set aside some of the duplicate numbers – say for the fruitcake, or the tin of pears in cream – and only pop them into the drum later in the evening.’ Her expression bland, she slid a couple of tickets across the table towards him.

Jepson thought fleetingly of the article he could squeeze from this (‘Fraud Allegation Shatters Methodist Merriment’) and nodded understandingly, tucking the duplicates into his jacket pocket. The stall was situated at the back of the Drill Hall, between another selling knitted goods and a long table on which helpers were setting out sandwiches. An attempt had been made to decorate the room, faded crêpe-paper streamers pinned between the rafters, and a small holly bush in a tub in one corner, the decorations cut from tinfoil.

The place was dreadfully familiar to him from his four years of Home Guard parades, those interminable evenings of shuffle and stamp, of repetitious tasks and tedious duties, of winter rain on the windows and the pervasive smell of damp serge, of stifling summer nights when all one wanted to do was sit on a hillside with a beer.

Early in the war there had seemed some point to it – during the night Blitz, Jepson and other veterans from his platoon had been deployed on the crew of an anti-aircraft gun, thunderously loosing twenty-eight-pounders against the bombers – but during the years that had followed, as the threat of invasion receded, thrice-weekly attendance at the Drill Hall had become yet another petty home-front penance to be endured, and none of them had been sorry when the Guard was officially stood down in the autumn.