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Rose was feeling off colour and had a bad cold, so Beth had decided for her they would stay in the warm this year.

There was an atmosphere of real optimism around the city that the war would end soon.

People might be getting lean with the shortages of food, fed up with being cold as fuel for fires was scarce, and missing their men terribly, wondering if their lives would ever return to how they once had been, but they were soldiering on under an invisible banner of Hope.

Beth had received a brief letter from Harry that he’d written in a truck taking him and some other soldiers to Dover.

He was of course cheerful, making jokes about the intense cold, the awful food, and the stench coming from one of his men’s feet.

But he reminded Beth that they would marry on his next leave and that he loved her more than he’d ever thought was possible.

Beth didn’t expect to get any further letters for a while.

She assumed he would be working his way across France, Belgium and Holland, rooting out any straggling German troops en route.

She doubted he’d have time to write, or that the mail would even get through.

She prayed nightly that he wouldn’t be killed.

She wasn’t sure there really was a God, but if there was, surely he wouldn’t take another man she loved from her?

January was cold and grey, and towards the end of the month they heard the shocking news of the German death camps.

Whispers about these atrocities had been flying around for some time, but most people felt they were was exaggerated or propaganda.

But now there were pictures of the starving prisoners in Auschwitz camp in Poland, and soon after the Allied army went into Buchenwald in Germany, and everyone realized that the whispers had been an appalling truth.

They found mountains of dead, emaciated bodies, and barely cool incinerators, still full of human bones.

Inside the fetid huts were old people and children too weak to stand.

It seemed the rest of the prisoners had been forced into a death march through blizzard conditions.

Beth and Rose could only stare at each other in disbelief that such terrible things could happen. They couldn’t bear to talk about it. They listened to the news on the wireless in tears.

Rose, who was still unwell, took to her bed. ‘I don’t want to live any longer in a world where people do such wicked things,’ she told Beth, and it was clear she meant it.

Beth shielded her from any further shocks, warning any visitors not to bring up grim subjects.

But Rose didn’t want to see anyone, refusing to come downstairs and having all her meals on a tray.

Her bedroom was lovely, with two big windows overlooking the garden, although just now it was only bare sticks of bushes and wizened stems of old flowers.

Some of the walnut bedroom furniture had been made by Duncan, the natural whorls and squirls in the grain picked out when the sun shone.

The heavy linen curtains had a glorious autumn leaves design in reds, golds and orange.

Beth lit the fire in the bedroom each morning, mainly to try to encourage Rose to sit in the green armchair beside it.

Although she’d sit there while Beth made her bed and plumped up the pillows, she soon went back to bed.

At first she was having a bath most mornings, but after a while Beth realized she was just washing herself at the basin.

‘It’s too hard for me to get in and out,’ Rose snapped indignantly when she reproved her. ‘Don’t tell me you can’t keep clean without a bath. My generation hardly ever had one.’

Beth offered to help her, but she completely understood when Rose refused. She was afraid of losing her dignity. So she said no more about it, and gave up trying to bully her into coming downstairs.

In the afternoons when Beth wasn’t expected at Hambleden House, and in the evenings, she read to her.

Sometimes it was an Agatha Christie book, though Rose claimed Agatha wrote the same story in each book and the characters were wooden.

But they both loved The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers, and The Long Winter by Laura Ingalls Wilder.

Ironically the latter was about a family’s hardships living through a desperately bad winter in a little house out on the prairies of America.

‘At least we haven’t got bears or wolves outside the door,’ Rose joked.

Listening to a story removed Rose from reality for a few hours, but Beth was growing more and more alarmed that her dear friend was sinking fast. She was barely eating a quarter of the food on her plate.

Her face had grown thin and drawn, eyes that had once sparkled looked dead, even the skin on her arms and legs felt thin and rough.

Beth telephoned Myles in Canada to seek his advice. ‘The doctor here just says keep her warm and she will get better,’ she told him. ‘But I’m really worried. She just wants to stay in bed, and she said the other day she’d seen enough in her life to not want to see anything more.’

