‘Dearest darling, there’s so much that I want to say to you and yet so little to actually tell you about. Each day here is much the same as the next, up at 6.30 and then fourteen hours of petty activity and dreadful tedium …’

‘Dearest darling, I’ve been trying to store up things to write to you about but most of them are so tiny and dull that they’ve fallen down the cracks in my memory and I’m sitting here, staring out at the compound (it’s raining for the first time in a while), simply wishing that you were sitting beside me …’

She re-opened one letter after another. The dates shifted to August, and then to September and the start of the Blitz and, though she’d tried not to alarm him, there was a change in Emlyn’s tone.

‘Darling Winnie, I gather that you might all be having rather a difficult time of it at home. I know you haven’t said much, but we manage to learn odd bits and bobs along the way, and it’s worrying the hell out of me …’

‘Dearest darling, of course I’m proud of you in your new job, but do be careful. I’m sure there’d still be plenty of useful work for you to do if you went to live somewhere quieter, and it’s quite painful having to sit here with little or nothing to occupy me while my dearest girl is in danger …’

Winnie remembered wondering what on earth she could write about, since any mention of her work, or sleepless nights, or shelters, or the myriad disruptions to daily life that stemmed from nightly bombing, led to pages of anxious admonition, and the subject matter of her own letters began to shrink, so that each one became a checklist of the same, careful topics: books read, wireless programmes listened to, neighbours’ gossip, rationing complaints …

‘Dearest darling Winnie, I’m always thinking and worrying about you, as you know, but you might laugh when I tell you what I dreamt about last night: it was that time when you were trying to extricate one of your shoes from under the bed, using the broom, and then the head of the broom came off, and we ended up having to lift the mattress and reach through the springs, in a dusty and annoying way. I woke up having made the momentous dream-decision that we must ensure we have a house with a bedroom large enough to have the bed entirely in the middle of the room, so that lost shoes can be retrieved from either side …’

‘Dearest darling Winnie, I’ve been thinking further on the bedroom scheme in my last letter. Yet another advantage of the central bed would be the chance for us each to have our own nightstand, and perhaps a bookshelf as well – and a lamp each, too. I’ve done a little sketch of the sort of thing I mean …’

The next letter was a further rumination on the subject of bedroom decor, with blinds versus curtains displacing the tense enquiries about her welfare. Was it at this point that she’d begun to lose the habit of carrying Emlyn’s letters around with her and re-reading them at quiet moments? A letter largely about bedside tables, however lovingly intended, is still largely about bedside tables. She’d read each one quickly and dutifully and had quickly and dutifully written her own in reply. It occurred to her now, for the first time, that perhaps Emlyn had been as uninterested in the non-availability of pencils as she herself was in whether ceilings should be painted lighter or darker than walls. They’d no longer been writing to each other; they’d been standing back to back, talking into the wind, words lost, only a thin warmth still tangible.