Anne tried to protest, but Cissy talked over her. ‘What you haven’t considered in your clearly busy little life, is the fact that Mum has bravely kept going these past six years by holding on to the belief that we’ll all come home once the war’s over. She’s clung to it through thick and thin, even though she’s terrified that something might happen to Dad. And I think it’s thoughtless of you not to at least try to come home earlier.’

‘I did suggest she came down here,’ said Anne crossly. ‘But it seems her job at the factory and her evacuees are more important than us.’

‘Don’t you dare get on your high horse about her job when you won’t give up your teaching, or step back from the political nonsense you’ve got involved in. If you’d taken just a minute to consider how you’d feel if the boot was on the other foot, and you’d been separated from your children for five years, you might have had some glimmering of what Mum’s been through.

‘Don’t forget, Anne,’ she carried on over her sister’s protest. ‘Charlie was only a few years older than your Rose Margaret is now when he left here – just a little boy – Mum’s baby.’ She took a shallow breath. ‘And Martin would be just as happy here as on the farm. All he really needs to recuperate is to have his family around him. And the same applies to Mum. God knows she’s waited long enough.’

‘I don’t appreciate your tone,’ snapped Anne.

‘I really don’t care,’ retorted Cissy. ‘It’s time you were taken down a peg or two when you’re being such a selfish, unthinking cow.’

‘It takes one to know one. How often have you been to visit Mum? It’s not as if you’re a million miles away, is it? But then I suspect you’ve been having such a high old time with all those pilots to flirt with and parties to go to, you haven’t given Mum a thought.’

Cissy gripped the receiver, her temper now at boiling point. ‘I came when I was off duty – which wasn’t that often – and of course I thought about Mum,’ she hit back. ‘It wasn’t all beer and skittles at Cliffe, you know. Friends died, planes crashed and burned with the crews still trapped inside them. Fire crews had to wait until it was safe to retrieve the bodies as Jerry bombed and strafed us. And when those bodies were brought out, melded together, twisted and blackened, they no longer resembled human beings.’

She took a sharp breath as the horrific images returned to haunt her. ‘How was it for you, Anne – down there in safe Somerset with your brothers and children, where the only threat came from a low-flying seagull with diarrhoea?’