‘She isn’t the first elderly person to say such a thing,’ Myles reassured Beth.

‘When we get news the war in Europe is over I’m sure she’ll bounce back.

As long as she’s eating and drinking, she should be fine.

She’s only seventy-four, that isn’t so old, and she has no alarming symptoms of something else, I take it? ’

‘No, her doctor checked her,’ Beth said. ‘He actually said he was so worn out he wished he could take to his bed! I felt that was a bit tactless.’

‘Yes, considering he’s known my mother all his life,’ Myles said with some indignation.

‘I wish I could promise to come, Beth. I will try to pull a few strings to see if I can get on a military plane, but it’s doubtful I’ll be lucky.

A ship is also difficult; as you probably know, the U-boats are still patrolling the Atlantic.

But I’ll do my best. In the meantime, just humour her, feed her and love her, as you’ve always done. I’m so glad she’s got you with her.’

There were times during the bitter winter when Beth felt despair.

It was so hard to get provisions, and even harder to turn the few ingredients she did manage to get into something tempting enough to make Rose eat.

Finally she managed to track down a black marketeer, and feeling extremely guilty she bought some butter, bacon, flour and a couple of tins of Spam and corned beef at an extremely inflated price.

It was good to make bread again with unadulterated flour, even if she did have to use the hoarded dried yeast which wasn’t a patch on the fresh stuff, now impossible to get.

As the smell of the baking bread rose up the stairs, Rose looked expectant for the first time in weeks.

With a couple of slices, a scraping of butter, and some of the homemade raspberry jam, Rose ate with relish.

‘Promise me you’ll eat dinner later with as much enthusiasm,’ Beth begged her.

‘When did you turn into such a dragon?’ Rose said but smiled anyway.

‘When you began being a bad girl,’ she retorted. ‘You can stay in bed for now, it’s the best place when it’s so cold, but at the first sign of spring I shall drag you out, whatever you say.’

Letters from Harry came intermittently, sometimes three together and then none for ages.

He had stopped trying to make her laugh with funny stories but instead spoke of imagining the home they’d create together, how he saw the garden, and that he hoped there would be babies too.

‘I’ve got this little daydream of us sitting in the garden on a hot day and a fat little porker of a baby boy playing in water in an old tin bath as Mum told me I used to do.

Sometimes I imagine a little girl with your dark hair, pretending to be a ballerina.

In this imaginary garden we have a dog, too, and a tortoise.

There is an apple and a pear tree, and the rest of the garden is full of flowers you’ve planted. ’

In each new letter there was another imaginary scene, sometimes a day at the seaside, or one of the children’s birthdays with a cake and candles.

A visit to a circus, or him teaching the children to swim.

All the scenes took place in warm weather, and Beth surmised by that he must be very cold most of the time.

For Beth such imaginings were doubly poignant, as she had no memories like these of her own childhood. But she knew in her heart Harry was giving her these glimpses into the future for that very reason.

She tried to think of interesting or funny things to tell him in her letters.

There were a few hilarious moments at Hambleden House, but most of the patients there were so poorly they didn’t speak much.

The story of the death camps dominated the news and she didn’t want to even dwell on that, let alone write about it.

But she did write about the imaginary house she’d like to live in with him.

It was a real one, a mid-terrace Georgian house she’d walked past one evening before they’d drawn the curtains, and it looked so elegant inside, with wall-to-wall bookcases and a moss-green Chesterfield sofa.

She mentally redecorated it in pastel colours and had an imaginary kitchen at the back with French windows overlooking a gorgeous garden, and a view of the River Avon beyond.

In March they heard on the news that the Allied army had crossed the Rhine at Remagen, severely damaging German morale with both the loss of their soldiers and the knowledge they could no longer win. Later in April it was reported that President Roosevelt had died, and been succeeded by Truman.

Spring came late, but a touch of warm sunshine and daffodils bursting into flower lifted Beth’s spirits so much that she finally persuaded Rose to let her dress her and bring her downstairs for lunch.