Summer, 1941

When I could conceal my pregnancy no longer – and bear in mind our clothes were honestly made from parachutes – I told Glynis one evening as she pruned the rose bushes. I showed her my bump and she dropped her secateurs.

I tearfully begged her not to tell my mother and father, but that was too great an ask. ‘Oh, Margot,’ she said, ‘I can’t keep this to myself, you know I can’t.’

‘Why not? I’m offering to give you the baby. You and Ivor can raise it as yours.’

I remember her sad, pitying eyes. ‘I would do anything for you and Peter and Jane, but this isn’t right,’ she told me. ‘You’ll feel very differently when there’s a little baby in your arms.’

‘I won’t,’ I told her defiantly. ‘I tell you I won’t.’ You see, I was so angry at Rick by that point. Angry he’d gone away and left me with this unwanted souvenir. Angry that he was blissfully unaware, somewhere far away from Llanmarion with his real girlfriend. I went to sleep each night haunted by their imagined laughter; Rick Sawyer and the ‘sweet, simple’ girl living the life that should have been mine. I never told him about the child – how could I? I had no way of reaching him.

Let’s get one thing clear right from the onset. I never saw Rick Sawyer ever again. If you’re hoping for the heartfelt reunion in the pouring rain, you’ll be bitterly disappointed. Join the club, as they say. That’s not to say I didn’t think of him. Some loves leave permanent marks across the heart, and he was certainly one of those. To this day, if I see yellow rapeseed or a copy of Wuthering Heights, I wonder if he’s still alive and, more keenly, if he still sometimes thinks about me.

‘Margot. I’m sorry, but we must tell your mother,’ Glynis said, and that was what we did. Together we drafted a carefully worded letter explaining what had happened. I remember never once feeling judged by Glynis. My predicament didn’t discolour me in the least, not in her eyes.

The letter was sent and precisely five days later, a stern black car, not unlike a hearse, bumped and rocked down the track to the farm. I’d been warned it was coming of course.

With the same sad suitcase I’d arrived with, I left the farm. Bess, Andrew and Doreen came to see me off. If they knew the real reason for my exile, they were polite enough to keep it among themselves. The official line – preparing me wonderfully for an illustrious career in the press – was that my mother was sick and I was returning to London to care for her.

‘I’m going to write to you every single day,’ Bess said, hugging me tight. ‘Llanmarion simply won’t be the same without you.’

I noticed how she’d started to sound like me. ‘Well, not every day,’ I replied with a smile. ‘But once a week at least. Keep me abreast of all the village news.’ On the spur of the moment I leaned in more closely and whispered through her hair, ‘Reg is on Anglesey. Rhodri has an address. There isn’t time to explain how I know.’

If she was cross I’d kept it from her, she didn’t let on. She just hugged me even tighter. ‘Oh, Margot, thank you. I love you and I’ll miss you.’

‘I’ll miss you too. Terribly.’

I hugged Doreen before Andrew stepped in. His eyes were watery. ‘I can’t believe you’re going back to civilisation and leaving me here.’

‘Oh, it isn’t so very awful, is it? And what’s the alternative?’ We both knew that there was every possibility he’d be off to fight if the war was still going in two years’ time.

‘Thank you, Margot. For everything.’ No further words were required. I knew exactly what he meant.

I crouched to say goodbye to Jane and Peter. ‘Now, you two will behave for Ivor and Glynis, won’t you? And, Peter, there’s no reason on earth that you can’t read Jane a bedtime story.’

‘But I want you to do it,’ Jane protested.

‘Peter will do a wonderful job, won’t you?’

‘I promise.’

‘Good boy.’

I rose to embrace Glynis. ‘We’re always here,’ she breathed into my ear. ‘Always. If you need us …’

‘I know.’

Ivor pulled me into a bear hug. He let me go and gave me a wink. ‘Shame, ain’t it? Best farmhand I ever had.’

It was with great sadness that I climbed into the back of that car. As we rolled down the drive, I closed my eyes so I couldn’t see their faces in the mirror.

