Daffy kept up to date on all the latest cinema gossip by speed-reading magazines at the village newsagent’s shop.

“She’s coming here to Buckshaw?” Feely asked. “Phyllis Wyvern?”

Father had given the ghost of a shrug and returned to staring glumly out the window.

I hurried down the east staircase. The dining room was in darkness. As I walked into the kitchen, Daffy and Feely looked up sourly from their porridge troughs.

“Oh, there you are, dear,” said Mrs. Mullet. “We was just talkin’ about sendin’ up a search party to see if you was still alive. ’Urry along now. Them fillum people will be ’ere before you can say ‘Jack Robertson.’ ”

I bolted my breakfast (clumpy porridge and burnt toast with lemon curd) and was about to make my escape when the kitchen door opened and in came Dogger on a rush of cold, fresh air.

“Good morning, Dogger,” I said. “Are we picking out a tree today?”

For as long as I could remember, it had been a tradition for my sisters and me, in the week before Christmas, to accompany Dogger into the wood on Buckshaw’s eastern outskirts, where we would gravely consider this tree and that, awarding each one points for height, shape, fullness, and general all-round character before finally selecting a champion.

Next morning, as if by magic, the chosen tree would appear in the drawing room, set up securely in a coal scuttle and ready for our attentions. All of us—except Father—would spend the day in a blizzard of antique tinsel, silver and gold garlands, colored glass balls, and little angels tooting pasteboard trumpets, hovering as long as we could over our small tasks until late in the darkening afternoon when, reluctantly, the thing was done.

Because it was the single day of the year upon which my sisters were a little less beastly to me than usual, I looked forward to it with barely suppressed excitement. For a single day—or for a few hours at least—we would be carefully civil to one another, teasing and joking and sometimes even laughing together, as if we were one of those poor but cheerful families from Dickens.