After the wedding and the honeymoon there is, briefly, a tiny flat in Kent Street, just down the road from his old one, with a kitchen and bedroom and hot water for coins. She keeps working at Clinton; they save every penny not needed for food and rent and hot baths. He has his eye on a property across the road: a shopfront with a house and flats attached. There’s a big yard with trees, a garage, a workshop, a chicken coop. It’s solid ground, it’s everything he wants. Perfect. He begins a long process of bargaining with the Scottish man who owns it – and within months they’re renting the shop and the smallest of the flats with a view to purchase.

Here too there are only three rooms, and it’s a squeeze. Sharon sleeps on a narrow bed just inside the front door, there is a kitchen lit by sun through tall louvres, a bathroom, a bedroom. They dig in, pull the purse-strings even tighter. A pound of mince makes enough rissoles for three meals, or is stirred with vegetables and Worcestershire sauce and served on toast. Three times. No more new clothes; shoes wear out and are mended. She digs the last of the lipstick from the tube with her little finger. Gets Val to cut her hair.

At Clinton, Arne is called upon when fuses blow and lights go out or the wiring needs renewing. He will often sit while his wife finishes in the kitchen, flicking through a newspaper and sipping tea, or watching Sharon and Paul, Matron’s son, playing out the back. Yvonne smiles wryly as Matron stops to chat with him: he has completely won her over.

He is at Clinton one early evening when the cry goes up: the Mad Hatter is gone again. In her thin nightie, her hats all awry, she has run for it, up Bowen Terrace and God knows where. He and Yvonne give chase, and he is faster, glimpsing the Hatter as she nears Brunswick Street. She flees – nimble for a woman her age, her nightie long and loose and no impediment – towards the squat stone mansion that is Lambourne, home to the Catholic Archbishop. He watches her disappear, wraith-like, through the high iron gates and into its darkened grounds.

Where he finds her soon enough; she is out of breath now, slumped near a soaring silky oak, triumphant. But hatless. It doesn’t take much to convince her to come back with him. He takes her by the arm as he would his wife, or mother, and slowly they proceed back to Clinton, the Hatter throwing back her head, every now and then, and laughing to the sky.