At the camp he was in charge of political education, and he told his grandfather he had organized a series of lectures by left-wing dons from Cambridge. ‘I tell them it’s their chance to get out of the ivory tower and meet the working class, and they find it hard to refuse me.’

Granda’s pale-blue eyes looked down his long, sharp nose. ‘I hope our lads teach them a thing or two about the real world.’

Lloyd pointed to Tom Griffiths’s son, standing in the open back door and listening. At sixteen, Lenny already had the characteristic Griffiths shadow of a black beard that never went away even when his cheeks were freshly shaved. ‘Lenny had an argument with a Marxist lecturer.’

‘Good for you, Len,’ said Granda. Marxism was popular in South Wales, which was sometimes jokingly called Little Moscow, but Granda had always been fiercely anti-Communist.

Lloyd said: ‘Tell Granda what you said, Lenny.’

Lenny grinned and said: ‘In 1872 the anarchist leader Mikhail Bakunin warned Karl Marx that Communists in power would be as oppressive as the aristocracy they replaced. After what has happened in Russia, can you honestly say Bakunin was wrong?’

Granda clapped his hands. A good debating point had always been relished around his kitchen table.

Lloyd’s grandmother poured him a fresh cup of tea. Cara Williams was grey, lined and bent, like all the women of her age in Aberowen. She asked Lloyd: ‘Are you courting yet, my lovely?’

The men grinned and winked.

Lloyd blushed. ‘Too busy studying, Grandmam.’ But an image of Daisy Peshkov came into his mind, together with the phone number: Mayfair two four three four.

His grandmother said: ‘Who’s this Ruby Carter, then?’

The men laughed, and Uncle Billy said: ‘Caught out, boyo!’

Lloyd’s mother had obviously been talking. ‘Ruby is membership officer of my local Labour Party in Cambridge, that’s all,’ Lloyd protested.

Billy said sarcastically: ‘Oh, aye, very convincing’, and the men laughed again.

‘You wouldn’t want me to go out with Ruby, Grandmam,’ Lloyd said. ‘You’d think she wears her clothes too tight.’

‘She doesn’t sound very suitable,’ Cara said. ‘You’re a university man, now. You must set your sights higher.’

She was just as snobbish as Daisy, Lloyd perceived. ‘There’s nothing wrong with Ruby Carter,’ he said. ‘But I’m not in love with her.’

‘You must marry an educated woman, a schoolteacher or a trained nurse.’

The trouble was that she was right. Lloyd liked Ruby, but he would never love her. She was pretty enough, and intelligent, too, and Lloyd was as vulnerable as the next man to a curvy figure, but still he knew she was not right for him. Worse, Grandmam had put her wrinkled old finger precisely on the reason: Ruby’s outlook was restricted, her horizons narrow. She was not exciting. Not like Daisy.

‘That’s enough women’s chatter,’ Granda said. ‘Billy, tell us the news from Spain.’

‘It’s bad,’ said Billy.

All Europe was watching Spain. The left-wing government elected last February had suffered an attempted military coup backed by Fascists and conservatives. The rebel general, Franco, had won support from the Catholic Church. The news had struck the rest of the continent like an earthquake. After Germany and Italy, would Spain, too, fall under the curse of Fascism?