However, they soon learnt their tables and “what makes ten”. By Christmas they were happily solving quadratic equations – not that they were specially gifted, but they had my undivided attention so understood what we were doing.

Half the time Peter was teaching Stratford children in Brentwood School. For the rest, in particular for the Sixth formers preparing to get to university, he had to improvise – sometimes in cafés, sometimes in our house – sometimes if it was warm enough, outside.

We were still members of the Communist party and so got to know several interesting people. One, a black doctor, was married to a blond wife. They had two children, the boy exactly like his father and the girl like her mother. When Peter suddenly developed arthritis in one knee, that doctor ordered him crutches and forbade his putting that foot to the ground for six months.

The winter got colder and colder. Someone left the tap dripping in our bathroom and in the morning we found the bath solid with five inches of ice so no-one could have a bath until the spring when we were at last able to lift out the bath-shaped iceberg and take it into the garden.

It was still there in the spring, and Peter was still on crutches, when the Old Man asked us to go to Cornwall to set up a second evacuation. He had heard on the grapevine that since a lot of children had drifted back to London during the Phoney War because bombing didn’t materialise, the Government had ordered a new evacuation; this time we were to go to Helston, twelve miles from Cadgwith, from which we had been snatched on our honeymoon. He reckoned we would have three weeks and he gave us a list of pupils likely to be going this time. So we took what we could carry, spent a night or two in Blackheath, and caught the Cornish Riviera again.

It arrived very late – in those days one could go by train all the way to Helston, and we were tired, so we turned into the first hotel we came to in the main street, booked in, and slept soundly.

Before breakfast we went out to buy a paper and were surprised to be greeted by passers-by: “Good morning Mr and Mrs Hewett. I hope you slept well.”
“How on earth did they know?” we asked one another.
Our list enabled us to match up our children with the offered homes, so when they arrived, three weeks later – how did my father know? – we were able, on the whole, to match evacuees to homes.