‘I see,’ said Noel, marking his place and closing the book. ‘The council won the quiz, by the way, even though I was scrupulously fair in every possible respect. And Mrs Claxton gave me the left-over prizes from the tombola.’

‘Oh, well, that’s all right, then.’ Vee found herself yawning, hugely. ‘I’d better get off to bed, plenty to do tomorrow. Same goes for you, young man. Nighty night.’

Noel listened to her footsteps along the hall. She seemed to be limping with both feet. He’d stayed up partly to check that she arrived home safely and partly to tell her about some of the more amusing events at the Drill Hall, but it seemed that she’d already been sufficiently amused this evening. She hadn’t even noticed the tin of pears and cream or the fruitcake.

‘It’s very odd that nobody won the best prizes,’ he’d said to Mrs Claxton, during the tidy-up. ‘Could the matching tickets have inadvertently been left out?’

‘Why don’t you take them home, dear,’ said Mrs Claxton, apparently failing to hear the question. ‘You’ve been a great help. Your aunt must be very proud of you. And do thank Mr Jepson, when he’s feeling better.’

Their eyes met briefly.

‘My husband never turned a hair during the raids,’ said Mrs Claxton, ‘but if someone lights a match in the dark, he’s straight under the table. It takes him back to the trenches, you see – snipers. And the language afterwards … he’s ashamed, though he can’t help himself. I should think it’s the same thing with your Mr Jepson – some nasty event in the past must have set him off.’

She folded the tablecloth with sober precision, her smooth, bright manner momentarily dented. ‘I hope this is the last war,’ she said. ‘I hope you youngsters manage it better than we did. I hope you find better things to do than kill one another.’

‘“And they shall beat their swords into plough-shares,”’ said Noel, by way of agreement, clattering the last chair on to a stack. It was one of the few Bible verses of which Mattie had approved.

On her way to Post 9 on Christmas Eve, on a morning so cold that the water in her kettle had frozen overnight, Winnie saw a black-and-white cat hanging around the ruins of Falcon Road – on the look-out for rodents, presumably, given that any residents had long since left. The only visible human being was a familiar bearded figure carrying a bucket and wearing a brown mohair hat that he claimed had been given to him by an Afghan tribesman. Rather than, say, swiped from a second-hand clothes shop on the Caledonian Road.

‘What?’ he shouted, catching sight of Winnie. ‘I am doing nothing wrong. Nothing. This is PERSECUTION.’

‘Looting,’ said Winnie. ‘Article 2:4 of the Special Wartime Measures Act. “The removal by a private individual of household objects from the site of a dwelling destroyed or partially destroyed by enemy action.” What’s in the bucket today?’