Once tea was over and Daisy asleep in her bed, Ivy, Rita and Sarah decided it was time for Cordelia to dye her legs with gravy browning to make it look as if she was wearing nylons. There was a huge amount of laughter and chatter as Cordelia willingly succumbed to their gentle ministrations, and everyone fell about when she tried to draw a pencil line up the back of her leg and ended up with a wriggly line that started at the ankle and finished up going across her knee.

‘I’ve started a new fashion,’ she said defiantly, lifting her skirt and admiring her handiwork. ‘A straight line is very boring. This is far more fun.’

Peggy was delighted to see them so happy, but the siren call of those letters couldn’t be ignored any longer, so she took them into the bedroom so she could absorb them properly in peace and the soft glow of Daisy’s night-light.

Anne was very busy down in Somerset with end-of-term tests and the arranging of a sports day at the village school. Her little girls, Rose Margaret and Emily Jane, had recovered from a bout of measles which had spread through the school like wildfire, and even infected one of the German POWs who was working on the farm. Calving was in full swing and the harvest would begin once the weather became more clement. Life was quite hectic, and she apologised for being so slack in not writing as often as she should.

Peggy was delighted to learn that Anne had received a card from Martin, who said they were being treated quite well, and that they’d just received Red Cross parcels for the first time. These had proved to be a huge treat and helped no end to boost morale amongst the men, who had no news of how the war was going or what was happening to their loved ones. Like Anne, Peggy could only conclude that the Germans in charge of the camp were heavily censoring the prisoners’ mail, or just not delivering it.

Peggy read her very young granddaughters’ almost illegible scrawl at the bottom of the letter, smiled at the row of rather wobbly kisses, and the two drawings of what were supposed to be newborn calves, but more resembled purple and yellow beetles.