'How about another cup of tea?' asked Alfred, with a faint smile. I looked at my half-drunk cup and shook my head.
'I don't blame you,' he said, 'It's not like your mum's is it, my old stick-in-the-mud?'
'Stick-in-the-mud' - one of the many nicknames he had called me by when I was a kid, back in the village. It brought back all the flavour of that time, just after the war, when his family and mine had lived next door to each other.
In fact, his only family by then had been his wife Sarah. They had had two sons. One of them had died of polio aged nine. His picture, tinted and misty, had hung, like an angel's, above the piano. The elder son had married early - too early for comfort; they'd had a baby six months later - and Sarah never spoke to her s0n again