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think.’
    Daisy promptly tied her hat forward, low on her forehead, shortly followed, all too reluctantly, by the other three.
    Jessica gave Daisy an affectionate look. Out of the four of them, Daisy always had been the most amenable, the first to volunteer for everything, the first to put a log on the fire, or rush out into the winter weather and help dig up vegetables with Branscombe.
    â€˜There, now off you all go, and be good enough to remember that you are waitresses, not debutantes. Keep your lips buttoned, and if anything untoward occurs, or you hear anything of interest, I beg you to report straight back to Mr Athlone, no one else.’
    A frisson of excitement ran through the four of them before they bolted through the hall doors and out to Freddie’s car, where they all squashed in.
    Jessica stared at them through the half-glassed doors. God help poor Guy with that lot in his house, but then, when it came to Guy Athlone, God did seem always to put in at least one oar to help him out of whatever corner he might have been backed into.
    She turned away, feeling glad that she was not going to the dinner, that she had been able to step aside from it, although sorry for Guy who had yet again been let down by caterers, alas, an all-too-frequent occurrence for bachelors who only spent Friday to Monday in the country.
    Jessica was so fond of Guy that if she had not been so busy in so many other directions she would have rolled up her sleeves and gone over to help him with his dinner party herself, but since the invasion of Czechoslovakia, Jessica, along with so many of her friends, had realised that the time had come to put into practice many of the contingency plans that they had only talked about up until then. ARP committee work took up all her free time.
    Besides, if she went over there to help out, or even as a guest, she knew that sure as eggs were eggs once the guests had gone, Guy would want to talk about a mutual friend of theirs. He would fulminate. He would be beside himself with pent-up fury over recent events, and who could blame him? Along with Guy, Jessica had known for some time now – and sometimes she wished to goodness that she had not known – that the friend, whom they naturally could not name, had reported back to the security services a conversation he had had with a leading member of Hitler’s government, a conversation which had made it quite clear that if Britain joined forces with Czechoslovakia, they could, together, defeat German ambitions. This, then, had been the time to act against Herr Hitler, but the benighted British government, in their infinite wisdom, had done nothing except bury their heads in their own weaselly ambitions, and pretend that the German threat would go away. And now, look! Shakespeare’s sceptered isle set in a silver sea was no longer a precious stone – more a blancmange wobbling on a plate. Why could not the few, the very few, who were not appeasers, why could they not have made their mark better? And why could only a few of them see what had to be done to prevent another war?
    She turned, sighing inwardly, enjoying a strange relief in going back to her lists, back to organising what to do in the event of an invasion. And then she sat down to write, personally, to each head of a household in Twistleton to ask, in the event of a declaration of war, how many evacuee families they thought they might be able to receive in their homes.
    Maude Beresford might once have had a secretary to open all her correspondence, but no longer. It was not just that taxes, the failure of farming, and many other monetary constrictions, had limited the number of servants that she could take on, but also that she was single, lived deep in the countryside, and hardly ever left home, all of which meant that she received very few letters, and no invitations, except occasionally to Scotland. The family still owned a lodge in the Scottish Highlands, where, sometimes, a