I arrived back in Kensington by dead of night and this was no coincidence. Mrs Watson, the fussy little housekeeper, met me at the car and bundled me inside with great haste. Mother waited in the hall. Everything was almost as I remembered it, except darker, more claustrophobic: the mosaic tiles, the wood panels, the foreboding oil paintings. The grandfather clock tutted out Mother’s disapproving silence.

‘We shall talk in the morning when your father is here,’ she said, pointedly avoiding my gaze. Her hair was pulled back in a severe chignon, her lips berry red. See what I mean about the strange details your memory retains?

‘Father’s coming home?’ I asked, my heart sinking. Apparently a pregnant seventeen year-old daughter out of wedlock was deemed of more pressing concern than a world at war.

‘Go to bed, Margot.’

As I passed her, suitcase in hand, she made no move to kiss my cheek. I climbed the stairs feeling very alone and very scared for whatever the morning would bring.

The next morning I was shown to my prison. I was moved into the back bedroom, overlooking the garden, where neighbours and people from the street wouldn’t see the scarlet letter. It could not have been made clearer that I was casting a terrible cloud of shame over the Stanford name, although very few words were spoken.

That first morning back home, Dr MacDonald came to examine me. I’d never liked that man – thin and bald like a boiled ferret. He had spidery little fingers and I hated feeling them on my skin. ‘I’d say she’s about four months along,’ he said, telling me nothing I didn’t already know.

Mother, apparently unwilling to believe it until a doctor confirmed the diagnosis, clutched a handkerchief and wept silently. Father simply glared. ‘No one is to know. Is that understood?’

‘Of course, Admiral Stanford. Our discretion is guaranteed. I shall have to brief a nurse and midwife. No one need know beyond that.’

‘You see, Margot,’ said Mother, ‘it’ll be all right. We shall all move on and soon forget all about it.’

No one seemed to be able to say the word ‘baby’, so I thought I better had. ‘What will happen to the baby?’

‘It’s all taken care of,’ said Dr MacDonald, snapping his case shut. He said no more. I couldn’t help but imagine him tossing the infant into the Thames as they had done in Victorian times.

Like something from an H. G. Wells story, I could feel the life inside me growing, taking shape every day. But I couldn’t think of it as a child, only as what Rick had done to me. All that love, that sweet nectar, had turned to glass and nails in my abdomen. I knew I was monstrous, but I wanted rid of it. Nowadays, of course, that wouldn’t have been an issue; I would have had a choice.

I was permitted to walk down the landing to the bathroom, but that bedroom, those four ivory walls, a ceiling and a bay window, became my entire world. Of the house staff, only Mrs Watson knew of my condition and ferried three meals a day to the bedroom on a tray. It was August, but I wasn’t even allowed in the back garden in case someone were to see over the wall through the willows. I was allowed to read and knit and embroider. The back room had a window seat that captured the sun between two in the afternoon and about six at night, so I would spend the afternoons reading or just staring out at the world beyond.

I watched as the sycamore leaves turned yellow and their keys spiralled to the ground. The leaf litter turned brown and the branches bare. At the same time I ripened, bigger and bigger every day. The body can do the most incredible things. I was so lonely up in that room. Father went back to Dover, and Mother could hardly stand to look at me.

In the absence of company, I started to talk to the bump. I knew instinctively that the baby was a boy. I sensed it. I gave him a running commentary of the lives of the foxes that lived in the shrubs at the bottom of the garden and the heron who troubled the fish pond. I read to him. Just because his father was a despicable rogue didn’t mean he deserved to be deprived of good literature.

But it so reminded me of reading to Rick by the lake. I was so sad, waterlogged by it.

Christmas came and went, demarcated only with some turkey and a piece of figgy pudding. The lawn became silver and frozen and it was too cold to sit by the window without a blanket around my shoulders.

I spent many hours wondering if I was being punished. The isolation, the starvation of conversation soon turned inwards. It wasn’t that my parents were being cruel; it was that I deserved it because of what I had done with Rick. I know now that that’s not true, but at the time I convinced myself it was.

By the time January came, I firmly believed I was a sinner who had given into the devil’s desires and was now reaping my just deserts.