HE WAS ONLY a couple of months older than her. (She thought it was more than that. She considered herself a girl and him a man.)

He was born in Sheffield, the eldest of four children. He left school at the age of fourteen, in 1932. It was not a good time. Unemployment was rife. Men waited at factory gates on the off chance of a day’s work. With his mates, George went on the cadge: gleaning spilled coal, running betting slips, a bit of petty theft. The pressure was on him, though. His younger siblings were waiting for his clothes and his bed.

A week after his uncelebrated fifteenth birthday, he joined the army. He went from short trousers into full uniform. He signed up for fifteen years.

He was sent for basic training to Catterick, where he showed some aptitude for mechanics — inherited, perhaps, from his father, who had been a lathe operator — and was attached as a trainee fitter to the Royal Engineers.

He had five good years, learning his trade, and how to drink, in postings up and down the country. He once, years later, spoke fondly to Clem of an army-versus-civvy mass punch-up in Yeovil, Somerset, in 1937.

He was genuinely astonished by the war; he hadn’t been paying attention. Hitler had been a sort of joke in the newspapers and newsreels. Then everything got insanely hectic, and he found himself in France, a corporal, meaninglessly bossing people around and being slapped on the back by elderly Frenchmen. On May 30, 1940, he lost control of his bowels on the beach at Dunkirk when German dive-bombers howled down and sand admixed with body parts exploded all around him. He was ashamed, so when he’d blundered into the sea, he struggled out of his soiled pants and trousers before being hauled, bare-arsed and half drowned — he was a poor swimmer — into a gaily painted launch from the Isle of Wight called the Anne-Marie.

He was rewarded for his gallantry by a week’s home leave.

There was nowhere at home for him to sleep, so he stayed around the corner in Palmerston Street, at his mate Jacko Jackson’s house. Jacko had joined the merchant navy six months earlier, and his bed was spare. The city was blacked out at night; George, awakened by the sirens, stood at the window watching the thin fingers of searchlights groping for German bombers. He would not go to the shelters; he had a great fear of being crowded into confined spaces. (Which meant he was not ideally suited to marriage, as Ruth would later discover.) In the half-light of dawn, the street would fill with women, head scarves knotted on their foreheads, their arms folded beneath their bosoms, clattering garrulously to the factories. On the penultimate night of his leave, he inexplicably got into a fight at a pub called the Hounds in Hand. He was in Jacko’s bed, sopping the blood from his mouth with a thin towel, when Jacko’s sister Muriel came into the room to see if he was all right. To make sure that he was, she got into the bed with him.

“When this is all over,” she said, before it was all over, “I’ll be waiting for you, George.”

Whether she was or not, he never troubled to find out.

By Christmas 1940, he was in North Africa, promoted to sergeant, in charge of a tank support unit and suffering from dysentery. He was to spend a good deal of his war squatting in tented latrines, smoking. The habit of lingering in the lavatory remained with him for the rest of his life, although usually he was in search of solitude rather than relief.