My father put one of the two village pubs out of bounds to the staff. He knew there was nothing else for the seventeens and eighteens to do. There was nothing else for the staff to do either, and while we learnt to play Cardinal Puff, a wicked game to ensure you drank more beer than you should, in our pub we couldn’t see our pupils playing darts in the other, so we didn’t have to know they were there or do anything about it.

But the nightly patrols were a challenge to Spud and his friends as we knew they would be. One horrible dawn my father was called to the phone.

“Are any of your boys missing? This is the coastguard. I’m afraid there is something on the mined beach below your camp that looks like a body.”

The army were called and made their way down. It was a body – a dead boy – blown up by a mine.

The huts were searched and Spud and one of his friends were found, in bed but dressed and wounded in the back.

“Yes, they had evaded the patrol and crept down to collect more live ammunition. Yes, there had been a mine detonated. Yes, they had been hit and were scared and had run back and put their heads under their blankets. Yes, their friend, Sid, was not with them. No, they didn’t look. They hoped he had got away along the beach.”

The doctor came and said Sid had died instantly – thank goodness. We couldn’t bear the thought of his having lain there all night in agony. That was what we found hard to forgive – that his friends had not known that he couldn’t be saved and done nothing.

The London police were alerted to contact his parents who came next day. His mother, in shock I suppose, kept worrying that one of his socks was missing. There were two younger siblings and against our advice she insisted on taking them to see the body. Perhaps she was right.

Gradually the children drifted back to London. By Christmas there were only about thirty-five left, including Spud, and we were moved to a large house in Hunstanton, where Gale was astonished to see coloured curtains and cushions. She had forgotten that sometimes things need not be just plain wood. The local WVS provided me with a large bag of pieces of material and I spent most of my time with Gale patching the boys’ trousers. Peter was in charge.