She was about to tear open his letters when she noticed that Daisy was drooping in her chair, so she gathered her into her arms and carried her upstairs for a wash before bedtime. The child was asleep before Peggy had finished reading a story, so she snuggled her beneath the bedclothes with her favourite toy rabbit, kissed her forehead and switched on the night light. With a loving smile at Jim’s photograph on the bedside table, she hurried back into the kitchen to fetch his letters and join Cordelia in the back garden.

Cordelia was sitting in one of the deckchairs wrestling with her knitting. It was supposed to be a matinee jacket for Ivy’s baby, but was a tangle of wool interspersed with holes where she’d dropped the stitches.

Peggy quickly unravelled it for her, knitted a couple of rows to start her off, and then settled back in the other chair to enjoy the evening sun and open the earlier of the two letters from Jim.

To her disappointment it was very short and full of moans. He couldn’t tell her where he was, why he hadn’t written for so long, or much about what he was doing, but it seemed he’d left the comfortable quarters on the coast and was back in a tent somewhere. The monsoon was the worst Jim had ever experienced, the rats were as big as dogs, the mud was up to his knees, and everything was constantly sodden and stinking. According to Jim it was a filthy place, and it would have been cleaner living in the jungle. There was no entertainment, and it seemed to him that the troops in Burma had been forgotten by ENSA as well as the rest of the world.

Peggy gazed across the sunlit vegetable patch and lit a cigarette. Jim was obviously feeling very low. She gave a sigh and returned to the rest of his letter.

Their camp had been set up near the shattered remains of a village pagoda, and he expressed his disgust at the fact that the beautifully carved alabaster figures of Buddha had been all but destroyed by the Jap invaders. Life was made completely miserable by the wet, the humidity and the swarms of mosquitoes, and he was down with yet another cold.

They were now all on standby again, which meant another round of packing, but he hoped it meant they’d either be sent somewhere decent, or finally receive their orders to board ship for home. He finished off by sending his love to everyone and his hope that this purgatory would soon be at an end, and he could be back in the cool of a Cliffehaven autumn.

Peggy tore open the second letter to find that he’d got part of his wish, for he was now stationed somewhere more comfortable in huts rather than tents, with proper beds to sleep in.