On wet days we played inside. Bob’s parents had a chaise-long in the back room, one of those couches with an arm at only one end that you see Cleopatra lounging on to eat grapes. We tried sliding down the big arm but it was covered in a kind of velvet material and didn’t slip so we looked about for other things of interest.

In a drawer or cupboard, Rob found an officer’s revolver from the Great War but, fortunately, there was no ammunition – sooner or later, we’d have tried a shot, maybe at the farmer’s bull in the empty field behind the houses. How Rob’s dad had acquired it we never found out but his dad had been wounded at the Somme and there was a copy of a newspaper picture of him being guided to the ambulance that I’ve seen in books and on TV now and then.

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